If The Dems Made A Concerted Effort To Appeal To Rural Voters What Would You Recommend They Do?....

[Xithras]

167. In my experience, two things would swing rural voters left:

1) First, foremost, and above all else, most rural dwellers simply want to be left alone. Want to get a farmer wound up? Start talking to them about government interference and paperwork. I have LONG advocated the implementation of some sort of farmer advocate program. Basically, government employees whose ONLY job is to represent rural residents when they need to deal with the government. If a farmer wants to clear a field that needs approval from a handful of government agencies, that farmer should only need to contact ONE person to do it. Farmers and rural residents tend to have a LOT of contact with different agencies when doing their work, and a huge percentage simply dislike government because their experience with it is a bit nightmarish. I recently overheard a conversation by a farmer who had to deal with FOURTEEN different government agencies in order to replace a drainage lift-pump on his land. When it rained heavily, one end of his land had a tendency to flood. Decades earlier a previous owner had installed a pump to remove this water, and pump it across a low levee into a neighboring wetland. When it came time to replace the pump, the buraucracy was a nightmare as everyone from the Army Corps of Engineers to the EPA chimed in. It took over a year for one farmer to replace one pump on one farm. The replacement itself took a day. The paperwork took more than a year, and they had him running back and forth between agencies for various sign-offs and approvals.

Many rural residents percieve the government as a burden because most of their interaction with the government occurs in situations like this one. Simplifying THAT would go a long way toward convincing rural residents that the government exists to work with them, and not just against them. They have work to do, and just want to be left alone to do it.

2) As others have mentioned, there really does need to be more of an opposition voice on the radio in many of these rural areas. Wherever you go in rural areas and visit people, you'll generally find the radio on. Whether it's in the cab of a truck or a tractor, or playing on a portable while they're working outside, most people run the radio fairly constantly. Rural radio stations are dominated by conservative talkers, so rural residents are consistently bombarded with right wing talking points. I've found that MOST can be swung back to the middle after a reasonable conversation, but the majority of rural dwellers aren't exposed to anything other than right wing drivel and never get that chance.

We need to get some real Democratic voices on the radio, permanently and coast to coast, in order to offer a contrasting viewpoint. I'm not talking about "equal time" rules that simply give the left a chance to refute Limbaugh, but full time progressive radio programming to offer a 24 hour alternative to the 24 hour conservative media firehose they're already drinking from.