Rural America is vanishing because it has voted against its economic interests for decades in order to pursue a backward social agenda. It voted itself out of the middle class, and now wants to blame others.
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Workers let in by Bush I depressed wages; Reagan merged social security fund with the general and then gave huge tax breaks to the same people who closed factories and shipped manufacturing to China. Small towns were forced to provide tax increment financing to allow Walmarts in. Buh bye mainstreet.
It amazes me that they do not comprehend that they are voting against their own interests. As Democrats, we need to improve our marketing, targeting, messaging, & overall communication strategy. We must improve our local election ground game and have our own Project 2028 strategic & tactical plans.
With the exceptions of Philly, Pittsburgh, and Erie. My native PA is all red in the middle. Keep voting against your better interests maybe someday you'll enter the 20th century.
Pretty sure it’s capitalism. They have voted themselves an awful lot of subsidies, which are very much in their interest. Farmers in socialist EU countries haven’t fared much better.
That’s easy for whyte folks. To me, they are all backwards ass racists who use hate as food and fuel. You talk to their dumb asses. No need to be “constructive” with those not worthy of my time 🤷🏽♀️
No they know they drank the kool aide and want seconds, they just what decent people fought for and then blame others for thinking they are coming after their piece of the American dream and are told you must hate instead of work together.
I've lived with them all my life and they do not want your help. They believe the government and anyone not like them has somehow stolen their livelihood and they want it back, even though what really happened is they killed it themselves and there's nothing to give back.
We tried that during the Clinton administration, when we attempted to retrain a ton of people, most of whom rejected the help and did their level best to drive Clinton out of office. When Hillary Clinton suggested the same thing with coal, they claimed she was personally killing coal.
Mostly they're going to die out or move to cities, and the ones that don't are going to get more and more bitter as their kids do, and they're going to engage in some violence. It's pretty unlikely anyone is going to come up with a solution before climate change makes most of these issues moot.
I mean, not to their face. Kidding aside, I wonder about this and haven't decided on a consistent approach. At what point do they not get the benefit of the doubt anymore? At what point do people say "It's not my job to coddle your ignorance"? I think it's gotta be a case by case basis.
It's tough because it's hard not to make generalizations, especially when emotions are involved. If people can have good faith discussions, then anything is on the table. I have not found many who lead with ignorance and hate to be able to engage in good faith. Not one, actually.
I honestly don't know. The only people I've known who can actively act against their own best interests are adolescents/teenagers (myself included at that age), but most grow out of it. Reaching or engaging with people who carry those behaviors into adulthood is not something I have an answer for.
You’ve just described the western 3/4ths of my state of Kansas. They vote based on Guns, God, and Abortion, nothing else. Cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
I mean, you aren’t wrong. When I was young lots of people in rural KY farmed but now they mostly lease the land to bigger farms. It’s also not safe anymore, the days of leaving doors unlocked are long gone because of poverty and meth.
the fact is
reagan broke the rural areas
and they have been sitting, on their boarded up main street, waiting for businesses to come back so they can go back to the life they had before.
its not coming back
and they sit and wait
and hate everyone else that has moved on.
Don’t GROUP people or DIVIDE us up 😕 that is what trump wants, it’s Time to gather together. At this time I live in rural America and Most all the people I know VOTED for Kamala. No more finger pointing, power to the people ✊🏼✊🏻✊🏾
How has the establishment R and D party economic agenda helped rural Americans? Outsourcing and deindustrialization is good for these areas? I don’t think so…
So true. And now they are funded by metro areas. Rural towns and communities would cease to exist if it weren’t for all the taxes paid by city folk flowing back to them. It’s supposed to be a mutualistic agreement, yet they bite the society that feeds them.
Very true like the South after the Civil War their entire reason for living was to own & punish blacks and thus became the poorest backward parts of USA
That’s an excellent assessment! I grew up in what’s one of the prime wine center in California. I grew grapes myself for 20 years.
Local growers were constantly shooting their toes off. Call CBP and you’ve got no workers. Get a tax cut, no free irrigation. Time after time, always something.
