About a white rural voter...

[Liberty Belle]

42. As a news editor I cover rural areas, and understand why some are dismayed with Dems.

While I don't understand anyone supporting Trump, I do see a lack of respect among some local county and state Dem leaders for issues in rural areas.

Dems need to really listen to rural needs and find solutions, not create problems.

Examples:

Blowing off concerns about long-time residents losing fire insurance or having rates quadrupled

Imposing a per-mile tax meant to encourage less driving, but urban dwellers ignore the fact that there is no mass transit in rural areas, and many rural residents have to commute long ways to their jobs. They can't afford an extra thousand bucks or so a year, in a state that already has the highest gasoline prices.

During COVID shutdowns, while much attention was paid by politicians to help restaurants in urban areas, they ignored the needs of farmers in rural areas who had just lost their main market for selling goods locally.

State leaders have allowed utilities to shut off power to prevent wildfires, but have not required that people harmed by this be compensated; for instance when planned outages occurred over Thanksgiving, many lost refrigerators and freezers full of food. Some lost food several times with as many as 32 outages in one community over a few months, yet they got nothing. And when power is shut off, electric well pumps don't work, so they can't get water to their livestock, or fight spot fires if a stray ember blows onto their property. The outages have disrupted people working at home or kids studying at home during COVID.

Our county recently made it prohibitively expensive to build homes in rural areas, too, to encourage devleopment along trolley lines. Sounds good but now rural areas are suddenly having trouble attracting new businesses/employers, since there is no more affordable workplace housing for them.

At a townhall this week in a mountain town, residents complained that formal rental housing has all been converted to Air BnBs, but the supervisors don't care because most live near the beach and their constituents WANt to be able to keep cashing in on the Air BnB craze.

All of the major industrial scale wind and solar projects locally have been foisted into rural communities, putting 500 foot tall wind turbines to surround homes and kill off birds of prey, also raising noise and infrastructure issues and even exploding to cause small wildfires that nearly burned down homes here (each turbine has 1,000 gallons or so of flammable lubricating oil for the gears). Solar fields can cause annoying glare and pave over wildlife habitat and wetlands. While wind and solar is important to address climate change, the rural folks have a point about urban folks who use the most power not having any of the negative impacts. We should do like European countries where there are small scale wind turbines on homes, and consider things like solar covers over highways or other areas that have no negative impact on rural residents. One desert town here has been decimated by dust storms just like the Dust Bowl after a wind developer scraped bare 12,000 acres of topsoil, which would never have been allowed to happen in a wealthy coastal enclave.

It all boils down to a general disrespect for rural residents. Dems should reach out and hold town halls in rural areas, even if they don't live there, to really learn what the problems including some caused by their policies, and work to fix them.

Instead, rural residents are listening to Republicans who do nothing for them, but demonize Dems by stoking fear of the government meddling in their lives and businesses....and to some degree that unfortunately is true. Republicans also stoke of fears of immigrants and anyone who isn't white, male, and Evangelical Christian. When people are hurting economically, it's sadly too easy to blame someone else and listen to anyone who promises to protect them.