The reason the message isn't reaching them is Sinclair Media, which has bought up all the rural radio stations, turned them into right-wing talk radio, and sprays non-stop Republican propaganda out of them. The other reason is that Republicans have made sure the rural areas don't have broadband Internet. Maybe Musk can fix this with Starlink -- ASAP, I hope.
Though frankly even small towns vote Democratic now, Look at a precinct-level map, and look at something as small as Auburn, NY. The urban-rural split is overwhelming -- *every* urban area, even the *tiniest*, goes Democratic.
Sinclair is just the latest iteration of the seizure of wide swaths of the media by conservatives. A handful of companies like Clear Channel started buying up AM channels right and left as soon as the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated and they have continued to gobble up media in every market since then. Rush Limbaugh became the biggest thing on talk radio in the 90s because the owners of his network made sure he was on in every market, even very liberal ones. There were some attempts at liberal talk radio, but it largely got squeezed out because they didn't have the financial backing to get on the air in enough markets. Rachel Maddow started out on the biggest of them.
I saw an analysis of how the elimination of the fairness Doctrine had impacted the US's radio market around 2000. They pointed out that Eugene, OR, a small city that is very liberal, but a college town (University of Oregon). I forget the number, but basically the AM band was saturated with conservative talk radio and most of the rest were owned by one conservative company or another.
Sinclair has taken it one step further requiring their local news to essentially parrot Fox in every market.
The founding fathers had a solution for apportionment based on population size. It's called the House of Representatives. The Senate was't meant to be apportioned to the population size because it would act as a check on the House. To that point, Senators were to be voted in by state legislatures instead of popular vote. At least until the 17th Amendment. I don't see how this intent of the Founding Fathers isn't clear. No matter how much you would prefer that CA and NY run the country, it just wasn't intended. I'm writing this even though I have lived in SF, CA my entire life as a liberal.
Senate | United States government
"The role of the Senate was conceived by the
Founding Fathers as a check on the popularly elected
House of Representatives. Thus, each state, regardless of size or population, is equally represented. Further, until the
Seventeenth Amendment of the Constitution (1913), election to the Senate was indirect, by the state legislatures. They are now elected directly by voters of each state."
U.S. Senate: The Senate and the United States Constitution
"During the summer of 1787, the delegates to the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia established equal representation in the Senate and proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Called the “Great Compromise” or the “Connecticut Compromise,” the unique plan for congressional representation resolved the most controversial aspect of the drafting of the Constitution."
Back when both parties were run by sane people who put the needs of the country first, having one house of Congress balanced to the rural minority had a voice was not such a bad thing. When the Constitution was ratified the US still had a majority of the population living in rural areas, but that shifted dramatically over time and now a majority lives in urban, or on the edge of urban areas. Today about 20% of the US population lives in rural areas.
The needs and problems of rural areas are different from urban areas. One example was what led to the Rural Electrification Act in the 1930s. It was partially a jobs program, but it also got the rural areas to favor Roosevelt because it brought electricity to rural areas where it wasn't economically feasible for electric companies to run power lines.
As
@neroden pointed out, the same problem exists today for broadband internet in many rural parts of the country, though that isn't the sole reason the rural areas vote Republican. Eastern Washington is significantly more conservative than the Western part, but large parts of Eastern Washington have some of the fastest internet in the country thanks to the Bonneville Power Administration that runs the dams on the Columbia River. The BPA put in a hefty internet backbone along the same towers used to transmit power in the 90s and when it became clear they overbuilt for their needs, they opened up leasing bandwidth to commercial and private use.
Because of the cheap power and great internet a number of data centers moved in. Google has a huge center near Hood River, OR. Crypto currency mining is also becoming a big business in that area.
It wouldn't be that most of their jobs have been sent offshore, the cost of living has been soaring, and their kids have been sent to die in illegal wars?
The reason they went for Trump isn't because he was Republican or because Sinclair sent out propaganda. If that was the case, McCain or Romney would have won before. Many of these blue collar workers in rural America voted for Obama. Twice.
They voted for Trump in 2016 to throw (in the words of Michael Moore) a molotov cocktail into the establishment of both parties.
