Pocketbook issues/economic insecurity aren’t the problem. Fear of “others” - race, sexual orientation, etc - and media that pushes those fears are the problem.
And abortion and guns, of course.
I, for one, am encouraged by this display of leadership so badly needed by the Dems. Obama and Holder are going after vote suppression and gerrymandering. Good for all of them. Hope it works.
These rural voters need to know that their Medicare and SS are in danger with the Trump tax cuts. They’ll go after “entitlements”-- code for Medicare and SS – to pay for those cuts. Too many believe that “they” won’t dare touch SS and Medicare. Those folks may learn the hard way.
You’re right. I call them bumper sticker issues. Complex social, political and economic issues that get coded into phrases with no intellectual content, but serve as powerful shorthand and a spur to voting for demagogues.
- I strongly suspect economic issues further worsen the “othering” issue. People usually are more generous to others when they themselves are doing better.
- The other’ing is so deeply entrenched because the GOP has made efforts to entrench it amongst the people. People are not usually born to hate other people. It’s usually a learned behavior. Take a kid and tell him his friend is gay and he won’t care a bit and will continue playing with him.
These efforts can help to reverse the GOP efforts. I am glad that unlike a lot of keyboard warriors these Dems are actually going out there and trying something instead of jut complaining from behind their monitors.
Good for this group. Here is one place you can spend money and have a real impact. Many Americans have forgotten that progressive thought and action began in rural areas in the upper mid-west. For generations farmers were a part of the progressive movement. Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter were farmers. They were abandoned by a changing party during the Clinton years.
I agree with you other commenters so far.
I am 64 and lived in Ohio all of my life, in Columbus, and Dayton, and Lima and Cincinnati, and also in several small towns in the rural farm country.
So many factors, some going back 50 years, have made those once-prosperous small towns sad places now.
I definitely think the arrival of conservative talk radio in the late eighties, and Fox News in the mid-nineties really intensified the damage.
I think it will be many years before we know, if new people who truly believe in standing up to the regressive plutocrats who now dominate conservatism, will have rebuilt the Democratic Party, and re-established it as an alternative in the rural places.
So many of these areas have lost their “best and brightest” to the big regional and coastal cities, leaving behind a regressive world view that is the consensus of those who have stayed. When I return to my birthpalce, nearly all of the progressive thinkers are 60 years old or older, and their children and grandchildren live in faraway places. I wish Daschle, Vilsack, and all well. Other than a few survivors of the sixties, however, I don’t think they have a lot to work with. Sure hope I am wrong
It will definitely be an uphill battle, and it’s good that these people admit that it will require a long-term effort.
One issue that may be useful is the upcoming farm bill. Farmers are already alarmed about Trump’s action on tariffs, which is already leading to threats of retaliatory action. At the same time, some leading Republicans are moving to impose stricter work requirements on the SNAP, or food stamp, program, which could further shrink the market for agricultural products and adversely affect the interests of farmers.
Traditionally, these two items – price supports for farmers and food assistance for the poor – have been handled together, and compromise has been effective. But decoupling these issues could have the unintended consequence of creating common cause between rural agricultural interests and advocates for the urban (and, increasingly, rural) poor.
Not the best group to lead the Democrats.
Tom Daschle: Shadow lobbyist for years before he finally registered as a lobbyist. Cheated on his taxes so he had to withdraw from being Obama’s choice to oversee health care reform. Most likely a good thing or else the ACA would have been even more slanted towards the health care insurance and drug industry. He has been in their pockets for years.
Tom Vilsack:
July 19, 2010 - Calls for the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod after an excerpted video clip of Sherrod is posted online, in which Sherrod discusses an incident involving a white farmer. Vilsack contends that he made the decision without conferring with the White House.
July 21, 2010 - Vilsack apologizes to Shirley Sherrod after video of the full speech shows that her remarks from the clip were taken out of context. Vilsack offers Sherrod another job with the Department of Agriculture, which she later declines.
Mary Landrieu: Another blue dog barking.
ETA: Given a choice, conservative voters will go for an actual Republican instead of a Republican lite. Democrats like Mary just don’t motivate Democrats to vote in enough numbers.
I had to laugh at this line:
The organization is a 501©4, so can’t directly focus on elections.
Tell that to GOP-funded c(4)s.
Hmmm. Maybe not the problem, but the biggest problem. Declining populations, lack of job prospects, decaying infrastructure. Unemployment is low and poverty is high, because all the jobs are WalMartish. These things are real. These people are watching their communities die.
Add to that a Democratic party under Obama which treats them dismissively, saying sucks to be you - can’t you just move to the cities? A party which hasn’t even been bothering to run local legislative candidates, which writes off their state and their area.
I’m not saying that “othering” isn’t a problem; it is with 30-40% of the population. But there are a lot of voters who can be persuaded if we just stop being so dog damned condescending.
Of course it would be nice to get their votes. But more importantly these rural people need to break out of their cells and rejoin the nation. I see it as a difficult task since the churches they attend have traded spirituality for political favors and so converted their members to easily manipulated single issue voters fearing whatever the preacher wants to pitch at them.
Out here on the prairies people are spread out and isolated by their work routines that leave little time or energy for anything else. But there are still little towns where they go for fuel, school, and tools. Two streets back from the highway there is a little café where the farmers and ranchers gather in the morning for breakfast and coffee and to catch up on what’s going on. If a person has some ideas to convey, that café is a good place to start.
And if the cafe just happens to have a radio or a tv tuned to the usual suspects…
Out here in West Virginia the churches are a big part of the problem, with far too many preachers selling right wing bullshit and hate that reinforces what people hear on hate radio and Fox. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of all that on community values; it forms the basis for what people talk about every single day.
Back in 2012, in my WV county, I was interviewed by The Economist as they tried to understand why WV Democrats voted for a convicted felon more than Obama in the primary. A republican commissioner was also interviewed, and embarrassed our community by saying this: “Mike Teets, the only Republican on the Hardy County Commission, denies that race has anything to do with local antipathy towards Mr Obama. But he is concerned that the president may be a Muslim, secretly in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, whose killing he could have faked. He also wonders whether the president might be gay. Wild accusations like these, Mr Obama’s supporters maintain, stem from sublimated racism.” https://www.economist.com/node/21558275
The reason Mike could feel comfortable talking like that is because everyone he talks to says the same things. This is what they talk about in the cafes.
Bill Clinton came from a rural state and won many rural states such as WV twice.
It’s a great group of people to go after this vote. The fact that some talking points memo commenters don’t like them because they are blue dogs is another selling point in their favor. The tent needs to be big and I think these people understand that. I live in a rural community in Maryland and it’s a pretty surreal place to have a political conversation. These people don’t read or watch real news. They think Conservative talk radio and Fox news personalities areNews
But there are a lot of voters who can be persuaded if we just stop being so dog damned condescending.
Persuaded WITH WHAT is the question.
They have economic concerns? Okay, what are we going to tell them? Manufacturing is coming back? The mines are going to be reopened? Self driving vehicles aren’t going to replace long haul truckers? Rural voters have been shooting themselves in all parts of the body for years now. Having Rump in DC is going to exact a large price especially on rural voters and might not be able to be corrected come 2020.
Links, please.