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Being Relateable
Buried underneath a ton of media fluff and bluster about who is investigating what or subpoenaing whom, who launched ballistic missiles this week, and who we are on the brink of war with now, there has been an easily missed bit of introspection happening amongst the DNC Elite. Hillary Clinton and the various party leaders have finally admitted to a fact that is as true as it is uncomfortable: the DNC has completely lost touch with rural voters and uneducated whites — and they can’t win consistently without those voters. As such, the DNC has been quietly asking itself how they can win back the rural votes. As much as I hate to do it for fear that someone will actually read it and take it seriously, I have, here, set out to try and lay out my roadmap for the Democrats to find their way back into rural America.
Step 1) Know thy audience.
In general rural voters are more conservative and self-sufficient than the classy urbanites that the modern DNC almost *exclusively* markets itself to. The fact that there is no recognition of this fact has spelled disaster consistently for the DNC in statewide races. Rural people tend to be more “outdoorsy” — a quaint notion to the urban elite who view camping, hiking, hunting, fishing as an interesting hobby for which you need a bunch of specialized equipment from REI — but it also means that you make your own fun, whereas the urbanite is dependent on Hollywood, Silicone valley and real estate magnates to create entertaining spaces/experiences, for which we trade our money to enjoy. There’s a reason the nightclub didn’t originate in farmland America — there wasn’t time for that kind of faff when you are milking cows at 5am, mending fences at 10am, digging irrigation ditches at 2pm and pulling in your hay bales at 6pm. In general, rural Americans want one thing: to be left alone by the government. While the more radical elements of the Democratic Party have no idea what that means, conceptually, the party needs to be able to pitch to that crowd to have any shot with those voters.
Step 2) Moderation.
Gun rights are a big deal for hunters and farmers — it helps protect their lives and their livelihood. Low taxation is a big deal as farming and owning a mom-n-pop is a low-margin business. Increased support for Blue Collar industry; restoring the dignity of *work*, not just education; Highlighting that all the regulatory schemes are designed to avoid impacting the small, family operation — these are all paths towards “progress” in rural America. Waltzing into small town america preaching about higher taxes and an oppressive, overreaching federal authority that is going to regulate everything from who you can hire to how much money you can make is simply not a path to success. This, then, ties into step 3…
Step 3) Control your own narrative.
Socialism, College tuition, higher taxes, medicare for all, strict environmental regulations to make gas, carbon pollution and farm equipment more expensive, more federal oversight, increased licensing regulations over fishing, hunting and gun ownership — these are all nonstarters in Rural America. If you are going to grow up on the family farm, take over the family farm, and hopefully pass on the family farm to your kids, the odds are pretty likely that you don’t care about college tuition or socialism. You want to know that you are going to be able to grow your crops and you will have a place to sell your crops so that you can buy more seed and equipment to work your farm. If you’re a coal miner, hearing that a political party has set a goal of putting you out of work is going to ring in your ears far more than any promise of a Universal Basic Income or occupation retraining. If you are a serious hunter/fisher/forager, hearing that some nerd in DC is going to control how much of it you can do and demanding that you buy anything you need beyond that… as long as it isn’t gun-related, because we banned them… you don’t have much interest in putting that person in power. In essence, the DNC has spent a lot of time in the last twenty years pitching itself to urbanites and Academics who never suffered under the elegant-on-paper-only machine called socialism, and it hasn’t realized that Rural Americans have real concerns that urbanites want to simply do away with because they haven’t thought about how those decisions will impact those people. The DNC has to show that it understands those concerns and respects them — which, ironically, is why the federalist system was designed this way in the first place. Most of this conflict is actually the fruit of robbing the states of their regulatory power through the Federal Government — and it’s largely due to the influence of Socialist academics who view both the Republic and the state designations as archaic and unnecessary. If the DNC is serious about courting rural voters, they need to do some work on their image and messaging to show that the Democratic Party actually values the things that Rural America does…… and resisting the urge to call them all “racists” for wanting to be left alone is a great first step to beginning that process.
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