I just find it incredibly stupid that they have spent the last 60 years actively ruining their own lives.
Stepping back for a moment, let's unpack this. You've made several posts essentially claiming that rural voters vote against their own best interests.
Do you actually know what their interests are? Do you know what rural people actually want? What is it that you believe Democrats have done in order to meet the interests of rural people?
Well that's... a broader question than it seems on the surface, especially 'what do rural people want' isn't really a cut and dry inquiry.
So before I can answer that, I suppose I need to define what I think of as 'rural' in this specific context.
When I think of 'rural' or 'small town' it's informed by my experiences, of course, as is every view that every person has.
I think of Swanton, Ohio where I was born - it's relatively close to Toledo so it's not like it's an isolated community in the middle of nowhere, but it's one of those interesting mid-west towns where even though an urban center is fairly close by there are people living in that village who have almost never left a 5 mile radius around it.
I think of Nederland, CO and Sugarloaf CO - the former being a small mountain town of about 1500 that is partially sustained by 'pass-through' tourism, the latter being... well to be honest it's basically where hippie drug dealers and 'lone survivor' idiots live to be 'off grid'.
I think about Kalispell, MT where I lived for a couple years in the early 2000s.
Not southern rural places, I've only driven through some of those here and there in my life, but small little towns nonetheless.
I extrapolate based on what I've experienced from these places plus what I've read - both news and 'human interest' articles, as well as stuff from forums and such.
Ok so there's some general guidelines - when I think about 'rural' towns and 'rural' voters *in the context of this thread* I'm generally thinking about people who live in smaller towns that are within a 2-3 hour drive of a larger urban center that for the most part don't have any background economic harness.
(By economic harness I mean for example Nederland having 'pass-through' money trickle in, or Kalispell having residual tourism money filter in from the skiing over in Whitefish)
Also note that the whole idea of small towns and rural people extends way beyond any limited conversational scope, but Toni is the one who started this thread claiming that city folk hate "rural working class" from "fly-over areas" so I'm trying to limit things to that kind of reference point.
So with all that preface out of the way...
Do you actually know what their interests are? Do you know what rural people actually want?
There's a really powerful difference here between what they "want" vs what they "need" and it's enough I think it deserves defining separately.
I assume they need the same thing everyone needs:
1. Personal economic viability (for this discussion we'll define that "make enough money to cover all the basics of living and then have some extra on top of that).
2. Housing and environmental stability.
3. Enough distractions and assorted what-nots to stave off the creeping horror of the human condition.
Now when it comes to wants, for a lot of small town rural white people you could start off with "no not-white people", but I chalk that up to an unpleasant personality quirk of people who live in these areas and don't generally ascribe it to small town dwellers as an attribute, though quite frankly a *lot* of them have that attitude.
A very common through-line I've experienced as well is this kind of internal back-and-forth over wanting conveniences of the modern world while simultaneously disdaining the idea of those conveniences and the people who utilize them.
Like I remember in Kalispell hearing lots and lots of people bitching about the 'modern world' and the canard of 'technology' and how it was an evil vice, but everyone sure was quick to start getting DSL when that was introduced to the area.
I recall an awful lot of bar griping about "city folk" and their "busy lifestyle" and how cities are "too crowded", but when the town hit whatever nebulous point of critical mass is required to make Walmart decide they should build a store there, the parking lot was packed to capacity most every day and the bitching at the bar turned into grousing about "all the sheep" are flocking to Walmart and it's such a huge deal because it's causing traffic and making it so the person bitching couldn't quickly and easily get to Walmart.
Anyways I'm kind of rambling and getting off topic, so let's TLDR this:
Every human has basic needs from a biological perspective (re: hierarchy) and then everyone has a related but not identical set of needs within the framework of civilization.
For many people across all spectrums and in all locations urban and rural, those basic needs are not being met.
This is what I would classify as the primary need for everyone, regardless of geography - to have those basic needs met.
What is it that you believe Democrats have done in order to meet the interests of rural people?
Very little, because the interests of rural people necessarily cannot be met by conservative politics, and Democrats are a staunchly conservative political party.
However, they aren't pouring gas on the fire, and they might actually come up with something useful if given enough room to work with.
When people like Toni wax nostalgic about the idyllic "small town culture" they yearn for and people like Jaryhn say we should be trying to birth more of these places, none of them are talking about an isolated cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere filled with bare-footed children and gap-toothed rednecks in overalls.
Nobody is pining for a return to subsistence farming or a Tyler Durden-esque post-apocalypse where everyone is living off the land and the modern world has collapsed.
They're longing for when GM came along and built a factory next to some small struggling burg, and employed near the entire populace, and everyone had money and a grocery store and could buy a house.
So when these small town poets talk about wanting to 'bring back the small town' what they mean is wanting the entire population of the town to have a high paying job that allows them to meet all of their basic biological needs as outlined above.
The harsh reality though is that this is no longer possible - globalism and unchecked predatory capitalism killed that notion for small town America the nanosecond it became cheaper to have some brown person from a 3rd world country do your manufacturing and to ship the parts back here than to make them here in the first place.
There are no more factories propping up small towns and there never will be, there's no more plantations or gold mines acting as a backbone for economic investment.
Small towns are an outdated model in the modern U.S., a country that has left behind manufacturing and production and shifted into a service economy.
What small towns require (not need, not want... require) in order to be capable of residents to have their basic needs met is either:
A. a constant infusion of outside resources propping them up, basically indefinite long-term welfare.
B. a plan to relocate the populations out of those small towns into places where those needs can be met.
C. small towns to disconnect from dependence on the outside broader world and become more self-sustaining communities.
If you've got 400-2000 people, and they all require X amount of resources to live, and the town generates X-% amount of resources to distribute among them, what other options do you have to get those resources to those people?
I'm not saying Democrats can or will magically fix the problem, or that the residents of these towns would even accept that solution if it were offered (that's a whole other conversation) but I know for absolute certain that Republicans make it their primary mission as a political body to ensure that no solution is ever enacted.
