... And I just have one question. How many people did you have to recruit to spread that broad blanket? I'm guessing a bunch.

Trashing thread.

The same could be said of my red-voting county here in PA.

Notwithstanding the admirable Progressive residents in my county and yours, the fact remains that a practical majority vote for the dumbest common denominator for the dumbest of all possible reasons.

By "practical majority" I mean "a majority of voters casting ballots on election day." The actual demographic distribution is, in this context, subordinate to the number of people who vote.

My county has a fair Democratic majority and has nevertheless voted Red in the past 4 presidential elections. Those who sit at home on election day might as well not exist.

That's the way it should be stated. Although Democrats are in the minority here, we are still a substantial number. I'm a 66 year old Democrat , and I've lived in a lot of places during my lifetime. I could have settled just about anywhere I chose, but I chose to live down here, and although I am in the minority politically speaking, I wouldn't live anywhere else. I'm a southern boy and I don't want us to rise again, I just want us to do better. We're trying.

They are within a few miles of "estate" developments that have $800k McMansions and five to ten acre lots.

has drifted into the Fox light column. Notice how they were able to shut down stories about inappropriate actions by a couple of their Entertainment Division Leadership people .

ABC has for many years been tilted to the right. Ask anyone who has or is employed by Disney.

I think the us vs them is built into the dna. R's really believe we D's hate them and are out to get them. We're not. We want them to do better. Somehow, they just can't, or won't, believe that.

I moved here from NY this last year, and when I'm not around my fellow transplants from the Northeast, I get a sense that people here were socialized into an us-vs-them mentality. I was a kid in the Sixties, and I saw that TV was trying to bridge that gap with shows like "The Andy Griffith Show", which took a few potshots at Southern folks, but more often showed them as decent, kind, brave, and smart. And this was all during the civil rights era, when white backlash to civil rights advances was at its hottest in the latter part of the 20th Century.

But as social issues of other types came to the fore, we have indeed seen the media reflect the "We're right, you're tragically wrong," sort of view of Northerners. And some Southerners resent that, and I can understand that. Nobody wants to hear that their great-great-granddad was a traitor, while his family has been tending his grave for generations.

and try to understand where there coming from but it looks like that doesn't go both ways ...AND IT PISSES ME OFF.

They mock our outreach, they deride our empathy, and they laugh at our efforts to understand.

Meanwhile they vote for every racist, rapist and pedophile they can set their dim eyes upon, as long as the candidate recites the proper religious bullshit and quietly vows to protect them from brown people.

They are actively, willingly and happily participating in the nation's destruction, voting against their own interests as long as it gives them a sense that they're "beating" this brown person or that snowflake Liberal.

Fuck them. Fuck each and every one of them. Fuck them individually, and fuck them in the aggregate.

We do not need them. Were it not for the malicious and deliberate effort of Republicans to gerrymander their party and to suppress the vote, these rural white Republican voters would vanish from the public eye like the offensive demographic quirk that they are.

I say again: fuck them. And when their opioid-addled communities crumble to an addictive white dust, we can tell them to pray harder.

When they realize that they have fucked up, and when they admit to having fucked up, and when they pledge to fuck up no further, then and only then will they be worthy of my outreach.


Fuck them.