re: #277 Anymouse 🌹

No, because the answers given to rural problems do not address the rural problems.

As I mentioned above, how does $120 a month Internet and an $800 computer plus thousands in software put food on my table to feed my kids? How is talking about all the great jobs in tech or solar going to feed cattle or bale the hay?

There was a real disconnect in the Democrats’ messages and life on the ground. Trump appealed to broad themes (make America great, as in patriotic themes), and good ol’ fashioned racism.

Telling some fifty-five year old rancher or coal miner well you can just retrain (when no one will hire a fifty-five year old, and they aren’t stupid enough to swallow that line anyway), along with no plan to get corporations to invest in those areas in the first place (and voters in those areas aren’t stupid enough to believe the magic solar company is going to appear and hire thousands of workers), and they voted for the only other candidate.

I don’t know the answer to this. I live in a whole town of college educated adults, almost all of whom voted for Trump. Reasons varied, but a lot of it came down to “what message do the Democrats have” (gee, it’s on a Website? I don’t have access to that) and “how are you going to feed my family?”

There were no answers to those questions.

While there were plenty of racists who voted for Trump (and will always vote for Republicans anyway, it’s not like Trump increased the racist vote for conservatives), there were a great number of people who just said “both sides” or “no message” and didn’t bother.

$120/mo seems unlikely. Internet is usually around $40, and you can get a good laptop for $300 these days. Old people will have trouble retraining, but a mobile workforce can enable young people to stay in rural America rather than continuing the brain-drain from rural areas to the cities.

Accepting Trump’s lies that he’ll bring back high-paying manual labor jobs because they prefer that to learning to live in advancing society is choosing to be a dead-ender and trying to drag the country down with them.