did the Dems abandon small town and rural America?

[pstokely]

or did small town and rural America abandon them? did they have rural and small town America?

could Dean get the vote of them? is it guns or social issues? if it's guns Dean might have a change?

[Code_Name_D]

1. They abbandoned whole states.

The DLC only focuses on "key battle grounds" where their corpret money is likly going to return a victory. If the odds are not good enugh, or they have resone to beleive that they will vote Democratic any way, they will abandone that area completly, and focus the money into the battle ground areas.

The problem is that if you do this too long, you run the risk of intrecnhing your own oposition. After all, if you do not spend recorses in an area, why would they vote for you?

And it gets worse. The DLC has neglected their more secure base. Victoryes in former sure things have shrunk, and the DLC is slow to respond.

But even if they were to respond, how would they respond? It is the lack of mesage that is the DLC Dems largest problem. They are so buizy trying to be all things to all people, that they end up being nothing to every one. The DLC's policy of victory, is to play the number. Why even bother with policy?

[Feanorcurufinwe]

2. Dean and Kerry's positions on guns

Dean and Kerry's positions on guns are identical as far as I can tell.

[w4rma]

3. Here is Dean's position on gun regulation

...
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to an issue that you seem to break away from liberal Democratic orthodoxy and that’s gun control. This is a brochure in your gubernatorial campaign from the NRA.

“In November we should return a truly pro-gun Governor to office by re-electing Governor Howard Dean.” And again, David Broder’s coverage of your campaign. “Dean bragged that he has ‘an A rating’ from the National Rifle Association... he argued that ‘as Democrats, we ought to say keep the federal laws we have, enforce them, but no new laws.’ Get the gun issue off the table. It cost Al Gore three states—and the presidency.”

Which states did Gore lose because of guns?

GOV. DEAN: I think Montana, Tennessee and West Virginia. There may be more, but those are the ones I would guess, given their patterns with previous elections.

MR. RUSSERT: Democrats in Congress right now are saying that at gun shows, you can buy a gun on Saturday or Sunday and there is no background check, because many law enforcement agencies are closed. They want to extend that deadline. Would you support that kind of gun control?

GOV. DEAN: What I would support—I do support closing the gun show loophole, but I would like to see InstaCheck, which is the same system that we have elsewhere, and I think if it takes keeping somebody on duty in law enforcement agencies, that would be fine. Look, let me explain to you why I take the position I do on gun control. In Vermont, in the last 11 years, we’ve had between a high of 25 and a low of five homicides per year. Most of them, the majority, are domestic related, not many of them have firearms and not one of them would be changed if we had gun control. We essentially have no gun control in Vermont. All we have is you can’t bring guns to school.

Now, I don’t believe for a moment that that’s appropriate for New York or Los Angeles or Washington, D.C. But the point I’m trying to make here is why does gun control have to be a national issue? We have some good federal laws. I support keeping them. We should close the gun show loophole with Instacheck and after that why can’t each state make its own laws? Why can’t each state address what they want to do about gun control as a state? Because what we need in Vermont is not the same thing as what you may need in Washington, D.C.

A guy in Tennessee told me, “Look, when you say gun control to me in Tennessee, it sounds like you want to take away the squirrel rifle that my father gave to me. When you say gun control in New York, it sounds like you want to get the Uzis and the illegal handguns off the street.” It’s two different problems. We have national laws. I’m not in favor of repealing them, but I think additional gun control ought be to be done on a state-by-state basis if the state wants it and we ought not to have a one-size-fits-all federal government approach.

MR. RUSSERT: But keep people traveling from state to state very easily.

GOV. DEAN: That’s right. And Virginia is a perfect example of this. New York claimed that a lot of their guns were coming from Virginia, so they had lax laws, so they signed a bill that said you can only buy one gun a month. That’s a Virginia law. It doesn’t apply to other states. It seems to me it addressed the problem in Virginia successfully. Why can’t we do that?

Democrats are getting killed on gun control. Democratic activists who basically are in favor of gun control are glad to see me coming in the West and the South, because they do not want to lose any more national elections on the gun issue.
...
http://dean2004.blogspot.com/2002_08_25_dean2004_archive.html

[jafap]

4. On the subject of abandonment

Sad to say, but I actually voted Republican in 1996. Not for President, but for Congress. The Democratic candidate was Madison mayor Paul Soglin. I had a business in a small town about sixty miles away. There was a parade in town, and the Republican incumbent was in it, but no sign of Soglin. He basically ignored my town, and I thought that if he ignores us as a candidate, what is he going to do when he is in Congress? Did Clinton ever make a visit to Madison - not only for his own campaign, but to help elect Soglin? I do not remember, which probably means he didn't.
Things like that can make a difference. The district has been narrowly democratic since 1998.

