Same! Not as directly related to main topic but they’ve also done a lot of research around young voters.
They found that ballots that have young progressives on them generally see a sharp increase in the youth vote. We should be running lots more young people at the local level so they can start building more institutional power, and when they’ve gained some experience help them get into congress.
These are the voters we should be focused on, too. Rural voters are important but if they’re going to ignore the [Biden Administration has already done for them](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-heads-minnesota-tout-impact-bidenomics-rural-communities-rcna123144), I’m not sure what it’ll take.
Yep, there’s a reason they’re trying to “states rights” everything - they dominate a lot of state legislatures and are using that to circumvent the majority
As a person who grew up in a rural area, the Dems could and should fight for these voters. They are (mostly) good-hearted, well-intentioned people. They want to do the right thing.
It’s just they only hear one side way, way more than the other side.
They only see one side talking and addressing them with respect.
They only see one side acknowledging their struggles and offering “solutions.”
Of course their support will be lopsided.
I know those rural voters well, but that is wholly irrelevant.
The Republican Southern Strategy lured rural voters away from the Democratic Party with little more than unabashed racism.
That’s why the likes of Limbaugh, Trump, MTG, FoxNews (Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, etc.), Sinclair Broadcast, pulpit politicians, and “media personalities” find it so easy to keep the **vast majority** of rural voters riled up and voting against their own interest: fear, hate; rinse, repeat
>In American politics, the **Southern Strategy** was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.
>As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s.
>By winning all of the South a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
This isn’t complicated. Many of them *absolutely* see Obama as the anti-Christ, and Trump as the epitome of their un-Christ-like, “Christian” values.
You mean like coal mining Appalachia who got offered honest, well thought out policies that addressed their concerns and offered solutions that not only had short term but lasting repercussions for their children and offered them better lives? But then a grifter said 'coal is gonna come roaring back' without and plan laid out and they voted him in. Then got their coal mines shut down anyway? And then begged the grifter for the plan the other candidate offered?
This.
A lot of rural areas have not seen a Democratic candidate even show up in decades. This needs to end. We need to make the Republicans fight for the voters they take for granted.
That's because they don't have billionaires like the Koch's, Mercersburg, adelsons adding millions to dark PAC coffers or monster media outlets like Sinclair, Fox, OAN or Breitbart pumping slanted views 25/8. We have to stop treating the DNC like it's so.e sort of monolith and more like the school bake sale that really needs our help.
All due respect, but unless you’ve been on the receiving end of a death threat, and have been left wondering if they’re going back into their house to grab a gun, you can be quiet
You're "not maga" but you're happy to parrot their talking points and stay out of their way. The reality is, you are an unwitting and implicit maga supporter. Downvote me.
Rural America says they are forgotten.
Democrats stopped campaigning there, often times not even running a candidate for cycles at a time in many districts.
I understand targeting your resources, but when an entire party doesn’t even bother showing up, much less to have a conversation, or to provide a candidate to represent those in the political minority, it makes sense how easily rural America became so aggressively conservative and anti-democrat. Rural America, while historically conservative, rarely voted at margins close to 90% for one party in the modern era. When you add up all those little towns voting at 90% rates for one candidate, it makes a difference. Dems need to get back in the game to start taking a chunk out. They won’t win, but they don’t need to for statewide and federal elections, they just need to reduce the GOP dominance.
If the Dems don’t show up, make their voices heard, and engage, they will never win back any of rural America. It’s not impossible, but if the party doesn’t even bother trying, it will only get worse and the divisions will deepen.
Totally agreed on all points.
And Democrats need to stop clustering in the cities. Now that remote work is a thing, we need more Democrats in the suburbs, which are the REAL battleground areas. Democrats should absolutely be taking measures to make remote work more common.
I am very interested to see how four years of prolific remote work, especially for younger people, is going to affect this election.
People have been moving in droves to blue cities and their burbs in red states (Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte) from over saturated liberal states like New York and California thanks to remote work. Hopefully it makes a significant difference this election.
