2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Tens of thousands to leave Democratic party the day after their primaries in protest [View all]davidthegnome
(2,983 posts)The county I live in (Aroostook) up here in northern Maine, has a, frankly, embarrassing voting record. We played a large part in electing LePage...
We rate among the highest in the Nation as far as poverty goes, lack of opportunity, lack of jobs, poor infrastructure, job benefits, diversity, business growth... the list goes on and on. We also rank rather poorly in regards to education. Still, you will find a good number of progressives up here, particularly in the more educated parts of the state, in universities, and so on.
I unfortunately live in an area that even our own elected representatives often ignore. This part of the state of Maine in which I live is at least a decade or two behind most of the rest of the Country. Very rural, very white, often ignorant and so on and so forth... to us, it frequently hasn't mattered who we voted for, because few gave enough of a damn to do anything to address the issue of poverty up here. Few did anything to address our crumbling infrastructure (yes, it is bad elsewhere - but it is TERRIBLE here).
I am experiencing (and have been, for all of my adult life) the troubles of poverty, of poor opportunity, of ignorance, a very weak, poorly funded education system. I have watched the small schools closing, I have watched some of our best educators, some of our brightest minds, some of the best of us, leave the state because Maine simply did not offer enough. In the last couple of decades, the population in my county has shrunken by half.
We used to have many mills. The towns surrounding the area where I live used to have good jobs, good schools, high employment rates - and so on and so forth. As those things continue to disappear, we see the rise of poverty, of drug use, of alcoholism, of the tea party, of conservative ignorance and so on... the weaker our economy becomes, the lower our population, the more this state turns red.
Democrats like myself are fighting a losing battle in these parts of the Country. We are faced with many people who point out to us that neither political party has done a whole lot of good for our areas. The ACA passed - but medicaid expansion did not, thousands of poor Mainers cannot get (and have no way to get) health insurance, or any kind of assistance despite crushing poverty.
This State is likely to vote for whichever candidate uses the best hype, whichever convinces us that they will be better for the economy, for job growth, wage increase, access to healthcare, etc.