Party panicking as rural America turns on Biden’s Democrats

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Reporter tells Biden GOP lied following Virginia election loss

PBS’ Yamiche Alcindor echoes Democrat attacks. Reaction and analysis on ‘MediaBuzz.’

The good news for Democrats is they finally pushed through an infrastructure bill that would have become law months ago if it hadn’t been held hostage by progressives.

The bad news for Democrats is that’s been largely overshadowed by their chaos, bitter infighting, and relentless focus on a more massive spending bill whose contents are a mystery to most Americans.

But there’s even worse news for the party, which is that they’re getting shellacked among rural voters. And building a bunch of roads and bridges is not going to win them back.

One media analysis after another is concluding that President Biden’s party, in the wake of last week’s dismal election showing, is in deep trouble in small-town America, and no one seems to have a solution.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., speaks before signing a House continuing resolution to keep funding the government, Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, on Capitol Hill in Washington. ((AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

DEMOCRATIC DYSFUNCTION AND DISMISSAL OF CULTURE ISSUES LEAD TO VIRGINIA DISASTER

The upshot, says Politico, is that "it will be difficult, if not impossible, to hold on to majorities in the Senate, which is dominated by rural states, and many state legislatures without at least some rural support." What’s more, virtually everyone in politics believes the Democrats will lose the House next year.

One sobering statistic: In the 2008 presidential contest, Republicans won 70 percent or more of the vote in only four small Virginia counties. When Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in the commonwealth, he was over 70 percent in 45 counties.

Former North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who lost in 2018, told the Washington Post that Democrat is now a losing label in rural regions. "People who are Democrats in rural America are hiding," she says.

The Democrats, who dominate in most big cities, have been getting hosed in the countryside for as long as I can remember. Their stances on two hot-button issues, guns and abortion, play very poorly in these regions. But the numbers have gotten so much worse that it’s harder to offset them with big margins in urban areas, especially in non-presidential years.

The problem, above all, is cultural. All the media criticism of Youngkin’s "culture war" missed the fact that many parents are angry about a loss of control in their schools, from curricula to mask mandates. The MSNBC pundits who continue to fume that many Virginia voters are racists are out of touch with reality. Not only did Barack Obama and Biden carry Virginia, but last week those same voters elected the first black woman statewide — but incoming lieutenant governor Winsome Sears doesn’t "count," apparently because she’s a Republican.

The plain fact is that Democrats are now widely seen as the party of the elites — well-educated and well-paid folks in coastal areas, and their allies in Big Media and Big Tech. And that has bred substantial resentment, especially among whites without college degrees, who are more prevalent in rural counties.

Scranton Joe ran successfully as a working-class guy, but he’s been pushing a Bernie agenda. The endless wrangling over whether Congress should approve a $3.5-trillion social spending bill or one for less than $2 trillion seems distant and abstract to plenty of folks, especially rural residents, and three-quarters of those surveyed by USA Today say they don’t think the legislation will help them.

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That may not be true — the child tax credit would be beneficial, as would the now-jettisoned free community college — but climate change and other initiatives may come off as just more big government.

And with all the Democratic wrangling, who can keep track of what’s in and what’s out?

FILE - In this Oct. 12, 2020, file photo, people wait in line for early voting at the Bell Auditorium in Augusta, Ga.  (Michael Holahan/The Augusta Chronicle via AP, File)

The Democrats’ drift toward progressive preciousness — pronoun battles, the administration’s 32-page report on gender equity — is what prompted James Carville to say some party members need to go to a "woke detox center." That problem isn’t limited by geography but may seem especially ludicrous the further you get from Manhattan and Santa Monica, from Harvard and Berkeley.

People are ticked off right now, notwithstanding the record-breaking stock market and 500,000-plus new jobs created last month. Some of this is rooted in the continuing hangover from the pandemic. The Democrats run everything in Washington and Biden, never an inspirational speaker, can’t seem to control the left-wing of his party.

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In that new USA Today poll, Biden’s approval rating is down to 38 percent. Some 46 percent say he has done a worse job than they expected — including 16 percent of those who voted for him. These are terrible numbers.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., speaks during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) ____ President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference at the conclusion of the G20 leaders summit, Sunday, Oct. 31, 2021, in Rome. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite  |  AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Donald Trump, for now, is history. Whether you’re in Pittsylvania County, Va., Coos County, N.H. or Sweetwater County, Wyo., voters are venting at the people in charge. Ten months after taking power in the nation’s capital, top Democrats are sounding the alarm, but no one seems sure of how to ride to the rescue.