My Experiences in Trump-Land - Lessons learned

Like many here, I woke up the day after the 2016 elections and received one of the most unpleasant, demoralizing surprises of my life. The Traitor had WON???? How was this even possible? My home state of Colorado becomes bluer by the day and voted for Hillary, no problem. Yet Colorado still retains some large pockets of red voters - mainly the highly conservative city of Colorado Springs and various far flung republican strongholds in the rural areas of the state. I live in rural Colorado on what Coloradans refer to as the "Western Slope." My county is poor and relatively isolated. The farmers and ranchers and small business owners here voted Trump with 70% of the county casting their ballots for the orange clown.

I did not want to think that my neighbors and friends were racist or were okay with cutting assistance to the poor in what is one of Colorado's most impoverished counties. I didn't want to accept that I live among such backward and mean-spirited people. I even posted here that I found it hard to believe that every last person who voted for Trump did so at least in part because they were bigots. So, I set out on a quest to try and figure it all out.

I don't like bringing up politics with acquaintances here because I'd much rather get along and hope that they'll eventually see the error of their ways. But that changed after Trump's so-called election. I started talking to people like "Ritchie" - the devout Christian who runs the farm I live on - and "Bud" a lifelong republican who is my landlady's husband. When I first brought up the subject to Ritchie in a sideways comment about the ongoing drought we've been experiencing, made worse by climate change; mild mannered Ritchie just blew up at me, and I beat a hasty retreat. About 6 months into our national nightmare, Bud came over to do some minor repairs on my house. We started out with some polite chit-chat until the subject of government regulation came up. Bud made the typical conservative remark about we Democrats being "Commies" and based our platform on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, etc., etc.

I was feeling my oats that day, so I engaged Bud in a political debate. I told him that I had never been interested in the study of Marx and that I prefered to base my political beliefs on the writings of Jefferson and Thomas Paine and that the Democratic Party has used the thinking of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment as their baseline - certainly NOT Marx. Bud was astonished and began to speak in a more personal vein, and ending up telling me that he felt "abandoned" by the republican party and had nowhere to go. Score one for our side!

I had another encounter with Ritchie a few weeks later, and he was shaking his head over Trump's sexual escapades and told me that he didn't see how he as a Christian could continue to support the president*. BTW, had I noticed how low the snowpack in our mountains is this year? Going to be a drought year for sure! Score two for our side!

Other conversations with Trumpers here showed me that many of them are completely brainwashed and when it comes to them, discussion is a waste of time. They are racist, have huge arsenals of guns, and believe that every last person on food stamps uses them to buy lobster and filet mignon. This contingent is unreachable and not worth wasting the time to try.

The Democratic party CAN turn voters like Ritchie and Bud, however. They would vote for a centrist Democrat along the lines of Conor Lamb. It is possible to reach disenchanted moderate republicans as well as independents, especially if we allow our candidates to speak to the concerns of the voters in their district as Lamb did. We don't need to concede the things in our platform that make us Democrats. We most certainly don't need to turn against pro-choice or concede the field to racists and crazed gun nuts. These elements among the electorate have minds that are ossified and their thinking is set in concrete. Forget about them.

Concentrate on voters like Bud and Ritchie, and I'm willing to bet a $1,000 bucks that my currently red district would go blue come November.

Just my humble opinion.