re: #76 HappyWarrior

My point though is how do you convince people who find your views and what you’ll vote on is threatening to them. No offense but in a way, it was easier for you because you weren’t running for a position that appoints judges that make rulings they find threatening. I’m not saying we dismiss your neighbors but our right wing neighbors are in fact threatened by much of what we stand for. That’s what I wonder about.

Well, that’s why political parties hire campaign managers, communications directors, policy directors, &c. That is their job to figure out how to do that. The GOP did it, they sold us Trump. They sold us trickle-down economics, which GHW Bush said in his primary against Ronald Reagan was “voodoo economics.”

It is the party’s job to show voters why those things aren’t threatening. Take same-sex marriage, which is likely on the chopping block now.

No same-sex marriage will ever threaten an opposite-sex one. Everyone in my village knows my sister is in a same-sex marriage. They know I am in an opposite-sex one. No one here in this uber-conservative town I know acutally opposes gay rights or same-sex marriage (our last village clerk was in a same-sex relationship, not even married - she left the position to marry).

My village was appalled at the Memorial Day speaker (a local Navy commander who just retired) we had who ranted on about North Carolina’s bathroom law and liberals cramming their values down our throats.

He will never be invited back (I have been asked to deliver the next Memorial Day speech here after I offered a counter speech in the June village board meeting that was appropriate to the meaning of Memorial Day). If this wingnut runs for the county commission in 2018 (I suspect he will), my board seat is up anyway and I intend to run against him.

They feel threatened by what they don’t know. That’s why you campaign, present your ideas, advertise, send surrogates or actual candidates here. It is easy to fear what you don’t know.

But you have to do something, anything, or you are simply ceding the field. On the state level, two electoral votes for Trump. Because there was no support for our Democratic representative from Mrs. Clinton or her surrogates, he lost his seat to a wingnut. Instead of four electoral votes, the GOP got five and a House pickup from us.