Oregon 2016 GE Pres Results

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Cool thread.
Re: rural Dems, how much do you think it will hurt Democrats, the trends you hint at there?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Cool thread.
Re: rural Dems, how much do you think it will hurt Democrats, the trends you hint at there?

Well, although I can't speak on behalf of "rural Democrats", I can definitively state that the position of the Democratic Party in huge swathes of rural and small-town Oregon suffered dramatically in the late '80s and early '90s, where the Timber Industry was starting to collapse as a result of decades of over-harvesting of publicly owned National Forest lands, and the Democrats appeared tone-deaf on the issue, and statewide Republicans were ably to successfully present it as a jobs vs environment issue.

Although Democrats ultimately were able to expand their margins in Metro-Portland, it was at a huge cost politically in Timber dependent communities throughout rural and small-town Oregon, where there were many jobs dependent on smaller locally owned mills, as well as good paying union jobs at mills that were part of some of the larger corporate outfits in the business....

Additionally, there were a large chunk of decent paying union jobs in places like Coos and Columbia County, where timber was exported overseas to Asia in the '80s from places like the Port of Coos Bay and Longview Washington (ILWU jobs).

Furthermore, the whole gun thing doesn't play so well in communities where hunting and fishing is a way of life, and it takes quite some time for the county sheriffs to show up if you have a bear our cougar in your backyard, let alone firing some warning shots if some random tweakers decide to raid your marijuana patch (Now totally legal in Oregon).....

The deal with Oregonians is that this isn't a hugely cultural conservative state, unlike many other parts of the country, there isn't a huge movement for "building walls" and discriminating against Latinos and Muslim-Americans, but in many parts of the state good paying jobs have been disappearing replaced with a mixture of tourism/service jobs, rural poverty, and Meth addiction, and although Trump tied with Dole for an historical low for a Republican in the state overall, Dems are losing some of their last rural blue-collar bastions in the state, even after seeing a wipeout between '88 and '00 in many of these communities, where Obama was able to bring many of these voters back.

Anyways, I could tell some personal stories about rural and small-town Oregon, but it's kind of the same deal that I started to see in Appalachian Regions twenty years ago, and now this election in huge chunks of the Upper-Midwest and "Frost Belt"....

People want their votes to be earned and not taken for granted, and unfortunately the most recent Democratic nominee didn't appear to want to fight for these voters and Trump did....  It was a huge strategic failure, and it will likely cost the Democratic Party well into the future, since a candidate like Bernie would have done very well in the rural and small-town communities of my home state, and still performed decently in the big city of Metro Portland.....

Could Ds handled the issue more deftly and lost next to no votes in Metro Portland?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Hillary won some cities in Clackamas County... I wonder why.