New Democracy Seminar: Democratic leaders plead for the party to reconnect with rural voters

[TexasTowelie]

DES MOINES, IOWA -- Democrats must win back the trust of rural America if they want to win elections in Iowa and nationwide, party leaders and operatives said Friday at a forum aimed at pushing the party in a “radically pragmatic” direction for 2018 and beyond.

That means, first and foremost, campaigning outside of reliably liberal city areas and acknowledging the cultural and economic concerns of the voters living in those rural parts of the country.

“We need to be in those small towns, creating those conversations in the coffee shop, pushing back on those folks who are anti-government,” former Iowa Gov. and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said. “We can’t just organize in Ward 1 in Des Moines, we have to go to Ward 1 in Mount Pleasant.”

Kathleen Sebelius, who, like Vilsack was a Midwestern governor who joined the Obama White House as a cabinet secretary, echoed that argument in a taping later on Friday of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press.”

Read more: http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2017/10/13/tom-vilsack-democratic-leaders-plead-party-reconnect-rural-voters/762572001/

Cross-posted in the Iowa Group.

[Vinca]

1. This kind of irks me. The voters also have a duty to learn about the candidates from

multiple sources. Anyone with 6 or more brain cells should have been able to figure out Trump was little more than a huckster and a scam artist. If they glommed on to Don because of his white supremacist leanings, I don't want Dems to reconnect with them. The party, as a whole, shouldn't be blamed for the ignorance of voters. We can inform them, but if they're the kind of hatemongers we saw during the last campaign (read Katy Tur's book - worse than I thought) it will do little good. I think we should spend more time getting each and every Democrat and left leaning liberal to the polls.

[murielm99]

2. I agree...

We don't want haters. And we should not change our platform to accommodate them.

[atreides1]

4. Tom Vilsack

Not really impressed with him...didn't the Shirley Sherrod incident happen while he was Secretary of Agriculture?

I don't have a lot of confidence in his decision making abilities...he made a decision about someone's career after viewing an excerpted video! A good leader would have dug deeper and gotten to the truth...and yes this was also a black mark against the Obama administration, as well as the NAACP!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firing_of_Shirley_Sherrod#Official_comments_about_Sherrod

[dalton99a]

5. Rural voters won't vote Democratic until they see their rural hospitals shut down

But that's still a big if - because they will blame Obama first and foremost.

[DinahMoeHum]

6. There's an outfit in rural Virginia called Democratic Promise. . .

. . .that Keith Ellison praised on recently, and has expressed interest in taking to a national level.

Might be valuable lessons learned here:

https://www.dempromise.com/

https://bluevirginia.us/2017/10/dnc-deputy-ellison-endorses-del-sam-rasouls-rural-initiative-democratic-promise

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/10/11/1705756/-Rep-Keith-Ellison-Endorses-Democratic-Promise