[Lexingtonian]

5. Some of both

When small farmers and manufacturing jobs began to disappear in the '70s, in a lot of places the worker vs management/corporation economic dynamic declined as the dominant one in regional politics. When it turned out that politicians couldn't change the economic facts much, the urban vs rural social dynamic became dominant.

In a lot of places (especially the South and Midwest) the medium sized and even large cities are still populated with enough or mostly people who are still culturally rural today, regional migrants, giving the conservative side some undue advantage. They're decreasing in number with time, but remaining examples of conservative cities are Charlotte, Jacksonville, Fort Worth, Lincoln, Tulsa, Richmond, Columbus, Dayton, Bakersfield, Oklahoma City.

At the same time the Parties realigned due to the Civil Rights developments, intensifying the difference in 'morality' (rural people own all the integrity, urban people own all the intelligence, in the urban-rural mythology) to one of 'culture'. The ugly fact is that the moral superiority of the rural folk is in discord with their being net subsidized by the cities they claim to abhor, resulting in that net subsidizing of the Red States by the Blue States, as well as hypocrisy about race relations.

I think the average rural Republican is not going to vote Democratic under any likely scenario in 2004. The differences in 'morality', race relations, and economic conditions ('gays, guns, and God' and dark skinned people) is too great. But they may stay home in the general or start knocking off their extremist politicians in the primaries, believing it has all gone too far.

The people that need appealing to are the rural swing voters and passive Democrats that have not found reasons for hope in the major Parties in recent years. They voted for Perot a few elections ago, but he turned out to be a dud. The persona and political positioning they're looking for requires the tricky mixture of being very conventional but also inspiring. So, pushing a policy position isn't quite the right thing to get their support. They have to see the person in action first, then they'll see whether his positions are sufficiently agreeable, though being a little wacky somewhere in a conventional way is something they do find appealing. I think Dean fits the bill fairly well, but he needs to put that quasi-folksy persona first and policy second if he fully wants to take that road.

[jafap]

7. about the rural Republican who will not vote Democratic

Sort of a funny thing. Gore won both Cerro Gordo and Floyd County Iowa in 2000, but the incumbent Republican Congressman (Nussle) also won both those counties. He got about the same number of votes that Gore did. So some people were crossing lines there.
You could say the same thing about SD. Even McGovern could not carry his own state as a Presidential candidate in 1972, but he was re-elected to the Senate in 1974 (perhaps by lower turn-out in a non-Presidential year). Daschle has won Senate races there in 1986, 1992, 1998, and so has Tim Johnson in 2002, but the state has never voted Democratic for President. So some voters are switching parties, at least for some elections. Maybe it is only that Democrats are winning in non-Presidential years, which does not bode well for Daschle in 2004.

[Lexingtonian]

11. That's true

There is a good amount of voting the person in places where it's rare for both parties to field good candidates at the same time, or people are of the stated opinion that it has no effect on them whatsoever which Party holds that office. For the other side of the coin, in the West the practice of nonpartisan mayoral elections began from the observation that voters were annoyed by the delimiting the final candidates for office by ideology- an irrelevant aspect in practice.

There is also a fair amount of splitting by interests affected. In New Hampshire, next door, the Presidential elections tend to be rather tight and are tipped by those voting the person. The House races go Republican easily because of dogmatic attitudes/beliefs about taxation that have become quite detached from reality. I suppose that may be the case in Iowa too.

About Presidential and midterm elections...we got our first liberal-leaning national pluralities since 1964 in 1998 or 2000. So we probably do better in Presidential election years than midterms now. 1996 in the Senate: -2, 1998: +0, 2000: +5, 2002: -2. And overall the electorate of the Right is moderating as it senses itself becoming a political and demographic minority- though some resort to greater extremism. I think we'll all be surprised at the thin margins by which Bush wins the states that he does. The country as a whole has trended Democratic/ socially/culturally liberal at a rate of 2.5-3% every four years since 1992. With some care we should do very well in 2004: the theoretical split in the Presidential race should be 52%-46%-2% or so, though Karl Rove is making every effort to make up the difference by getting 3-5 million more conservative Christian voters to the polls and splitting and discrediting the Democratic candidates. So I'm not really worried about Tom Daschle; John Edwards and Fritz Hollings, however, face rather even odds.

[QC]

6. The Great Unwashed seldom make $100k "contributions."

So neither party is really much interested in them.

[chimpymustgo]

9. John Edwards cares about them and wants their votes.

He's is FROM them, he knows them and wants to improve their lives. He's making a real effort to tell them why they should vote Democratic.

[QC]

10. Edwards is a blessed exception.

I'm strongly drawn toward him because he is a blue-collar kid like me. I would be proud to vote for him, but the political establishment as a whole is mainly interested in catering to the corporate feudalists.

[ShaneGR]

8. Edwards is the only candidate who makes a big deal about it

He's got his whole rural America plan.