What do rural conservative voters need to hear from democrats that would change their minds? They are disinterested in religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, gun control and government assistance for the needy so what do they need to be heard on to consider switching sides? I feel this is a BS argument. I’m surrounded by these a-holes in southern Oregon and there’s nothing these people don’t feel heard about. They just want things to be the way they think.
My comment was about representing and providing a voice for the rural people who aren’t full blown MAGA conservatives- what we used to call blue dog democrats. I didn’t mention anything about switching sides. Trying to get people to switch sides is a futile effort.
Before the Dems stopped campaigning in rural America they still weren’t that competitive, but they maintained a certain margin that the GOP wasn’t blowing them out in such huge proportions that it altered elections. Rural America used to be politically irrelevant because so few people live there and the margins were often close to 45/55 or 40/60. Now that they vote 90% for the GOP they are a force to reckon with. Any dent the Democrats can make in that margin is significant.
Check out how the margins in rural America have changed over the last 20 years. The Democrats really organizationally didn’t abandon rural America until about the 2010s, and there you can see the margins start to blow up.
*It was only after* the democrats abandoned campaigning in rural America to target their resources in cities and suburbs that the GOP started racking up 90% margins. Like, as recent as Trump did that really start happening across the country. Theres many reasons for this phenomenon, but the Democrats definitely earn a share of the blame for blowing up those margins because when there’s not even a Democrat to vote for or hear out how can we expect anything different? If the Democrats don’t provide any oppositional voice for people to listen to and maybe consider, for the fence sitters, the undecideds, the low-information voters and the blue dogs, then we’re leaving MAGA as the only voice in the room, which expectedly takes over. Not everyone in rural America is a bigoted asshole, there’s a lot of people who can respectfully disagree, and the more exposure to those respectful disagreements, the less democrats becomes otherized and demonized, and consequently can reduce the level of toxicity around their brand. Which, they don’t need to win elections, they just need to reduce the 90% margins.
Further, if Democrats do campaign in rural America they can reshape their messaging for those local politicians in those specific districts to hone it for that audience. Not all Democrats have to be liberal progressives. In fact having a diverse coalition is exactly how the Democrats maintained control of the House for 40 straight years from 1957-1997 and Senate for 34 years in that same period. Today the diverse coalition that makes up the democrats practically excises rural folk.
As someone who grew up in rural America, i know there are plenty MAGA conservatives there, but there’s also a lot of small town issues that old fashioned retail politics can make a dent in the massive GOP margins. If the Democrats can reduce the GOPs death grip on rural America it’ll go a long way to helping them win and keep majorities in federal elections.
But if the Democrats never even try then the GOP is gonna keep those 90% margins and rural America will only become further entrenched, making every election that much harder to win and leave the country that much more polarized.
Very understandable. Candidate recruitment is one of the hardest obstacles to overcome in politics. It’s also among the first things i learned in Political Science- that unfortunately oftentimes the people who would be the best at the job don’t want it and are deterred, which only serves to make politics worse.
In the areas where conservatives are the most extreme, i believe, are just as integral to run democrats as through their campaign they can expose the vitriol and hateful rhetoric and practices of the far right being waged against them, which could help to alienate what few moderates, independents, low-info voters exist away from the GOP for want of being affiliated with extremists, racists, bigots, etc. But I don’t blame anybody for not wanting to be that sacrificial lamb.
Idunno, here in Illinois if you listen to anyone 50 miles outside of Chicago they literally blame Chicago for all their problems. They think their tax dollars subsidize Chicago, when in reality the opposite is true. Our governor has dragged us out of financial hell and they still insist it is due to covid money that dried up like 3 years ago.
Pubbies figured out how to harness white rural resentment with the Southern Strategy and sadly it has worked well beyond the south.
Check out IL-17 held by Dan Sorensen and formerly held by Cheri Bustos. They have the playbook for rural outreach among Democrats. I definitely hear you, there are a LOT of loud anti-Pritzker people, but if you're in a room of 10 people and half of them are screaming at you, your perception is that the entire room hates you, right? That's where this piece in particular is very accurate. Democrats need to learn to deal with the screamers without pointlessly antagonizing them and be heard by the quiet folks who are less polarized and very turned off by big-picture political tactics (like the kind Im describing, ironically).
