Rural Democrats: Party Ignored Us, Suffered the Consequences

[frazzled]

80. Obama lost the rural vote in both elections

He got only 38% of the rural vote in 2012 (41% in 2008). Why the steady decline in Democratic votes in rural areas? Could be a lot of reasons: more people may have left rural areas to move to larger places for jobs, more may not have voted, some may have voted for Trump. Maybe misogyny played a more significant role than we are allowing.

Everybody here is assuming that it's all about ideology, but it's not really. It is historically typical for people to want a change in parties after two terms of one party. It's also typical that the new party loses Congressional seats in the first midterm election. There's an entire, complex nexus of reasons that we won the popular vote by a significant margin but lost the electoral vote. Stupidity and meanness are among those reasons. None alone is sufficient for an answer.

There was an article in today's Times about voters in West Virginia coal country. Donald Trump promised to bring it back. But we all know that coal has been a dying industry for decades, and it shouldn't come back. But was it really just a promise about jobs, which will take a long time to replace, and depend as much on state and local as federal help? No, it was about abortion, and other conservative values:

“I don’t think he can ever fulfill all the promises he made even in four or eight years,” Danny Maynard, 59, said after Bible study at the Chattaroy Missionary Baptist Church. Mr. Maynard lost his job at a coal company last year. “But I think we’re headed in the right direction,” he said. “He wants to make America great again.”

Mr. Trump pummeled Mrs. Clinton in coal country. Here in West Virginia, he won every county and took 69 percent of the vote, a landslide also fueled by his promise to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices who would roll back abortion rights. As Mr. Copley put it, “Coal is secondary to me.”

It is difficult for outsiders to fathom how deeply faith and work are intertwined here, or the economic and psychological depression that sets in when an entire region loses the only livelihood many of its people have ever known. Coal has always been boom and bust; its decline began long before Mr. Obama took office. But in West Virginia alone, 12,000 coal industry jobs have been lost during his tenure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/28/us/donald-trump-coal-country.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

Clinton talked about bringing new kinds of jobs to coal country, even as she acknowledged that new sources of energy would have to continue to replace coal, in the fight for climate change. She spoke eloquently about it, with great compassion, to that man in the red sweater at the Town Hall forum. She understood the issues, was truthful yet compassionate. But she didn't promise to "make America great again" by appointing conservative judges, to overturn Roe v. Wade, and she didn't cater to white fears of being emasculated or overtaken by racial minorities. She did it right. But those other things were the things that at least this part of rural America was listening to: things that are anathema, or should be, to any liberal or progressive.