4741

I went to Starbucks today in a heavily blue/white upper-class San Diego mid-city neighborhood. There was a bald old white dude there. He had a mug with flag stickers all over it and had set his bright red “Trump 2020” ball cap next to him prominently turned out so that everyone who walked in would be sure to see it. He just sat there glaring at everyone with a smirk on his face. And surprise, no one said a damn thing, and eventually he’d finished with both his coffee and his attempt at public trolling and left.

We don’t do that. We just don’t. As ever, they feel the disdain they have for us is directed at them.

4742

Democrats need the white rural democratic voters, like me. It’s a turnout thing, we need to keep the delta in the rural areas lower while increasing the delta in the urban areas. A good politician knows that, so stop thinking that you’re walking on eggshells and start talking to rural democrats. See Jess King’s run in central PA for ideas.

Rural isn’t 100% R, it’s more typically 60/40. So, in a town of 10,000 people, you still have 4,000 democrats to try to inspire and 6,000 R’s to deflate. Alienating 100% of everyone in this type of place is bad politics.

4743

So, what has a national Democrat done recently that alienated rural white Democratic voters?

4744

Elected Obama?

4745

You may be better than that, but that’s not it with me. I just want to win and would do anything legal to accomplish that.

But to be clear, the problem is not insulting or antagonizing the pig in the MAGA hat who is calling for sending congresswomen “back.” It’s the broad brush stuff, which treats a whole lot of people as the enemy, and serves to make them into political enemies.

We won’t win those counties, but if we run 30 point deficits again, we will lose those states. Cut that down to 20 point deficits, and we win those states.

I might recall some extremely impolitic statements by Obama and Clinton, clinging to guns and religion and deplorables. Probably just bad dreams of mine. :)

But in the internet era, important damage is done by ordinary people and small time politicians. I try to post here and on other forums each time I feel like someone is crossing that line into broad brush insults.

I end up posting a lot.

4746

Ding ding ding!!

4747

I’m not saying they have, good politicians don’t, which is why they act in the way that upset you.

Obama kept the rural delta low, so I think he did a good job inspiring rural Democrats.

4748

I mean really. Is anyone saying that Democrats can’t be racist? If one thinks that, then one is deluded.

4749

So I’ll agree that Obama’s “guns and religion” statement was probably the biggest gaffe of his political career. Only because rural voters bruise easily though. It’s hard to imagine anything he could have said about urban voters that would have caused similar offense.

Clinton’s statement about deplorables was taken out of context and weaponized. It was inevitable that she’d say something sometime that could be used in this way. There’s a reason that the Clintons hated the press so much.

4750

I’m not upset. I think FF is exactly right. We shouldn’t be needlessly antagonizing rural voters. Absolutely agree. I’m not sure how much good it will do though.

So, how did he do this? I mean, how did he do this better than Clinton did?

4751

Not be running against Trump who was so outrageous that the media did everything they could to cover Clinton in the least favorable light in the name of bullshit notions of ‘balance’.

4752

To be clear: I am a born, bred, and current Minnesotan.

The Midwest, about 10-15 miles out from any urban center, is a fucking nightmare. I’m sorry if that offends you. But these are the motherfuckers that consistently elect the Brownbacks and Trumps of the world, and they don’t deserve my fucking time. It’s just that, luckily, in Minnesota we have enough actual civilization that it pretty much overbalances that yeehaws out in Brainerd and Mankato and Detroit Lakes and the rest of the bumfuckistan outposts.

But yeah, I mean, I probably would be more diplomatic if I were something other than some asshole posting on a video game nerd forum.

4753

I agree we should not waste effort giving the GOP free ammunition with poorly thought out statements, but I also think it’s a mug’s game to try to make much hay by being more mild and “sensitive” in statements. I also do think it’s harmful to buy into the frame of “liberals mean and uncaring to the wonderful rural voters”.