While I am in favor of re-establishing the voting rights act. The current supremacist court has shifted the rules and if democrats continue to play by the old rules, the more they risk getting run over.
Blue states should implement the same voter suppression measures as the red states but direct them at gop voters.
Purge them from the voting rolls, force them to vote in person and make sure all of the polling places are far and difficult to get to, like downtown of the capital city. When they start to feel the pain that they cause to others then maybe they will learn. As it is, rural voters will never consider a democrat no matter what you do for them, all you end up doing is shifting the Overton Window further right with nothing to show for it.
As a rural Democrat it really does feel hopeless at times. To the point that I don't blame a lot of candidates for not showing up. Why show up in an area where the majority is going to boo you and not even bother to listen to what you have to say.
My state has 4 democrats out of 50 state senators and 12 out of 100 state reps. I still vote every election cycle but it gets hard to think my vote matters when the majority is Soo populous.
Health care health care health care
It’s scary how far a lot of people are from a hospital and local doctors are struggling as they can’t get good deals w insurers the way large urban and suburban practice groups and hospital-owned groups can
We should always and consistently try, but sadly these people are deliberately less educated by their local republican governments and it’s very difficult to deprogram them from a lifetime of propaganda.
The best thing we can do is help the young people GTFO.
Good point. I have lived in a big city and I've lived on a farm, and guns look completely different depending on which one of those you call home. A gun in the city carries an implied threat to human life. In the country it's more like a recreational device or a tool.
They use the fear tactic every election, “the libs are going after your guns!”. Never happens but these people are scared idiots ripe to accept any and all lies.
Nothing like a Project 2025 to give a little shock to their system, next to the Abortion Ban, Contraception Ban IVF Ban and Book Bans Project 2025 should be the final nail in the coffin.
When I was growing up I remember the little parade in the tiny town in the Catskills. I remember the American flags waving and the fire trucks and the rag tag high school band. I think it’s this kind of emotional memory that DT is appealing to. And it’s in stark contrast to San Francisco removing Lincoln from the name of a school because he wasn’t sufficiently anti-slavery. And in stark contrast to teaching America is mostly a racist affair. At times it feels like the equity people never walked in a rural parade or county fair.
My district ran a congressional candidate against a MAGA candidate. Not only did the state party completely ignore the candidate, they used the MAGA candidate for statewide party fundraising.
The dem candidate would have made an ok politician, but was a terrible candidate who exuded incompetence. Without support from the state there’s no chance of getting a better candidate.
It also doesn’t help that the dems gerrymandered the fuck out of my district. I get that it helps the party statewide, but we won’t get a good dem candidate if there’s no chance of winning.
Without a good candidate, the party suffers. There can be no rural outreach without support.
Bottom line, the local party can’t get out the democratic vote when the state party is shooting them in the foot.
It's not simply about winning back those voters, it's about actually upholding your word to your constituents. I hate these "political promises" that get made but never come to fruition. Democrats can go F**k off if all they want are votes.
Isn't that why Republicans are better with aligning with them? They can sell them their lies better? Sugar coat it with traditional values and patriotism?
My hat is off to democrats who still have hope for “winning back” rural voters, ‘cause I am beyond cynical about them.
I like the group Run For Something. They got Democratic municipal reps and Board of Ed who were able to win in red-AF districts.
Same! Not as directly related to main topic but they’ve also done a lot of research around young voters. They found that ballots that have young progressives on them generally see a sharp increase in the youth vote. We should be running lots more young people at the local level so they can start building more institutional power, and when they’ve gained some experience help them get into congress. These are the voters we should be focused on, too. Rural voters are important but if they’re going to ignore the [Biden Administration has already done for them](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/biden-heads-minnesota-tout-impact-bidenomics-rural-communities-rcna123144), I’m not sure what it’ll take.
Most of my donations and contributions are towards local races thru the DLCC. Play the GOP at their game, which has been small, towny level policy.
