>Why else would most Trump voters come from rural areas?

Because the political and cultural interests of rural areas are different than the interests of urban areas? The economies of rural areas have crumbled. But 50% of the population live in cities and so economic policies that benefit the "majority" of the population will completely miss the issues rural areas face. Trump's support is because he at least pretends to care about them.

Also rural areas see much less of the impact that government has. They see less infrastructure, they see less of the masses of students that have to be educated, etc. They tend to be pro-small government because they don't have a daily view of the impact government has on daily life.

I don't view that as gullible, I view that as a perspective that is incomplete due to geographical circumstances. And I am sure that's probably a road that goes both ways, with people in urban & suburban areas not seeing the full picture with respect to rural society.

To be clear, rural areas receive more federal support, but it’s farm subsidies, not visible infrastructure.

Farm subsidies aren't a major factor. The federal government spends about $20B per year on farm subsidies.

https://www.cato.org/publications/tax-budget-bulletin/reform...

To put that in context, the GDP of the state of Iowa is $173B. And that's just one state with a large agriculture sector.

Yes, the role of government support in their lives does not take on as much of a visible role.

However I'd also like to comment on a common argument that Blue States/Cities pay for Rural areas. Yes, red states receive a disproportionate amount of federal aid, but that is something everyone benefits from. For example, farm subsidies keep food costs low for everyone in the country. Low income states with a high proportion of people on SNAP & other means-tested government programs mean the social safety net is improving our society as a whole by ensuring fewer people are left behind, which would be an even larger drag on society & the economy. In short, I don't think you can separate funding by state in that way and come to any value judgments based on it because the interwoven nature of our society means we do not stand alone as individual states.

I agree with your second paragraph, with the caveat that it would be nice for the direct beneficiaries of these funds to acknowledge the help they are receiving. That's my beef - not the subsidy, but the illusions held by the people receiving it.

Nonsense. Consider where government jobs are--and the massive economic effects of those jobs: there are substantially more federal government jobs (on a per capita basis) in the cities than the rural areas.

I'm open to an argument, but citing jobs is unrelated to whether federal money flows into or out of a state relative to their income taxes.

> pretends to care about them.

And that's why I said:

Not bad people, but gullible people.

You're missing the point. It's not that they're gullible, it's that one side ignores them completely and the other side is speaking to them. It doesn't matter that the guy telling you what you want to hear is probably lying, its still a better spot than the guy that ignores you because they don't want or need your vote.

It’s amazing how many people in the left still don’t get this. Trump supporters absolutely did not vote for him out of gullibility. They got exactly what they expected.

> The bulk of Trump voters are from rural areas, and tend to be less (or un-)educated.

You're of course ignoring even worse problems on the Democrat side.

The lowest education rates and highest drop-out rates in the US are not in rural areas, they're almost exclusively in the inner cities where Democrats tend to completely dominate the vote.

Rural students at 87% are more likely to graduate from high school in four years than the national average at 83%.

The graduation rate by comparison in Washington DC public schools is typically around 65%-70%. Shall I list all the major blue cities by graduation rates, or is that not necessary because everyone already knows what the outcomes actually look like?

The persistent low education and high drop-out rate problems in so many major Democrat dominated cities (eg: Philly, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Milwaukee, DC, etc.) is terrifying as an American. They're rates that low-development nations might be ashamed of.

The left pretends none of that exists when it's inconvenient, like when making blanket statements about Republican voter education levels.

I feel like your answer is sort of in bad faith. I live in an urban area, and people are quite concerned about the dropout rate (and more to the point that I think you're trying to imply but are dancing around for your own reasons, the racial achievement gaps). But I guess we put a different spin on it: we are ashamed of it, we should be ashamed of it, and we bring it up a lot in political races and on billboards and in conversations about who to elect to the School Board. Have we been effective in fixing it? Not really. But it's not because of propaganda purposes -- it's because it's a hard problem that's intertwined with questions of financial capital and stability and health care and justice and environment.

Anyhow, in the United States, all citizens have the vote, and an uneducated urban vote and an uneducated rural vote are both votes, though due to our unequal representation the rural vote is 'worth' more.

In sports terms, if a penalty is committed, we give the other team some compensation. Like a pass interference penalty. Because it's not fair to make a team go for the same goal when they've gotten cheated...

In the US, we scream bloody murder at most attempts to even out those starting point disparities that our ancestors caused... when I was in school, one favorite trick to do instead was to stick Magnet programs in poor schools to import kids from the rest of the city to try to bring up some of the numbers, rather than focusing on the kids who weren't doing well in the first place.

It makes for a wonderful self-fulfilling "these people are worth less because they accomplish less so it's out of our hands so we have no need to try to make right our past wrongs" story.

I think the point GC was making is also that rural people see how poorly democrats are running cities in many cases and don't want that to happen to them.

The logic being: better little-to-no government at all than one that does a terrible job.

Worth noting here something important: when people talk about the "educated" city people, what they actually mean is people holding a university degree.

