Most are land owners, ranchers mostly, so low property taxes appeal to them and that's why they vote Republican. Many are registered Independent though I should add. Also, we live in a media desert. Everything is right wing. You go to the gym, car mechanic or hospital and FoxNews is on. I also noticed in restaurants, that the bar TVs if not on sports have FoxNews. The local cable stations as well as the satellite servers have stations like Free Speech TV, BBC News and Al Jazeera on an upgrade tier and many don't pay for it because most of the people I know don't spend much time watching TV so if they watch news at all, it's FoxNews or CNN. The radio AM and FM are all right wing talk, sports or music.
Our local newspaper is very conservative. Our local university has probably five democratic students in it. I know. I met them when I was working a table in their student union attempting to register voters. One of the heartening things was that there was a group of students there at the Wednesday Bernie event from the university that were pro-Bernie, more than I had met on campus.
So, I think the reason Bernie appeals to the rank and file Republican and Republican leaning in my area is because he makes common sense to them. He isn't crazy and because he's been an Independent in the past, it has the appearance to them that they really aren't crossing the line and being faithless to their party and ideals. This is just MHO of course in trying to analyze this phenomena.
On edit: I forgot to add. When I asked the same conservatives, who are looking into Bernie, why they wouldn't prefer Hillary as her policies and ideals are closer to Republican ones, and to a one they tell me they don't like her and wouldn't vote for her. So there you have that on my casual sort of polling. Again, this is just MHO, and other may have very different experiences in their demographic.
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