The proper approach IMO is to focus on what I refer to as “broad-based” policies that benefit all Americans (and in this context “broad-based” does not mean moderate - universal health care is a broad based policy as opposed to the ACA which was a targeted policy). Universal health care, investment in green jobs, infrastructure investment, these are the kinds of themes that can attract support across a broad spectrum of Americans, without selling out to the extreme right.

4754

As a born and bred southerner, I can definitively confirm rural areas are actual hell occasionally sprinkled with a dash of decent humans entirely (or at the very least electorally) overwhelmed by the worst dregs of our species.

Also the cell signal is fuckin awful.

Barbarians!

4755

Preach. Every time I visit my parents in the shrublands, I feel like I’m at the start of a bad horror movie.

4756

Nothing like extra sensitive snowflakes that go around calling everyone else snowflakes. I don’t recall any of them pointing at rural Americans and saying they don’t belong here though.

4757

Actually, Obama’s statement was taken out of context too. But in each case, professional politicians (pre-Trump) always knew that an aside or a subordinate clause can be re-purposed by the enemy, and it was a skill required for the big leagues to take care. But yes, I agree.

As to rural voters bruising easily, this is off the point of my post, but I will respond. So, so many rural voters I know are desperately attached to their way of life, it’s the way their grandparents and parents lived, and now they want it to work for them and their kids.

And it isn’t working. It’s all boarded up storefronts and foreclosed properties and unrepaired bridges and family farms that have to sell out.

It can’t be helped, progress and change disadvantage some people, but never forget that it is experienced as a tragedy.

The spending that used to occur downtown in the village here… first it went to the malls down the road, and then it went to the internet. Wealth comes into our community through agriculture, but that is all but nullified by most of that wealth being spent out of town. And federal agricultural policy has piled onto technological progress, strongly encouraging huge farms that concentrate wealth.

Very little in the way of opportunities, and the most talented and ambitious of course grow up and move away, leaving a community that really just does not work, crime is rather high, schools deteriorate because the tax base declines, etc.

It’s not crazy to compare the problems to inner city black problems… And last I checked, we all understood inner city blacks being rather touchy about outside criticism of their way of life. Especially from people without a whole lot of understanding of it, and who have a track record of not being sympathetic. And particularly when the criticism strays from the actual things that do not work into cultural things that aren’t really relevant to the problems. In the case of rural America, that would be hunting. And churches.

None of this means we need to compromise on our issues, none of this means we have to bite our tongues when some rural guy says something racist. But it does mean that if you take the handful of confederate flags around our county and use that to attack everyone who lives and votes here, you are going to get much the same voting response as when a black protest elicits comments about how everyone in that neighborhood is lazy. Then we lose by 35 points instead of 20, and depending on the state, maybe we can’t overcome the deficit in the metropolitan areas.

4758

Some of that “criticism” is flat-out racism.

4759

Word.

We should help people in those communities actually build something sustainable, or retrain, or move the fuck out.

What we shouldn’t do is coddle their racist truck-nutz bullshit because hurr durr libtards Obummer gunz.

4760

Good post. You’re right, of course. It’s just that… it’s not like Trump is saying anything helpful to them. He’s just giving them a way to sneer, and maybe that takes the sting out of it. That shit is tragic. We feel it too. When I was a kid, I left the house after school and didn’t come back home until dinner time. Who lets their kids range free that way anymore? I actually grew up almost entirely in smaller, conservative communities and I understand that way of life, which had an honest day-of-work-puts-food-on-the-table feel to it, is waning. There’s no real security for anyone–I’m anxious all the time, and I have a graduate degree and a decent job. I worry about my kids, my ailing parents, other family members who have slipped through the cracks and exist in purgatory. Democrats spend enormous amounts of energy trying to create political solutions to these issues, because again, we all feel it. Republicans do absolutely nothing for them. Not one policy, not one bit of rhetoric. All they offer is bombast and false machismo. It’s not even halcyon–it’s an ugly bumper sticker to cover up the rust spots. We really do want to bring rural voters who are feeling left behind into the conversation–that’s precisely what both Clinton and Obama were trying to actually express with their gaffes. But I truly think that alot of them would rather burn the world than get some relief. Why else would they vote for Trump?