Holding a degree is to a large extent a proxy for age. It used to be that not many people went to university. The concept that ~everyone (or at least 50%) should go to university is a relatively new one. So the numbers of people graduating over time has shot up. Hence if you select the population by whether they have a degree, you'll end up with a lot of young people. And youth is quite correlated with voting left.

The notion that holding a degree makes you inherently smarter than someone who doesn't is an increasingly suspicious one to many folks, like me. There are too many people with multiple PhDs writing academic papers that have major errors in them, signing off on papers that have major flaws, changing their supposedly expert opinions overnight for political reasons, saying things on Twitter that are totally bizarre and so on. Do universities really make you "educated" or do they just make you unwilling to question another "educated" person's opinions even when obviously wrong? My experience is that older people, people in more rural areas and those without a degree are more willing to engage in common-sense reasoning and reject nonsensical claims even when they come from an educated member of the elite, whereas degree holders find it far harder (perhaps because it would devalue their own degree).

The story about uneducated rural areas vs educated cities is slowly turning false. Previously you just hadn't access to culture and were cut off from most events, but that changed with a global network to a significant degree. If remote work becomes more established, there is actually little reason to stay in the city, especially if you found a family.

You find derisive comments on rural areas throughout writings of the 19th and 20th century and it will probably still be reiterated for decades.

I know Trump voters who are extremely well educated, this is not an argument. Secondly, if by "educated" you mean holding a piece of paper, we already know that many colleges these days are infested by the far left, so again it is not an argument. What you care about are critical thinkers, and there's a much bigger disparity there. I'd argue that many college degree holders are not good critical thinkers.

Having lived in San Francisco has definitely changed my perspective. An area with supposedly lots of intelligent people continuously votes for the worst politicians, leading to one of the worst managed cities in this country when it comes to property crime, drug use, cost of living, and homelessness.

The rejoinder to this line of thinking is generally: "if liberals are so smart, how come they always lose?"

Worth a thought.

Because intelligence doesn't translate to popularity?

If we actually care about outcomes, then maybe we should use some of that vaunted intelligence to think about winning more.

"You're dumb and racist, so vote for us" is apparently not a winning message. And spending hundreds of millions on the same dumb media consulting firms that lose again and again, zero positive message besides "it's us or trump".. I could go on for days about how "smart" the democratic politicians are.

Pursuit of winning at the cost of values isn't a great path. We certainly see it in a bipartisan selection of politicians, but there's no reason intelligence should win out any more of less to propaganda or misinformation, regardless of which party it comes from, especially because it tends to be a lot easier to convince even inteligent people of an appealing lie than an ugly truth, again regardless of party affiliation.

That's what the democrats did, though, by picking Biden over Bernie. And they sucked anyways.

What values did Biden communicate during the campaign?

As I said, these things are not constrained to one side or the other. Though Biden was a moderate, and overall there was more support for moderates in the aggregate than for the more extreme progressive views of Bernie. That could just have come down to a more cynical calculation about "electability" though.

Whomever's downvoting both of us should chill, first off.

Second off.. I mean Biden's basically center-right, and he does nothing for any of the values most loudly espoused by the democratic base. He'd have been fired from a FAANG company for the "You're not black" comment, but everyone just agreed to pretend it didn't happen instead because we were stuck with him at that point.

So you can't say it's about values instead of winning. The thing is, our values would win. 60-70% of the country supports medicare for all, most people would support a more redistributive tax code, most people don't like the idea of cops shooting their kid, it goes on and on. But the democratic professional class refuses to run on those values, again and again.

Do you ever see the Republicans telling the pro-life people to eat shit the way the Democrats consistently tell progressives? No, they make a deal that they'll fight for it, probably lose, but at least they'll fight, and they get votes for it.

And the coup de grace is that anyone who questions the democrats' commitment must not really be on our side. Probably a closet racist. It's really kind of genius if your goal is to maintain control of the party.

Yeah, I don't get the downvotes either. It's an honest discussion, but too many people upvote/downvote only based on agreement with the point of view. I'm perfectly happy to upvote a comment I disagree with if it is well thought out and improves the discussion in a thoughtful way. Conversely, I'll downvote someone I agree with if their comment is inflammatory.

Anyway, I'm done here, no energy left after going through these threads. I generally agree with your sentiment though, albeit not on everything.

Quite the assumption that intelligent people would only vote liberal.

Because liberals aren't evil, and it's so much easier to win elections if you're prepared to tell outright lies and manipulate voters on tribal lines.

Like this:

https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/a-massive-mural-featuri...

Even though Clinton and Obama weren't saints - and I have limited respect for both of them - you are going to have a really hard time finding behaviour on that scale on the liberal side.

You're also going to find much less evidence of either threatened or actual violence.

Even BLM at its worst has never come close to the appalling record of right-wing violence in the US over the last couple of decades.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/27/in-ameri...

So that's why liberals "lose" - we're far less likely to feel comfortable with lying, cheating, bullying, violence, and intimidation. And for a substantial percentage of right-wing supporters those seem to be considered admirable moral features, not bugs.

Disagree? Provide evidence of general trends, not specifics.