They’ve sown so much chaos that half the population can’t tell what’s real anymore. A leader who lies about the good and openly admits to the bad leaves us as translators, trying to decode the riddles he speaks and share it with the world.
I agree but being in a rural area it’s been in fascism before this began Unappossed republicans, preachers & no newspapers go to a rural area the experiment started & began worldwide of distrust & god fearing hateful people.
They wanted the fantasy of Mayberry back. With Andy & Barney & Aunt Bea. I grew up in one by of those places & they skip the casual & blatant racism. The sexism & backwards thinking. The intolerance of others & outsiders. The demands for conformity. Things small towns are really famous for.
As an Iowan, can confirm. Closed their rural schools with vouchers, about to remove their labor force with racist deportations and raise the price on ag inputs with tariffs. Trump '24 amirite??
I know. I'm from downstate Illinois, or as some people north of I80 call it, "southern" Illinois lol. But I am one of few blue bastards in this ocean of red pricks, and I've seen it firsthand since Reagan.
When all those public schools shutter, all those ignorant parents who are afraid of knowledge will “homeschool” their children, which means the wives will all become stay at home MLM queens whose version of school is iPad time
They were going to own the libs. A lot of the soybean farmers have not forgotten what happened in the first time around. Good luck to all the farmers this time. I do wish them well but I don't think anything good is going to happen.
They will believe EVERYTHING that Orange Orangutan will tell them. Some know he's lying his ass off, but they will go along because they now believe they're in this "cool MAGA club", something they were incapable of doing back in high school. It's a damn cult.
Largely due to the epistemic bubble they live in. They are the uniformed uneducated masses and many are religious. They did not understand the assignment that this election was about Democracy vs. Fascism.
Blazing saddles. Oh could we just bomb the shit of Russia like they did in Blazing Saddles. What a great movie! But what a great ending to Putin and Russia.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice.” -Mark Twain
Rural people believe what they believe because they’ve never encountered anything that challenges their belief system.
Rural Americans aren't dumb, they're resentful. They want big city amenities but not the density. And they want social access but not be around people.
As someone who lived in rural places much of my life, I hear you. I really do. But in many rural places—especially in the south—this just isn’t the case.
See Mississippi, for example. All the blue counties are rural, and the state is full of rural Dem voters hidden by majorities in red counties. Our majoritarian system silences so many people who are screaming at the top of their lungs. This is true for Rs in consistently blue states as well btw.
Not trying to be contrarian, just want to acknowledge my own frustration as a former rural voter and the hard work of so many others who live in rural places and show up every day in their communities fighting for change. 🫶
Very true. I live in rural Texas where the folks who rely on the local food bank and Medicaid overwhelmingly voted for Trump because they believed his lies.
I live in a very red area of PA, and see the same here. It isn’t that they are stupid, or even hardcore racist, it’s that they’ve been brainwashed. They believe the lies. I don’t think the people who live in blue states/areas truly understand this. The right-wing propaganda has been very successful.
Exactly!! Watching this unfold has been driving me crazy. These are my coworkers. They aren’t stupid, they are brainwashed. And until that problem gets fixed, nothing else we do matters.
Truth red county in CO gets grant money to build a clinic, dental office, community center, and now a new school has no idea where the $$$ come from. Are on SSI, snap, Medicaid and voted for the mango menace they are about to FAFO
As a Californian, the algorithms always feed me posts of people who have moved from CA. I always read the comments.
Over the years the complaints from the locals has increased as they learn they can’t compete for houses and day care, and they weren’t living a middle class life after all.
Of course it is just possible that the folks who vote against their short term economic interest do so because they see a higher moral purpose. Eg that's what we say about the folks who voted to end slavery. Just saying..
I live there, and you are exactly right. Trying to convince them otherwise is impossible with fox and talk radio feeding their cavernous willful ignorance.
Much more to it than that.
Rural population grew and stayed stable to the rest of the population from 1960 to 1990 as the interstate hwy system was built. It's faded since then primarily due to automation efficiency and foreign trade. Canada's rural pop. as a % has slowly declined since 1970...
