fwiw: "You all don't get it. I live in Trump country, in the Ozarks in southern Missouri..."

[rustysgurl]

41. I too lived in the Ozarks ...

... not far from the Queen City. My parents retired there when I was in high school. It was hell. The entire county was red... BLOOD red. Most of the Republican candidates ran unopposed in the general elections. Democrats didn't even bother to organize, and I don't remember one Democratic candidate EVER winning an elected office in that county.

People in these areas work hard for not much. They look at big city folks as soft, weak and entitled. They will disagree with them just to disagree. They love their guns, their churches and their independence. Some of them live on food stamps and other assistance, but they are looked down on by most of the folks around there. Jobs are few; decent paying jobs even fewer. Most farm, and then work a job to pay the bills. Some commute 40-75 miles one way to Springfield or Branson to work.

Life there is not easy. These people, while hard working, are resentful. They are resentful of big city folks who have more. They are resentful of liberals who want to give "handouts" to people who don't work as hard as they do. They especially don't want to help immigrants or anyone who doesn't look like them. True story. One of the factories in our small town brought in an engineer and his family from St Louis. They were black. They didn't last 6 months. They were shunned. Folks in the grocery stores wouldn't check them out. Restaurants wouldn't wait on them. People looked right through them, unless of course you are talking about the police, who (I kid you not) would stop the man at least once a week in town for one cockamamie vehicle violation or another. He packed up his family and went back to St Louis. I felt so sorry for them. But when I expressed my disgust at the unfairness, friends just shrugged and said, "that's the way we are."

Nothing, absolutely nothing, will convince these people that anyone running on the Democratic ticket is worthy of their vote. They revile Democrats, and I am sure the 8 years of the Obama presidency was absolute hell for them. Trump is their boy. He makes it ok for them to say what they've always thought, and he puts liberals in their places (or so they think). He could shoot their grandmothers and they would find a way to rationalize it. Him letting a bunch of black and brown people die in a pandemic doesn't affect them. Nothing he does affects them directly (or hasn't so far), so they don't care. They live in a very tiny sphere, and unless something affects them directly, they are content to let him do whatever he wants, as long as it's against Democrats. As the poster said ... they HATE Democrats and all they stand for. So anyone with an "R" next to their name is fine with them. He/She could be the world's worst, but they'd elect them anyway.

Going into these areas and trying to convince the citizens that they are voting against their own interests is akin to John Chau getting himself rowed over to the off-limits North Sentinel Island off the coast of India. He pretty much knew the outcome before he set foot on land, and anyone visiting Blood Red Missouri knows the same.