You are entitled to your feelings

[Cirsium]

50. There is no farm voting bloc

I see people here equating rural voters with farmers with MAGA with "red states." That is all way off the mark.

States don't vote, don't have personalities, don't do anything. It is the archaic and anti-democratic electoral college that has us thinking in terms on states. Don't blame the results of that on people who happen to live on this or that side of some imaginary line. It is the people in those states that matter. There are more Democrats in Texas than there are in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota , New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, or Virginia.

Then there is the debate about should we reach out to them or should we shun them? Both have some truth in them. Absolutely we should no longer take any abuse from MAGA friends and relatives and that often means cutting them off entirely. At the same time we can acknowledge the undeniable truth that the Democratic party leadership has utterly failed and that a big cause of that has been their betrayal of blue collar workers and thwarting of working class aspirations.

The most important misconception so commonly heard from Democrats involves agriculture. There is no farm voting bloc. That is a myth. All food related occupations comprise only 10.4 percent of U.S. employment, or 22 million people. Of those, 12.7 million work in food services, 3.3 million in food and beverage stores, 2.1 million in food, beverage and tobacco manufacturing, one million in forestry and fishing.

What are we left with? How many are actually on farms? 2.6 million, or 1.2% of the total umber of people in food related occupations. Of those how many are actually owners? Most of the people working on the farms here in the Midwest are not owners, overwhelmingly so. The owners are the farmers, not the farm workers. By the way, here it is mostly small farms and about 40% of the growers vote Democratic.

Ergo, the number of farmers voting for Trump is an exceedingly tiny percentage of the voting population.

Then, we have misconceptions about the demographics. "Rural" today is more like suburbia was 30+ years ago. Metropolitan areas have sprawled farther and farther into formerly rural areas, and most small towns have been dying. Remaining areas that resemble the old rural America have been steadily losing population while monstrous metroplexes grow and grow. Mayberry R.F.D. is dead and gone.