Last week the local NPR station had a discussion about the perennial topic of how to convince rural voters to vote for Democrats. I couldn’t listen to the show in real time, so I wrote a quick email that said, in part, this:
[…] For these people [rural Dakota voters who are in denial about COVID], and they’re the majority, only Fox News and right-wing memes on Facebook represent the truth — everything else is a liberal plot.
If you can’t convince people to wear a little piece of cloth on their face and stay home from the bar to save their lives and the lives of others, convincing them to vote for a Democrat is absolutely a bridge too far.
Maybe your guests have a solution to this problem, but from where I’m sitting, the solution is to forget about rural states that are too far gone, and concentrate on states with enough minority and young new voters to flip the legislatures and the federal offices. These include Arizona, Georgia and Texas.
Obviously pretty reductive and simplistic, but, hey, it’s a radio call-in show. Of course I think it’s a problem that, for example, Sarah Gideon ended her campaign against Susan Collins with $14 million cash on hand when some Democratic Senate candidates in rural states raised a few hundred thousand dollars — I think the party should run decently-financed (say $1 million) Senate campaign for every seat, no matter what the odds, because the Senate is so important to Democrats that throwing down a few mil to bet on a lightning strike is an unfortunate necessity. Decently-financed federal campaigns also have major down-ticket benefits for small rural state Democratic parties — lists of likely Democratic voters are cleaner, there’s a group of volunteers who learn the ropes, etc.
Anyway, it turns out that the radio show host was using a piece in Politico by the chair of the Dunn County Wisconsin Democratic Party as a jumping-off point. Dunn is an Obama-Obama-Trump-Trump county. Here’s the nut of that chairman’s argument:
