Why rural voters don’t vote Democratic anymore

[pbrower2a]

(12-09-2016, 02:01 PM)The Wonkette Wrote: I thought that this article might be of interest to posters and readers of this forum.

Quote:Who were the rural Americans that were instrumental in creating the current political reality? Joining a chorus of conversations on this topic comes the Census Bureau, bearing fresh data that helps paint a clearer, more nuanced picture of this famously aggrieved segment of the American population.

Home ownership is much higher in rural America, and it is higher in some very poor rural communities than in prosperous urban areas.  Of course,  there may be some who live in tiny apartments in the cities during the workweek and return to the rural homestead on weekends and holidays, which might make some economic sense. But even without poverty, the landlord-tenant relationship is almost never one of chumminess. Owning a home makes one an asset-owner who sees taxes to pay, taxes that obviously cut into one's dreams of conspicuous consumption even if the tax revenue is collected for acceptable reasons.

Home owners are likely to be net creditors instead of net debtors. Just to meet ordinary repairs a home-owner needs to have some savings. If one rents a furnished apartment and the refrigerator goes bad, one calls the landlord and never sees the repair bill or the cost of a replacement refrigerator.

There is much rural poverty, but that largely involves non-white minorities. Those minorities vote heavily Democratic even in rural areas, probably because the Republican Establishment is associated with people who have treated those minorities badly in the past. Culture? Rural people are not the ignorant hicks of urban legend. They get much the same cable television and pop music as their urban counterparts get (allowing for ethnic differences); they are on line; they get as much formal schooling.

Rural dwellers miss out on two-hour one-way commutes on congested ten-lane freeways and high rental costs, crowds in the cities in which they work, and of course the ugliness of urban sprawl. Rural folks are usually closer to nature in some form, even if it is only an unremarkable grove of trees. City dwellers are generally deprived of any chance of seeing natural beauty, and not surprisingly they are environmentalists.

[Odin]

(12-09-2016, 11:46 PM)Dan Wrote:

(12-08-2016, 07:53 AM)Odin Wrote: Something I've noticed is that even in this election the parts of the rural Midwest Colin Woodard have as part of Yankeedom are significantly less Republican than other rural areas. Given that the Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the "Yankee" party that I expect that as older, more socially conservative voters begin to die that rural Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan will become more Democratic. Hell, Even Obama did very well in rural Wisconsin (he won almost every country in 2008) and Clinton's failure there was because she was such a terrible, tone-deaf candidate. Ironic given that Wisconsin is the birthplace of the Republican Party.

According to the exit polls the age gape is smaller in the upper midwest than the rest of the country; In Minnesota Trump won 18-24 year while losing voters over 65.  http://edition.cnn.com/election/results/.../president

Well, fuck...

[pbrower2a]

(12-03-2016, 03:57 AM)Galen Wrote:

(12-02-2016, 10:19 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: As for why rural people do not vote for democrats the answer is clear.  The Democratic party doesn't give a shit about them.  HRC made that abundantly clear when she essentially called these people a basket of deplorable.  The DNC and the Democratic Elites including the ethnic ones live in their own urban coastal bubble.

As a dark skinned homosexual black man I've received more bigotry and racism at the hands of so-called liberals than from any of the deplorable red necks I've been known to run with.

Pretty much sums up one of the major issues with the Democrats.

One of the things I always liked about the red necks is that unless you are messing with them they are perfectly content to leave you alone.  Liberals and progressives appear to be genetically incapable of leaving people alone.  The open hostility they have to, among other things, Christianity is one of the the reasons Hillary lost.  Say what you like about Trump, he is not openly hostile to Christianity.

Three years later:

1. Much of the educated, talented workforce that used to stay on the family farm no longer does (as if it ever did -- think of Abraham Lincoln, a superb attorney). As Grandpa and Grandma retire the grandchildren often ask to sell the farm so that the grandkids can get the sort of education better suited to treating cats and dogs in a veterinary clinic than to feeding the cattle or pigs on the farm. But by becoming veterinarians those kids (1) get exposed to liberal ideas more likely to lead them to the Democratic Party and (2) prepare them for moving to places in which people have dogs and cats and not farm animals, which means increasingly-suburban communities.

2. Democrats used to be generous with farm subsidies that made small-scale farming profitable. Those Democrats have been defeated or retired, only to be replaced by Republicans now generous with farm subsidies to entities such as the giant feedlot owned by... Koch Industries... which reciprocates by sponsoring the most reactionary politicians in American life. Koch industries owns Matador Cattle Company, and you can expect that it gets every federal subsidy possible. The subsidies now support fewer, but bigger landowners whose corporate farms rely heavily upon aliens as workers (who are classic proletarians in the Marxist sense but obviously cannot vote). Republicans are just as generous with farm subsidies with giant corporations that pay off Republican politicians with lavish expenditures on their electoral campaigns; obviously the people getting the subsidies that Republicans offer are not the small-scale farmers that FDR saved from destitution. 

3. Are Democrats going godless? Not as much as the Mammon-worshiping elites who, despite their lamentation of the decline of Christian faith among the proles and the middle class, are themselves Christian in name only. The optimum for our economic elites would be that they get away with their extreme egoism while the common man is content with vague and indefensible promises of Pie in the Sky When You Die. Such is a revival of a Gilded ethos. Democrats are much closer to Pope Francis on economics than they are to Donald Trump. 

But know well -- the children of those alien laborers on giant farms in the Midwest and South become citizens, and they cannot be expected to vote on behalf of the economic elites who exploit their parents so badly.