The Morning Briefing: Dems' Disdain for Rural Americans Is Their Real Midterms Problem

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Thursday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Synchronized swimming at the pigeon ranch was always better after a little moonshine.

While I have frequently cautioned against spending too much time thinking about the midterms, it’s been a subject that has been impossible to ignore, especially since Monday. The instinct most of us had when news of the Supreme Court leak hit on Monday night was to wonder what impact it might have on the midterms. Opinions on that have been all over the place. Just here in-house, Lincoln wrote that it could be a “miracle” for dispirited Democrats, while Athena wrote that it wouldn’t change things.

I went from thinking it would be a boon for the Democrats’ midterms prospects to convincing myself that they’d cry this tantrum out long before then.

Athena wrote yesterday that some Democratic analysts aren’t sure this particular issue will help them at all.

We’re back to looking at the real problems that the Democrats have facing them. Joe Biden is an albatross that none of them will be able to shake, of course. The economic woes he’s visited upon the country won’t be better in a matter of months. They’re busy convincing themselves that none of what’s wrong is their fault anyway.

I happened upon an interesting Opinion piece in The New York Times that I wrote about yesterday. It was written by a progressive state senator in Maine and her campaign manager and it pointed out what could be the Democrats’ biggest problem heading into the midterms: the party has abandoned rural America.

The authors of the piece minced no words, saying that the Democrats’ message to rural voters over the past decade or so has been clear: “You don’t matter.”

A lot of those voters broke Trump’s way in 2016 because they were fed up with the Democrats never coming through with their promises. Joe Biden was able to sucker a lot of them back in 2020 by pretending to be an old-school moderate Democrat who would have their backs.

It was another bill of goods.

Rural voters who are worrying about financial issues probably aren’t as concerned with abortion on demand and propping up teachers who talk to first-graders about gender reassignment as coastal Dems are.

The Democrats have spent the last twenty years becoming a regional party. Because that region includes some populous states, they’re under the mistaken impression that they represent what America really wants. In reality, if you dropped most of them anywhere in small-town America they’d think that they had been abducted by aliens and deposited on a foreign planet.

The good news for Republicans is that Democrats lack the capacity for self-awareness, so they won’t be figuring any of this out anytime soon.

The bad news is that they have at least six more months to screw things up.

Everything Isn’t Awful

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Smells Like Onion

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