I worked in Marion and Mahaska counties in Iowa as a Field Organizer in 2016. My job was to organize rural Democrats to get out the vote. It meant speaking to a TON of rural white voters. The two counties together have a population of about 50,000, with the biggest town at 11k.
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These are exactly the voters Bernie and his supporters keep saying we should reach, that we are failing without reaching them. And, they propose, consistently, that the “pain and suffering” of these rural counties is economic.
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That’s the drumbeat of the Bernie movement, essentially: “It’s the economy, stupid.” We’re leaving the rural white voting population behind because we’ve been alienating them by talking about social issues all the time and not how we’re going to help them economically.
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In my experience, talking and working with rural voters every. single. day from July 2016 to November 2016? They aren’t that concerned about the economy and losing their farms, at least not where federal elections are concerned.
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You’d think if the problem was economic, that’d be cited as a reason for reluctance to vote for Hillary, that there would be a clearer divide. That the narrative being imposed upon rural whites by a coastal elite (Bernie) that their concern is economic would ring true.
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Nope. I was told that they weren’t voting for Hillary because she’s a woman, because they don’t trust women to lead, because she leaned too far into being pro-choice, that they disagreed with Dems on social issues.
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I got asked why I was in favor of killing babies and told by a rural farmer with a disabled daughter that he was worried about “them Mexicans at the border."
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No one talked about the farm bills. When the economy was brought up, it was with a favorable view to Dems, as Dems had brought wind power to the state and provided a new industry.
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My mom consistent volunteers were rural lesbians and queer people. Social issues were what people wanted to talk about on the doors, not the economy. I simply didn’t see Bernie’s narrative reflected on the ground.
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And I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather keep those firebrand lesbians in the party than try to sacrifice them to court the racist old white farmer who won’t vote for anyone but a white man regardless.
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(sorry for the typos. I just woke up and haven’t had my coffee yet).
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