The faster that Democrats understand this point the better. Of course, they can win back all of these voters but claiming Russia stole the election to take the spotlight off of Hillary and the DNC's failed strategy won't work.
Where we live is like on the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. We're on the edge of the Portland metro area on the Washington side of the Columbia River (I can see Oregon from my house!
), which is very, very liberal. It's not unusual for Congressional races in Portland to go 80%+ Democrat. And just to the east of us is the most conservative part of Washington State.
Our county voted for Obama twice and just barely went for Hillary Clinton (by less than a percent), but our Congressional district is held by a Republican and the overall district is around R+5. The district to the east of us is R+25 (I believe).
Our county has a strong economy with some high tech and a lot of people who live in this county work in Portland. A lot of people fled Portland in part to get away from the politics that are too liberal and in part because this county has far better schools than Portland. This county is conservative, but more libertarian conservative than social conservative. I have yet to run into anyone who has anything good to say about Donald Trump. Racism exists around here, but they are a minority and keep quiet about it unless they think they have a sympathetic audience.
Someone started putting up "Be Bold Vote Republican" signs around the area and I've seen a couple defaced already. One had swastikas drawn on it, I couldn't make out what alterations were done to the other one (I was on the freeway).
As you get away from Portland, this Congressional district becomes much more conservative in every way. My SO did appeals on criminal cases in the county to the north of us for a while and she saw some bone chilling racism. One Hispanic guy who was represented by a Hispanic lawyer was asked by the lawyer during jury selection how many potential jurors would be inclined to vote against his client because his was Hispanic. Some people raised their hand. He then asked how many would be inclined to vote against his client because his lawyer was Hispanic, even more raised their hands. And this was nearly 20 years ago.
One of my theories about the growth of racism has to do with the changing demographics of communities. The urban areas in the US have had large non-white populations for a long time. When the non-whites started coming in there was a lot of racism, but the whites in those cities who didn't leave found out non-white people are just people too. Then after the white flight of the 50s and 60s, the suburbs became more non-white and they went through the same dynamic. Now the rural areas are getting more non-white and in some cases whites there have been fleeing the non-whites for decades.
As non-whites move into these areas the whites get scared they will lose their identity to the non-whites.
I grew up a minority in an inner suburb of Los Angeles. My town was on the border of East LA which, at the time, was the second largest concentration of Mexicans in the world. My town was heavily Asian (mostly Japanese-Americans) when I was born and became more Asian as I grew up. It was over 60% Asian when I moved away. Until college I never went to a school that was more than 15% white.
I was not a popular kid, but it was due to other factors than being white. One of the most popular kids in my class in two different schools I went to was a white kid (we changed schools the same year). Ethnicity wasn't really an issue. When we had a big influx of immigrants from Taiwan starting around 6th grade, there was a lot of tension, but the Asians who were born there had the same issues with the immigrants everyone else did.
So I see non-white people and I see people. I always thought Martin Luther King's thing about dreaming his kids would be judged on their character than the color of their skin was always a "duh" for me. But I lived in an environment where I learned from an early age that non-white people are not "other" and dangerous, but are just people. There are some people who are dangerous, but my caution receptors don't go off based on skin color, it's more about age, gender, and number.
I go on alert when I see groups of teenage males who are messing around. The last two times it happened both groups were 100% white and in neither case were they really dangerous. It's just when I was a teenager when groups of males started getting mischievous there was a good chance I was about to get bullied so I still have a trigger. I'm aware of it and don't do anything about it, but I still go on alert.
When I was at Boeing I worked with a woman who had grown up in rural North Dakota. She said she never even saw a non-white person except on TV until she went to college. She was very happy to be an urban animal and was politically very liberal, but she understood that environment.
Humans are naturally xenophobic and another ethnic group is an "other" until people get to know them, then they cease to be "other". Today the divide is more along skin color lines, but it was once divided between ethnic groups from Europe. My father grew up in an all white town in Michigan (Muskeagon) in the 1920s and 30s and there was tons of ethnic tension between the Germans, Swedish, Norwegians, Italians, etc. When some of my ancestors came to the US (Irish) the mostly English descended majority referred to them as "white n***ers".
The African-American/white divide in the South and to some extent elsewhere is one divide we have been unable to conquer. It goes back to the colonial period.
