At National Public Radio, Brian Mann writes, Rural Democratic Lawmakers Join Endangered List:
Two-thirds of the Republican wins came in districts where the percentage of people classified as rural was greater than average. Democrats saw many of their small-town icons retire or go down in defeat, along with younger members who had been renewing the party's appeal in the hinterland. The few rural Democrats who remain will face another tough election in 2012. ...
That uprising was not limited to the Midwest or the South.
Scott Murphy, a businessman from the Hudson River Valley in New York, won his rural seat in a special election just last year. He thought he could hang on by focusing on local issues: dairy farms and the district's troubled horse-racing industry. But Murphy also voted for the health care law and other parts of the Democratic agenda. ...
Murphy wound up losing by 11 points.
Bill Bishop, a journalist who writes about small-town politics for a blog called the Daily Yonder, says Democrats are now an endangered species in House districts dominated by small towns.
"They just pretty much disappeared from a lot of rural America — from the Dakotas across Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin to the territory of New York and Pennsylvania — and then all of New Hampshire switched," he said. ...
The surprising thing, according to Bishop's analysis, is that Democrats were still managing to win and hold a lot of rural seats — often by distancing themselves from the national party and downplaying the Democratic brand.
[A larger, clickable map can be found at Daily Yonder.] |
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2004:
In the wake of the election, there's been a lot of soul-searching about the purported "values gap," and how Dems can appeal to voters' moral sense. Some unfortunates on the DLC side of things have argued for a sort of capitulation to the bigotry and misogyny pushed by the GOP, arguing that we need to change the way we think about issues like gay rights and choice. But many clearer thinking folks, both here at dKos and elsewhere, have forcefully made the point that our problem is not where we stand on the issues that the GOP has designated as indicia of values -- it's our failure to frame our issues as moral issues. I couldn't agree more. The GOP has focused on advancing governmental solutions to what it sees as moral decay, and while we've done the same, we haven't identified the problems we seek to correct as moral problems. But they are. |