I`m from a small suburban town in Ohio called Perrysburg. The population of this cute little quintessential town is booming, growing probably between 5% and 10% per year. The reasons for this kind of growth are obvious: Great Schools, A Safe community and that small town feel.
The irony of this situation is that this growth is deteriorating all of the reasons people are moving to our community. Crime is on the rise, schools are getting crowded and our once small town feel is being replaced by strangers, traffic and strip malls.
Traveling to San Francisco last week opened up my eyes to how great liberals are at city planning. San Francisco is a large city yet it has maintained large open spaces and parks. In short, the city is very livable.
Connecting the two seemingly unrelated thoughts above, Liberals can win in small town Red America, if we frame our party as the party that "Protects our communities". Urban sprawl is a huge problem, destroying the essence of communities (that I think voters would care to protect) all across the country.
Our party is wonderful at planning. We're great at creating zoning laws, open spaces and parks. We care about making our communities livable as our opponents only seem to care about building strip malls over anything that is decent. I propose this should be one of our key local issues and I could see this issue turning communities blue all across the country.