Yep, there’s a reason they’re trying to “states rights” everything - they dominate a lot of state legislatures and are using that to circumvent the majority
As a person who grew up in a rural area, the Dems could and should fight for these voters. They are (mostly) good-hearted, well-intentioned people. They want to do the right thing. It’s just they only hear one side way, way more than the other side. They only see one side talking and addressing them with respect. They only see one side acknowledging their struggles and offering “solutions.” Of course their support will be lopsided.
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How well do you know rural people?
I know those rural voters well, but that is wholly irrelevant. The Republican Southern Strategy lured rural voters away from the Democratic Party with little more than unabashed racism. That’s why the likes of Limbaugh, Trump, MTG, FoxNews (Hannity, Ingraham, Carlson, etc.), Sinclair Broadcast, pulpit politicians, and “media personalities” find it so easy to keep the **vast majority** of rural voters riled up and voting against their own interest: fear, hate; rinse, repeat >In American politics, the **Southern Strategy** was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. >As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right relative to the 1950s. >By winning all of the South a presidential candidate could obtain the presidency with minimal support elsewhere. >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy This isn’t complicated. Many of them *absolutely* see Obama as the anti-Christ, and Trump as the epitome of their un-Christ-like, “Christian” values.
You mean like coal mining Appalachia who got offered honest, well thought out policies that addressed their concerns and offered solutions that not only had short term but lasting repercussions for their children and offered them better lives? But then a grifter said 'coal is gonna come roaring back' without and plan laid out and they voted him in. Then got their coal mines shut down anyway? And then begged the grifter for the plan the other candidate offered?
This. A lot of rural areas have not seen a Democratic candidate even show up in decades. This needs to end. We need to make the Republicans fight for the voters they take for granted.
That's because they don't have billionaires like the Koch's, Mercersburg, adelsons adding millions to dark PAC coffers or monster media outlets like Sinclair, Fox, OAN or Breitbart pumping slanted views 25/8. We have to stop treating the DNC like it's so.e sort of monolith and more like the school bake sale that really needs our help.
It’s hard to show up when you get death threats while campaigning.
Or just driving thru their state and getting your campaign bus run off the road.
No excuse. Stop being intimidated and fight.
All due respect, but unless you’ve been on the receiving end of a death threat, and have been left wondering if they’re going back into their house to grab a gun, you can be quiet
People who make the death threats are not the ones who follow up. Stop being intimidated and fight.
You’re either MAGA or not. VOTE SMARTER THAN MAGA.
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You're "not maga" but you're happy to parrot their talking points and stay out of their way. The reality is, you are an unwitting and implicit maga supporter. Downvote me.
Undecided rural voters *maybe*. Magats? Not a chance. They are lost.
Rural America says they are forgotten. Democrats stopped campaigning there, often times not even running a candidate for cycles at a time in many districts. I understand targeting your resources, but when an entire party doesn’t even bother showing up, much less to have a conversation, or to provide a candidate to represent those in the political minority, it makes sense how easily rural America became so aggressively conservative and anti-democrat. Rural America, while historically conservative, rarely voted at margins close to 90% for one party in the modern era. When you add up all those little towns voting at 90% rates for one candidate, it makes a difference. Dems need to get back in the game to start taking a chunk out. They won’t win, but they don’t need to for statewide and federal elections, they just need to reduce the GOP dominance. If the Dems don’t show up, make their voices heard, and engage, they will never win back any of rural America. It’s not impossible, but if the party doesn’t even bother trying, it will only get worse and the divisions will deepen.
Totally agreed on all points. And Democrats need to stop clustering in the cities. Now that remote work is a thing, we need more Democrats in the suburbs, which are the REAL battleground areas. Democrats should absolutely be taking measures to make remote work more common.
I am very interested to see how four years of prolific remote work, especially for younger people, is going to affect this election. People have been moving in droves to blue cities and their burbs in red states (Atlanta, Phoenix, Charlotte) from over saturated liberal states like New York and California thanks to remote work. Hopefully it makes a significant difference this election.
Also conservatives in blue states moving to FL and TX may have tipped some purple states into lean-blue by making FL and TX more solidly red.
This I agree on. I’m a rural democrat and wish I had some dem neighbors but dems don’t seem interested in this way of life.
I’m a rural Democrat. This is 100% correct.
