The Democrats nationwide – including here in Minnesota – are as split along rural-urban lines as, well, the rest of the US is. \u00a0And that fault line is shaking the endorsement challenge in the Governor’s race in Virginia, where the “progressive”, Northern-Virginia, government-worker set has pretty directly set out to alienate the rural Democrats that used to dominate the party and the state. \u00a0 The state party “Uninvited” one “Mudcat” Saunders – a Virginia democrat operative and activist who’s served as a go-between among rural and urban Democrat interests – from a lmeeting on…<\/p>\n
…well, patching up the rural\/urban split:<\/p>\n
In short Democrats believe that because of their populous numbers in the urban suburbs in Northern Virginia they don’t need rural voters, nor are they showing any willingness to petition, engage or win them over.<\/p>\n
Their beef with him was his unwillingness to vote for Hillary Clinton last year; it doesn’t help that he was pretty outspoken about it.<\/p>\n
“They don’t have to. And this is why we are the minority party,” said Dane Strother, a Washington-based Democratic strategist with deep Southern roots, “If we remain uninterested in the rural vote we will remain the minority party.”<\/p>\n
Virginia Democrats are in the midst of a civil war that is only getting worse rather than better since the election of Donald J. Trump. Virginia did not go for Trump, but its rural voters, a decent amount of them Democrats, voted decisively for Trump over their party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s not just Virginia. \u00a0When Collin Peterson finally retires, the 7th CD will not elect another Democrat to Congress for several generations; if Rick Nolan and\/or Tim Walz leave office to run for Governor, its entirely possible those districts will go GOP.<\/p>\n
And yet the MNDFL – as shown with last week’s teapot-tempest with Rep. Hortman scolding the GOP’s “white males” for sitting out Rena Moran’s speech along with a whole bunch of DFLers – is obsessed with the same social justice fripperies that have led to the slow eradication of the DFL in most of greater Minnesota.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Democrats nationwide – including here in Minnesota – are as split along rural-urban lines as, well, the rest of the US is. \u00a0And that fault line is shaking the endorsement challenge in the Governor’s race in Virginia, where the “progressive”, Northern-Virginia, government-worker set has pretty directly set out to alienate the rural Democrats that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62714,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62713\/revisions\/62714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}