The Republicans have crawled between a rock and hard space and we need to squeeze them closer together. Mitch McConnell, though he voted for the infrastructure bill, will not be going to the signing ceremony today for fear of backlash from the Trumpians, while ‘leader’ McCarthy seems to have ‘Speaker of the House’ beer goggles on, ignoring death threats, we’re talking member on member, circulating in the caucus he is in charge of. I’m not sure either one of them is crafty enough to survive their reality.
We should seize this moment. The Democrat’s message for the Republicans’ ‘bread and butter’ rural voters, and there are a little over thirty million of them, is that they are voting in people who aren't voting for them. Maybe, four of the thirteen Republican members of Congress that supported the infrastructure bill, actually represent rural districts. The majority of rural voters were thrown under the electric bus by their representatives.
This is the message: Go get one of the great paying jobs with benefits provided by Biden’s Democrats and look forward to a better future for you and your children. The infrastructure bill will bring much-needed resources and living wage jobs to rural communities across this country. Most live in sparsely populated, unincorporated areas that don’t have the safety net of living in a municipality. These populations are far more dependent on the Federal Government and the people they elect to Congress. It’s a good thing Democrats had their backs and are going to be delivering jobs, roads, public transportation, and maybe most importantly, reliable broadband internet.
So, I know I’m talking to an online community on Daily Kos that can’t imagine functioning in the Twenty-First Century without high-speed broadband. Unfortunately, so many that live in rural California, and other parts of rural America, are hindered by lack of access to high-speed internet.
In California, according to Calmatters.org, “We know the importance of broadband for telecommuting, distance learning and access to emergency updates. This, then, raises the question: Why are there 463,000 largely rural, unserved households that remain without access to broadband internet?” Terrain, distance, poverty have been cited but it might be a lack of representation that needs to be front and center in the Democrat’s messaging. Up until now, rural Californians have been on the wrong side of the digital divide, and their representatives such as Devin Nunez, David Valadao, and Kevin McCarthy did not vote for the infrastructure bill and need to be called out on it.
Since it looks like the current redistricting maps will make CA23 even more rural, those voters need to know how their lives have and will improve with their portion of the 65 billion dollars worth of broadband the Democrats delivered. We need to scream it from the rooftops in a clear concise message. If we can master this messaging, the most important infrastructure upgraded in rural America will be their congressional representation.
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