My wife and I went to a wedding in Door County, Wisconsin. Door County is the thumb of the left handed mitten that Wisconsin looks like. It is a very beautiful rural community that we have visiting pretty much yearly for the 37 years of our marriage. There are a lot of cornfields and cherry trees, wonderful parks and because it sits right between Green Bay and Lake Michigan you see lots of water. During election time of course we see a lot of political signs endorsing the various candidates. Since 2016 most of the signs we see for President have been Trump signs. This year there were still more Trump signs than any other Presidential candidate but not nearly as many as I had seen in past years. Why does “Rural America” appear to be so Conservative and Republican? Growing up I thought rural America as a Democratic stronghold. What changed? As I explored the subject I find that it is not one with an easy answer. Is it about race? Yes! Is it about religion? Yes! Is it about respect? Yes! It is a very complicated and varies depending on the region that you are living in.  Trying my best to understand why and this is an attempt to discover the reasons that I think, affect rural America.

It is real easy to say all Republicans are racists because let’s face it, if you are a racist you are not voting for a Democrat. Too many look at the problems of the Black Community as a Black problem and not an American problem. I think, if you look at the problem from a neutral color viewpoint you may see that in many cases Rural America faces the same problems as our inner cities. Our inner cities and our rural communities both have suffered because of the loss of manufacturing jobs. In some circles that is a reason rural America likes what Trump was selling by saying he was going to bring those manufacturing jobs back. What was his plan? One word, Tariffs! I think, in some ways we are a country that thinks those jobs as being stolen by countries like China but in reality those jobs were sent overseas by American Corporations to increase profits. Trump told the country that tariffs would bring back those jobs. That of course didn’t happen but Rural America likes the idea and some still do. Did the Tariffs hurt? Yes, because the Chinese retaliated with tariffs of their own on our agricultural products and that directly hurt rural America. Biden has not removed those tariffs for various reasons like the Chinese - not holding up their end to an agreement to end Trump’s trade war. That has helped cause inflation and more tariffs will just make inflation worse. I was having a conversation with a man that was complaining that he needed to buy an air conditioner and it was hard finding one that was actually manufactured in America. Something like 85 percent of all Air Conditioners are manufactured overseas and many are only assembled here with most of the parts coming from overseas.  My thought was that if we want to increase of manufacturing base it is not going to be by trying to force jobs back to America but by developing new technologies and new products. Stop chasing the manufacturing jobs of the past and develop new industries and manufacturing jobs of the future. There is a good article by the Harvard Gazette called “Larger lesson about tariffs in a move that helped Trump but not the country”.

In some cases I think the Black Lives Matter protests were not helpful for the Democrats in the Rural Communities. I am a White and I am a believer in the Black Live Matter movement because I believe that Black Lives are not as valued as they should be. The Democrats embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and in return I think much of Rural America felt it was being ignored, that the Democrats didn’t feel their lives mattered as much as the Black lives did. Many Democrats when they heard some say the All Lives Matter looked at it as kind of a racist comment. I still think, in some cases, it was a racist comment because all lives do matter but the point of Black Lives Matter is how Blacks and how Whites are treated by law enforcement is differently. I think the numbers show that. The Democrats have not done a good job communicating that. They should have been asking for the help of the leader in the rural communities instead of making them feel like they were part of the problem.

Immigration kind of goes hand in hand with job loss because many are being told that the illegal immigrants are taking away their jobs. I have heard Trump say multiple times say immigrants are taking away Black jobs or whatever color of the people depending on the people that he is talking to at the time. Because of the loss of the manufacturing jobs in the rural areas the message of their jobs being taken away by immigrants gets a lot of traction. That is just the old blame game. That is why the wall gets a lot of traction. I never hear what jobs are being taken away but that’s another story. People need to have someone else to blame and it is easy to blame the immigrants. That is not even a new complaint. Here again I don’t feel the Democrats have addressed the concerns of the Rural community on immigration and at the least Trump’s Wall is something they can see. The Wall won’t work but it looks like the Republicans are trying to do something. Multiple administrations should have solved this problem years ago. It is people’s thirst for cheap labor that has caused much of it. We also don’t like to spend a lot at the grocery store that causes some of it too. In the beginning of the Biden Administration they sent the Vice President on a fact finding mission to explore the reasons why so many are willing to take such a dangerous journey in hopes of coming to America.  I think this is the only way to solve the Immigration problem. Trump is talking about deporting 75 million people. I think that would be disastrous to the economy and to our wallets.

I think many of the problems the Democrats have experienced with the rural communities is self- inflicted. I think much of the things that would help the inner cities would also help the rural communities. Healthcare should not be thought of as communism. It should be part of the rights and freedoms that we should all be entitled too. Most of the freest countries in the world have Healthcare. Our infrastructure is very important to the rural communities. Talk to them about it. Democrats need to go back to the communities that had been part of their roots and talk with the people.