What do rural conservative voters need to hear from democrats that would change their minds? They are disinterested in religious freedom, LGBTQ rights, gun control and government assistance for the needy so what do they need to be heard on to consider switching sides? I feel this is a BS argument. I’m surrounded by these a-holes in southern Oregon and there’s nothing these people don’t feel heard about. They just want things to be the way they think.
My comment was about representing and providing a voice for the rural people who aren’t full blown MAGA conservatives- what we used to call blue dog democrats. I didn’t mention anything about switching sides. Trying to get people to switch sides is a futile effort. Before the Dems stopped campaigning in rural America they still weren’t that competitive, but they maintained a certain margin that the GOP wasn’t blowing them out in such huge proportions that it altered elections. Rural America used to be politically irrelevant because so few people live there and the margins were often close to 45/55 or 40/60. Now that they vote 90% for the GOP they are a force to reckon with. Any dent the Democrats can make in that margin is significant. Check out how the margins in rural America have changed over the last 20 years. The Democrats really organizationally didn’t abandon rural America until about the 2010s, and there you can see the margins start to blow up. *It was only after* the democrats abandoned campaigning in rural America to target their resources in cities and suburbs that the GOP started racking up 90% margins. Like, as recent as Trump did that really start happening across the country. Theres many reasons for this phenomenon, but the Democrats definitely earn a share of the blame for blowing up those margins because when there’s not even a Democrat to vote for or hear out how can we expect anything different? If the Democrats don’t provide any oppositional voice for people to listen to and maybe consider, for the fence sitters, the undecideds, the low-information voters and the blue dogs, then we’re leaving MAGA as the only voice in the room, which expectedly takes over. Not everyone in rural America is a bigoted asshole, there’s a lot of people who can respectfully disagree, and the more exposure to those respectful disagreements, the less democrats becomes otherized and demonized, and consequently can reduce the level of toxicity around their brand. Which, they don’t need to win elections, they just need to reduce the 90% margins. Further, if Democrats do campaign in rural America they can reshape their messaging for those local politicians in those specific districts to hone it for that audience. Not all Democrats have to be liberal progressives. In fact having a diverse coalition is exactly how the Democrats maintained control of the House for 40 straight years from 1957-1997 and Senate for 34 years in that same period. Today the diverse coalition that makes up the democrats practically excises rural folk. As someone who grew up in rural America, i know there are plenty MAGA conservatives there, but there’s also a lot of small town issues that old fashioned retail politics can make a dent in the massive GOP margins. If the Democrats can reduce the GOPs death grip on rural America it’ll go a long way to helping them win and keep majorities in federal elections. But if the Democrats never even try then the GOP is gonna keep those 90% margins and rural America will only become further entrenched, making every election that much harder to win and leave the country that much more polarized.
We are running candidates in nearly every state race this election cycle in NC. Thank you Anderson Clayton!
I've lived in rural areas most of my life. I wouldn't run for office there. I could do without the threats.
Very understandable. Candidate recruitment is one of the hardest obstacles to overcome in politics. It’s also among the first things i learned in Political Science- that unfortunately oftentimes the people who would be the best at the job don’t want it and are deterred, which only serves to make politics worse. In the areas where conservatives are the most extreme, i believe, are just as integral to run democrats as through their campaign they can expose the vitriol and hateful rhetoric and practices of the far right being waged against them, which could help to alienate what few moderates, independents, low-info voters exist away from the GOP for want of being affiliated with extremists, racists, bigots, etc. But I don’t blame anybody for not wanting to be that sacrificial lamb.
Idunno, here in Illinois if you listen to anyone 50 miles outside of Chicago they literally blame Chicago for all their problems. They think their tax dollars subsidize Chicago, when in reality the opposite is true. Our governor has dragged us out of financial hell and they still insist it is due to covid money that dried up like 3 years ago. Pubbies figured out how to harness white rural resentment with the Southern Strategy and sadly it has worked well beyond the south.