Canada's rural population is at 18%. In the US it's 16.7%. We Democrats need to start looking at stats and stop making assumptions to satisfy our narratives.
To this end, we Democrats need to be solely focused on the poor and the working poor and end such identity politics of blaming certain groups. The Biden and Harris outreach to rural America was abysmal. Just go ahead and have the guts to say "White Christians suck" because that's your intent.
Getting money and having the party focused and paying attention to them and talking about them are two different things, Frank. If we are walking the walk we need to talk the talk too.
Bull? Throwing around stats is why our party loses nationally. It has to connect with people in the first place.
This isn’t “throwing around stats”, it’s improvements in the quality of life & opportunities targeted far more for rural areas than they were for Dems’ traditional bases. You’re telling me Trump & Vance talked the talk more than Harris &Walz. Moral rot is the heart of darkness in rural America.
And what “talk” would that be? Hating LGBQT, blacks, and Latinos? Embracing a medieval view of women? They’ve been coddled for way too long and treated as if they are the only true Americans while the majority of Americans in the rest of the country aren’t
If you're in the cue for a piece of a 260 year old farm that started out at 25K acres and most of it was free for your ancestors there's also dozens if not hundreds of other patches of land or buildings for rent and all bought through government contracts and farming subsidies. Let kids starve.
rural America is watching their kids leave & towns die - partly due to lack of good jobs. they figured more babies & some macho salve was the way back to their old glory.
Not coincidentally, Trump‘s campaign slogan was basically “more babies and less browns” + tariffs to encourage “buy American”.
Rural America has been a microcosm of what Trump is for centuries. All cronies and what's your last name. If you are the ones in charge why embrace change.
100% agree. I live in rural Texas and drive thru these towns where nothing is left except a convenience store and a couple churches. The town I grew up in in west TX has whole neighborhoods that are abandoned now. But somehow they keep voting for a party that does absolutely nothing for them.
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Could we find a constructive way to help better them that doesn’t refer to them as backwards?
I think they’d be more responsive if we weren’t always calling them backwoods hicks.
I’m just not ready to give up.
I don’t think the divide is as wide as everyone thinks.
But if we just turn our backs on almost 1/2 the population, where does that leave us?
There has to be a way forward. And there has to be a way of helping people make decisions that better their everyday lives.
It all sucks.
But maybe there’s hope? I don’t know.
The challenge is getting the real ranchers to wake the F up.
But dismissing all of them unilaterally is a mistake that’s now cost us two elections and possibly our democracy.
And what’s the alternative?
But if we keep telling them they’re wrong ABOUT EVERYTHING we’ll never be a country again.
Let them face consequences instead of bailing them out from the policy they supported this time. Maybe then it'll finally sink in
Rural America also got used to an unsustainable way of life, and got screwed by equilibrium.
When a successful economy stood alone, things were out of balance, but only temporarily.
A hot drink in a cold room
is soon lukewarm.
reagan broke the rural areas
and they have been sitting, on their boarded up main street, waiting for businesses to come back so they can go back to the life they had before.
its not coming back
and they sit and wait
and hate everyone else that has moved on.
the nazi only cares that he gets to watch people he doesn’t like being kicked harder than he is
Local growers were constantly shooting their toes off. Call CBP and you’ve got no workers. Get a tax cut, no free irrigation. Time after time, always something.
The Democratic messaging skips rural America, leaving it to Fox "News" and worse.
Rural people believe what they believe because they’ve never encountered anything that challenges their belief system.
They are a contradiction of their own natures.
Over the years the complaints from the locals has increased as they learn they can’t compete for houses and day care, and they weren’t living a middle class life after all.
Rural population grew and stayed stable to the rest of the population from 1960 to 1990 as the interstate hwy system was built. It's faded since then primarily due to automation efficiency and foreign trade. Canada's rural pop. as a % has slowly declined since 1970...
Bull? Throwing around stats is why our party loses nationally. It has to connect with people in the first place.
Fuck those backwards mutha fuckas! I hope they get everything they voted for
Not coincidentally, Trump‘s campaign slogan was basically “more babies and less browns” + tariffs to encourage “buy American”.