{"id":1311932,"date":"2019-06-28T19:16:01","date_gmt":"2019-06-29T01:16:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/cepeda-column-democrats-need-to-start-listening-to-rural-america\/"},"modified":"2019-06-28T19:16:01","modified_gmt":"2019-06-29T01:16:01","slug":"cepeda-column-democrats-need-to-start-listening-to-rural-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/cepeda-column-democrats-need-to-start-listening-to-rural-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Cepeda column: Democrats need to start listening to rural America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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BRODHEAD, Wisc. \u2014 This week I\u2019ve tooled around the south-central Wisconsin towns of Orfordville, Monroe, Footville and Oregon, shopping at the Piggly Wiggly and Blain\u2019s Farm and Fleet, eating burgers at the North Side Pub and Grill and taking in a Beloit Snappers minor-league baseball game.<\/p>\n

Being in the country is beautiful, with tons of wide-open spaces, green pastures and picturesque farms filled with horses, cows and goats.<\/p>\n

The people are, of course, Midwestern nice \u2014 I hadn\u2019t expected to be the only brown face in nearly every single one of these settings, but no one hesitated to smile or greet me warmly.<\/p>\n

This is how it\u2019s done in the rural Midwest. Despite differing viewpoints on how to tackle climate change or worries about residential well-water pollution from massive concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs), there\u2019s not a lot of fulminating.<\/p>\n

Sure, you can hardly get away from Fox News playing in the background at virtually every diner, bar and auto repair shop. But there\u2019s tranquility and the unhurried pace necessary to do what few Americans in big cities can afford to do: put it all in a perspective that\u2019s open to whatever it takes to maintain a culture of quiet and a focus on nature\u2019s bounty.<\/p>\n

This is exactly what the One Country Project is hoping to capitalize on as it seeks to rebuild trust and respect between coastal elite decision-makers and the people in rural communities who have to live with government policies.<\/p>\n

Helmed by former Sens. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., and Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., the One Country Project is attempting to reopen the dialogue between rural communities and the rest of the country to develop more inclusive policies.<\/p>\n

To start, the organization conducted something of a \u201clistening tour\u201d of Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by analyzing social-media traffic from Feb. 15 to May 15 to identify the most regularly discussed social, economic and political issues. The most salient topics were farming, climate change, education, health care, immigration, abortion and women\u2019s issues.<\/p>\n

What they also learned is that rural folks are, understandably, scared about the future of farming culture \u2014 due in no small part to what One Country\u2019s analysis calls \u201can underlying feeling of \u2018disrespect\u2019 toward farmers and the agricultural economy from their fellow Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n

But despite feeling dissed even though they feed the country, their self-interest is slowly driving an open-minded attitude toward the contentious and partisan issue of climate change. One Country found that \u2014 though the majority of the social-media conversation was basically neutral \u2014 the amount of discussion declaring or implying belief in climate change (19%) was nearly double that of language surrounding climate skepticism (10%).<\/p>\n

The need for solutions that prevent future floods and farming disruptions \u201cpoints to the possibility that there is a chance to reach rural voters with a discussion of reasonable responses to climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, immigration was also found to be a much-talked-about issue. How couldn\u2019t it be? I\u2019m pretty sure I hardly saw any brown faces while I was out and about being a tourist in rural Wisconsin, probably because they were all toiling away on the farms. Some estimates say about half of all workers on Wisconsin farms are undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

Still, social-media comments revealed a bias towards limiting immigration, preventing crime and vilifying the Democratic Party\u2019s more tolerant positions on undocumented migrants.<\/p>\n

This in particular was worrying, because One Country found that \u201cDemocrats are characterized as lacking a solution and not acknowledging the fact that rural Americans believe there is an emergency at the southern border. Interestingly, there is also a strain of discussion portraying Democratic positions as being driven by opposition to President Trump rather than by a committed stance on the issue overall.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is an area where Democrats will continue to struggle as long as they lack a unified voice on immigration matters.<\/p>\n

And if they keep painting rural Americans with the broad brush of intolerance, backwardness and hatred instead of trying to engage those populations with real issues that hit close to home \u2014 such as the need for year-round visa programs for workers in nonseasonal industries like dairy \u2014 they\u2019ll just keep widening the political chasm.<\/p>\n

One Country heard rural residents speak loud and clear: Americans, especially Democrats, aren\u2019t listening to people in the flyover states.<\/p>\n

They\u2019d better start.<\/p>\n

Continuing to make such a large portion of voters who represent key voting constituencies feel left out is, for Democrats who want a change election, perilous at best \u2014 and stupidly disastrous at worst.<\/p>\n

Esther Cepeda\u2019s email address is estherjcepeda@washpost.com<\/a>, or follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BRODHEAD, Wisc. \u2014 This week I\u2019ve tooled around the south-central Wisconsin towns of Orfordville, Monroe, Footville and Oregon, shopping at the Piggly Wiggly and Blain\u2019s Farm and Fleet, eating burgers at the North Side Pub and Grill and taking in a Beloit Snappers minor-league baseball game. Being in the country is beautiful, with tons of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1311932","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 19:10:25","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}