Yeah before you paint 75 million Trump voters with that broad of a brush you might wanna consider the fact that Joe Biden got 81 million votes 4 years ago and Kamala is sitting at 67 or so now. That means many millions of those Trump voters this year weren't motivated by "racial, socioeconomic, gender-based hate and rage" just a few years ago. And this is exactly what I've been saying over and over here. If you call them all idiots, you can be damn sure none of them come back. But nobody wants to ask what the hell did we do wrong to lose 14 million voters either to apathy or to a makeup wearing phony? Some of you really need to consider the possibility that you're blinded by the same visceral vitriol that many of the people you criticize on the other side are. Common sense dictates that there is a way to get a lot of these people back but most of this board would rather throw the baby out with the bathwater than admit there's a massive disconnect going on here.
There’s no disconnect. It’s not as complex as you’re trying to make it.
It’s not necessarily rural folks are “idiots”…it’s that they have bought into the propaganda they’ve been fed for over 4 decades.
Racism/sexism/bigotry/xenophobia + high prices at the grocery store, gas pump, and in the housing market are the drivers here.
Trumpism provides a scapegoat, a focus of blame for rural white folks (in particular) and rural citizens of all races. This is Trumpism in a nutshell:
“The immigrants are taking your jobs. The immigrants are causing your rent to go up. The immigrants are taking over your rural communities and murdering and raping your beautiful white wives and daughters.
And the Dems are standing by and letting it happen. They care more about paying for transgender surgeries for prisoners and they’re changing the gender of your kids while they’re at school. And they want to kill angelic little babies via post-term abortions!”
And rural people buy into it, because they need/want to blame someone for the fact that their communities have died off and their manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas.
Dems are at an obvious and enormous disadvantage when trying to combat that messaging and “reach out to” rural voters.
The Dem message since at least Obama has been one of hope and equality for all races, genders, sexualities. To provide policies that help all people. To understand that immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are part of our fabric and are contributors to our economy. To provide a way forward for educational and occupational opportunities for those in rural/depressed communities.
The Dem message doesn’t provide for an easy scapegoat. It doesn’t tap into the fear and rage receptors in the human brain, which MAGA/Trumpism does exquisitely well.
