Democrats Just Discovered Rural Voters Exist, and Apparently Everyone Is Very Excited
Every few years, usually after an election has gone sideways and a campaign headquarters starts smelling like cold pizza, panic, and unemployed consultants, somebody in the Democratic Party makes a startling discovery: rural Americans are real people. They have jobs. They have bills. They vote. Some of them even possess telephones, opinions, and indoor plumbing. This revelation inevitably arrives with the fanfare of scientists detecting life on another planet. Party strategists gather around glowing maps, stare at the enormous stretches of red between metropolitan areas, and ask the difficult questions. Who are these mysterious people? Why do they dislike us? Could someone perhaps commission a poll? Wisconsin congressional candidate Rebecca Cooke has offered a considerably cheaper answer: Democrats stopped showing up, stopped listening, and left rural and working-class voters behind. Cooke, a Blue Dog Democrat running in Wisconsin’s competitive Third Congressional District, recently to...