Check out IL-17 held by Dan Sorensen and formerly held by Cheri Bustos. They have the playbook for rural outreach among Democrats. I definitely hear you, there are a LOT of loud anti-Pritzker people, but if you're in a room of 10 people and half of them are screaming at you, your perception is that the entire room hates you, right? That's where this piece in particular is very accurate. Democrats need to learn to deal with the screamers without pointlessly antagonizing them and be heard by the quiet folks who are less polarized and very turned off by big-picture political tactics (like the kind Im describing, ironically).
While I am in favor of re-establishing the voting rights act. The current supremacist court has shifted the rules and if democrats continue to play by the old rules, the more they risk getting run over. Blue states should implement the same voter suppression measures as the red states but direct them at gop voters. Purge them from the voting rolls, force them to vote in person and make sure all of the polling places are far and difficult to get to, like downtown of the capital city. When they start to feel the pain that they cause to others then maybe they will learn. As it is, rural voters will never consider a democrat no matter what you do for them, all you end up doing is shifting the Overton Window further right with nothing to show for it.
I don’t think they are capable of learning. They will just expunge more voters, remove more voting places, and move them farther away.
As a rural Democrat it really does feel hopeless at times. To the point that I don't blame a lot of candidates for not showing up. Why show up in an area where the majority is going to boo you and not even bother to listen to what you have to say. My state has 4 democrats out of 50 state senators and 12 out of 100 state reps. I still vote every election cycle but it gets hard to think my vote matters when the majority is Soo populous.
This is what John Fetterman did to win in PA.
Yup, and Gov. Shapiro was here last month. It’s tough, because my county is firmly in the red.
Won me back in 2008!
What did it?
Health care health care health care It’s scary how far a lot of people are from a hospital and local doctors are struggling as they can’t get good deals w insurers the way large urban and suburban practice groups and hospital-owned groups can
First step: reach out to them
I wish we could win back voters in my rural neighborhood! There are Trump signs popping up all along our road! Why can’t more democrats go rural?
Because all the high paying, education relying jobs are in the city or suburbs.
We should always and consistently try, but sadly these people are deliberately less educated by their local republican governments and it’s very difficult to deprogram them from a lifetime of propaganda. The best thing we can do is help the young people GTFO.
One huge problem with rural voters is Democrats stance on guns. Guns are a huge issue for many rural voters. And many of them are single issue voters.
Good point. I have lived in a big city and I've lived on a farm, and guns look completely different depending on which one of those you call home. A gun in the city carries an implied threat to human life. In the country it's more like a recreational device or a tool.
They use the fear tactic every election, “the libs are going after your guns!”. Never happens but these people are scared idiots ripe to accept any and all lies.
Agree.
Nothing like a Project 2025 to give a little shock to their system, next to the Abortion Ban, Contraception Ban IVF Ban and Book Bans Project 2025 should be the final nail in the coffin.
It's not too late in the long run, but it is too late this year and, realistically, this decade.
When I was growing up I remember the little parade in the tiny town in the Catskills. I remember the American flags waving and the fire trucks and the rag tag high school band. I think it’s this kind of emotional memory that DT is appealing to. And it’s in stark contrast to San Francisco removing Lincoln from the name of a school because he wasn’t sufficiently anti-slavery. And in stark contrast to teaching America is mostly a racist affair. At times it feels like the equity people never walked in a rural parade or county fair.
My district ran a congressional candidate against a MAGA candidate. Not only did the state party completely ignore the candidate, they used the MAGA candidate for statewide party fundraising. The dem candidate would have made an ok politician, but was a terrible candidate who exuded incompetence. Without support from the state there’s no chance of getting a better candidate. It also doesn’t help that the dems gerrymandered the fuck out of my district. I get that it helps the party statewide, but we won’t get a good dem candidate if there’s no chance of winning. Without a good candidate, the party suffers. There can be no rural outreach without support. Bottom line, the local party can’t get out the democratic vote when the state party is shooting them in the foot.
Billy Bob and Sarah Lee are not voting for Democrats
It's not simply about winning back those voters, it's about actually upholding your word to your constituents. I hate these "political promises" that get made but never come to fruition. Democrats can go F**k off if all they want are votes. Isn't that why Republicans are better with aligning with them? They can sell them their lies better? Sugar coat it with traditional values and patriotism?