Honestly, pretty much every state looks like this. Blue urban centers, red rural counties. This is the divide. The north/south thing is centuries out of date.
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Also blue college towns. Despite the GOP’s assiduous efforts to make it more difficult for students to vote.
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I suppose at this point, you’re right. But that is only if you are able to step back and look at it objectively. Before all of this they might have a point that Democrats don’t care about “fly over country”. I suppose most Republicans don’t either, but they at least paid some lip service. Why change horses for the side that you spend your whole life thinking looked down on you?
Tribalism is super strong. Getting your brain to change its mind, especially when it comes to “loyalty”, is hard. Beyond politics, think about brand loyalty and purchase decisions. Usually we will default to the same things we always do or buy. Partly due to familiarity, partly do to the fact that you not doing the same thing means you were wrong the first time you chose something. No one wants to be wrong. (The book “You are not so Smart” does a good job of explaining how fucking terrible are brains are at making decisions. Most of them are on autopilot.)
An example would be Dr. Barbara Bollier running for Senate in Kansas. She is a Republican State Senator, but ran as a moderate Democrat (well she switched in 2018). It didn’t stop the political ads from painting her as someone who will support the “Radical Left”. She was anything but that. But if you mind has been poisoned that the Democrats want to destroy American, you will excuse any bad behavior from the side that will save you. 
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Except for all the democrats from “fly over” country, of course. Because they existed and were part of the political landscape all along. It’s always been a false dichotomy, just like the north-south one, etc.
And actively blocked anything the Democrats wanted to do since Obama took office whenever they could. A public option would have helped everyone, and it got gutted early on, because COMMUNISM or whatever. At some point lip service is worse if it’s actively making people’s lives worse. They’ve done nothing other than continue to try and gut any support for working Americans.
This is all they are now and have been for a while. People have real problems that we have to work together to solve. They have nothing to offer on that front other than negation, and that’s been true for a while. Trump’s only real “accomplishment” was a tax cut that grew the deficit and widened the gap between the 1% and the rest of us.
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The entire idea that democrats don’t care about “flyover country” is a Southern Strategy racist dog whistle. Democrats got power lines to rural areas. Democrats got phone lines and cell service to rural areas. Democrats are the ones who invest in stopping opioid addiction in rural areas. Democrats are the ones who care about rural poverty.
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I mean… right? It’s never been anything but. The GOP has done almost nothing to actual improve the lives of Americans, unless one is incredibly wealthy.
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especially in america where first enslavers weren’t required to give up their land as reparation after the civil war, then whites terrorized non whites off the land, later codifing that with sun down towns and segregation… then much later - all the way up to and including today - the usda and banks favor white families and large ( mostly white run ) corporations for farm loans and subsidies.
rural america doesn’t look the way it does by accident
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This is what Republicanism has been my entire life. Smart! The lizard-brain is always an easier lift than actual politics, and once you own it you’re free to pursue whatever policies you like, since that’s not why people are voting for you.
Meanwhile, Democrats have spent my entire life stumbling around in circles whining, “Buh…Buh…why are you voting against your self interest?”
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Absofuckinglutely. It is a similar pattern to most colonial states though which was what I was assuming.
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Did you not pay attention in November?
I did, and one thing that happened in november was a loss of seats in the house. While Trump himself was rejected, it’s not clear that house and senate fared the same. Couple that with Georgia being Georgia, and you can see why I’d be skeptical.
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So, no. You did not pay attention. Biden, Warnock, and Ossoff all won because people put in the work to get out the vote. That’s how people win. Abrams has given the rest of the country a playbook for getting rid of politicians who do not work for us.
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It’s never satisfying to see politicians confronted with evidence of their hypocrisy. They just say something generic and non-committal and move on. We like to imagine they would be forced to publicly acknowledge they were wrong or were lying or that they would even show shame but that’s never the case.
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Easy. That’s a lot of nosebleeds. They’re unused to such giddy heights of optimism.
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