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YES. This article clearly answers what I was asking about a month after the presidential election. "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems?

• throwaway6734 7y ago
  > "Why aren't Democrats trying to answer everyone's problems? And realizing that someone is telling you they have a need if they vote for the other party?" Not true in all cases. Particularly look at what is going on with farmers in the midwest voting directly against their economic self interest.
  • scarface74 7y ago
    There are cultural interest that they have that supersede any economic interest. I’ll leave it to the reader to make their own inference.
  • rayiner 7y ago
    Why is it bad when farmers in the Midwest vote their conscience, against their supposed self interest, but it’s good for rich programmers to vote against their self interest? The Trump tax cuts were good for me—am I obliged to vote for him?
    • throwaway6734 7y ago
      I should have been clearer. Voting against your self interest is not an issue (and can even be admirable). The issue I have is farmers relying on state welfare to stay solvent while they vote against their economic interests.
    • stjohnswarts 7y ago
      His attempts to become an authoritarian and being a Russian puppet however are not good for you. I would say that's against every American's interest. Lower taxes or not. By the way 75% of his tax reductions went to the richest 5% and the middle class tax deductions expire in a few years.
• Sharlin 7y ago
  Rural Americans: ”Things are changing, we’re losing our jobs, and it sucks” Democrats: ”Well, how about we introduce some wealth transfers, improve social safety nets, and make healthcare and education less expensive so it’s easier to get through this demographic transition?” Rural Americans: ”Trump! Trump! Tru-u-ump!” Democrats: https://tenor.com/oZEM.gif https://tenor.com/oZEM.gif
  • krapp 7y ago
    Well, Trump promised to restore rural American culture and way of life, to stop the change, reopen the mines, bring back the factories and the jobs. To turn back the clock on globalism and the leftist regulations which (as far as many such people were concerned) were the real reasons for the rural economic downturn. He's a charlatan, though, and everything he promised was impossible, but conservative people by definition don't want change, culturally or economically, and "Make America Great Again" as a slogan means "turn back the clock to when the world made sense to us." The Democrats, meanwhile, represent the very change rural Americans want to avoid. They embrace globalism and progressivism and multiculturalism. They want people to look forward, not backwards. But, looking forward, rural Americans only see their own relevance diminish. They don't want to live in a world where the government has to take care of them because capitalism has determined that robots and Chinese children are a better ROI than American labor, or where labor doesn't mean something. But they will have to live in that world. We all will, in time, whether we want to or not. Add to that decades of propaganda training Americans to associate the Democrats and progressivism with neo-marxism and atheism, that a social safety net is only for the lazy and indigent, that the "dignity of an honest day's work" is a thing that exists and matters, and it's easy to see why the Democrats' message falls on deaf ears. It's not even an entirely economic argument at that point, it's economics, culture and religion. Corporate interests have successfully convinced rural voters that socialism and regulation are the great moral evils of their time, even though it's capitalists who exploit them and send their jobs overseas, in the name of the very values they espouse, and even though rural areas often depend on government subsidies and programs. Trump's populism doesn't work because rural voters are stupid. It works because it appeals to people's fear about the future and their sense of being personally wronged by that future, on an emotional rather than intellectual level. You don't have to be stupid to fall for that, you just have to be vulnerable, it's a basic long con.
• karlakush 7y ago
  There's a lot more than just economics that separates rural areas from urban areas. Gun control is a prime example. People from urban cities don't go hunting so they don't see a reason for gun ownership. People from rural areas don't have to deal with gang violence so they don't see a problem with gun ownership. It's difficult to find a Democrat or Republican politician that crosses the divide on issues like this because they would lose their primary if they did. The best way to fix this problem is to move to some sort of approval voting or ranked choice voting system. This would allow candidates to have a chance at winning elections even if they don't have the support of a major party. Unfortunately, these voting systems have a lot working against them. Most notable is the fact that they are deleterious to the party in power, so there's little motivation for politicians to work on implementing them.