Can progressives learn anything from Republicans?

[The Industrial Atheist]

[Angrboda]

Here in my state, it appears to be a question of rural voters winning out over the better represented urban voters. It was the same with Trump. I'm not sure that's a question of tactics so much as addressing their interests and getting out the vote in those sectors that are important to your winning.

[Jackie]

Right about now, Trump and the Koch brothers and the rest of the Republican party have me disgusted.  The way they're governing is going to leave a scar across the world that will last long after they're gone. And to me and a lot of other intelligent, educated people, we see Trump is an orange skinned windbag with no redeaming qualities as president.  Not only that, but Republicans haven't had a decent president since before I was born.  

But there's one big question: why do they keep winning?

I mean, serious, they've had a habit of nominating complete morons as president and those morons win.  How?  I had hoped after the disaster that was the Dubya presidency, we would have learned our lesson and not voted for idiots.  Then Trump came along and we threw that lesson right out the window.  I would have hoped after the mess they left the economy, we would know better than to believe that tax cuts for the plutocrat class are going to help anyone else.  But those same people are cheering on Trumps tax cuts, the ones that are mostly paying out to the people who benefited from the Bush bailouts.

I guess my question is, why do republicans keep winning with such bad ideas?  And whatever the method to the madness is, can democrats harness that for their good ideas?

Because most humans are tribal. In a very real evolutionary sense, because we are social, and that grouping produces safety in numbers, far too often we will buy a falsehood because it is appealing rather than testing the data to be sure it is accurate.

I would say though, the best thing for democrats to do is stop playing defense and relying on all our old haunts and convey the message that poor rural whites are getting screwed just like poor urban blacks. Our base is solid, but it isn't enough, we need to play offence and take away the narrative from the GOP who has controlled it since Reagan.

It isn't impossible for democrats to win in red states. Montana has a democratic GOV, Oklahoma has also had a democratic gov.

If we push post WW2 policies, the policies that built our middle class and the rust belt, the GOP will lose.

[John V]

[Angrboda]

[Neo-Scholastic]

Democracy is not being destroyed under Trump. Get real. We survived Obama. You can survive Trump.

[Mister Agenda]

Republicans/conservatism are most popular in highly rural states. The electoral college is a fact of our politics, it has to be taken into account. The concentration of liberals in urban areas makes them more vulnerable to being disenfranchised by gerrymandering.

If Democrats want to swing highly rural states their way, they will need to appeal to rural and small town Americans. And rural and small town Americans don't have to deal with diversity very much, compared to people in urban areas. They are unlikely to diversity issues as relevant to their lives, because many of them can go weeks without ever seeing a member of another race. It doesn't matter as much if your nearest neighbor wants to shoot their gun in their back yard if they live a mile away from you; and you know that if someone tries to break into your house, the deputies can't possibly be expected to get there in time to protect you.

I grew up mostly in small towns and, for a couple of years once, on a farm. I now prefer to live near a convenient city, because I like things like libraries, more than one movie theater, and being close to the central bureaucracy of my state. But in rural Illinois, you can be looked down of for raising a crop that isn't corn. It's a different world, and I still remember my first HS Freshman school assembly when I realized there was not one black kid in the entire school.

Democrats have winning issues in rural America, if they're willing to frame their message in a way that targets their particular concerns. That means a strong economic message. Preserving coal jobs is a fantasy, the percentage of businesses that are started outside of metro areas was around 20% 40 years ago, compared to 12% these days. Change has not been good to rural areas in recent decades. Some of the counties the Dems lost in 2016 had upwards of 40% unemployment and mortality rates shocking in a developed country. There is a price to be paid for addressing the concerns of rural and small town working class whites. They may be a minority, but they're a large one, and they are the majority in many states. 220 counties flipped from Obama to Trump. It's worth some effort, IMHO, to try to flip them back, and gain some, instead of trying to milk more votes out of the 'urbs' and suburbs.

I don't know what the exact message should be. Something that helps farmers and small businesses (the main businesses in small towns). I'm not an economist or a sociologist, but I think there's a segment of farmers and small business owners that see big, arguably nearly if not actually monopolistic businesses like Monsanto and other big agro-corps and the literal handful of companies that control the meat-packing industry as unfair competition.

They won't vote Dem if the Dems don't offer them anything that will make their lives appreciably better.

[John V]

[The Grand Nudger]

[Jackie]