Got to agree with you, Andrat2000. The Dems really need to change their approach.
There's a great piece at Politico about it. Copy pasted at length, because I know you're not going to click the link and read the whole thing,
Heartland Democrats to Washington: You’re Killing UsNew report blames elitist national party for alienating voters, and threatening the party's chances in 2020.
By Michael Kruse, 1/11/18
The report, “Hope from the Heartland: How Democrats Can Better Serve the Midwest by Bringing Rural, Working Class Wisdom to Washington,” lands at a moment, of course, when Democrats are riled up with activist energy but also wrestling with themselves about the direction of their party—their most reliable areas of support having receded to cities, coasts and college towns. In contrast, this report is based on interviews with 72 Democrats who hail from none of those places but rather largely agricultural, blue-collar areas in the vast, eight-state center of the country.
From the Appalachian regions of Ohio to the Iron Range of Minnesota and the northern reaches of Michigan and Wisconsin, across Iowa and Missouri and through the southern swaths of Indiana and Illinois—areas in which Bill Clinton triumphed and Hillary Clinton tanked—the quotes from the 72 rural Democrats Johnson interviewed read like a pent-up primal scream. And [Representative] Terry Goodin’s comments pop out in particular. In the report, he says the Democratic Party is “lazy,” “out of touch with mainstream America,” relying on “too much identity politics” where “winners and losers are picked by their labels.” The Democrats in his district, he laments, “feel abandoned.”
In the parking lot, Goodin ran into a man wearing a well-worn cap with a well-known slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Delmis Burns, I would learn later, drives a truck for a living and has known Goodin for more than 40 years and votes for him every time he runs because Burns, despite his preference in the presidential race, is in fact a Democrat.
“You’re looking at a Democrat right there,” Goodin said. “He’s a Democrat who voted for Donald Trump.”
“He’s also,” I said, “a Democrat who didn’t want to train a Muslim in his truck because he was afraid of getting blown up.”
“But you know,” Goodin said, “you let people live their lives, and you don’t question—I mean, what good would it have done?” He went on: “There’s no reason for confrontation—that’s the trouble with Congress now—because Delmis Burns and I, you wash away some of the odd things, what some people may consider odd that he would have said, what he said about the Muslim guy—the reason he said that is there’s no Muslims around our area. So he just don’t trust ’em. He don’t know who they are. … But Delmis Burns and I probably agree on 90 percent of everything we’d ever talk about. So why would I focus on the 10 percent that I don’t agree with him on?”
“Tell me how in the world Nancy Pelosi, or some of those folks in Congress,” Goodin said, “how would they even be able to sit there and talk with Delmis Burns? Do they even know that a guy like Delmis Burns exists? That’s why I say that the East Coast elitists have forgotten America. They’ve not been to America, they forgot America, they forgot about certain parts of America. Maybe they’ve done that intentionally. I hope they haven’t.”
Indiana-based rural strategist Melina Fox wishes the infighting would stop.
“[Goodin] is a rural Democrat who’s
winning,” she told me, “so maybe they need to be
listening to him.”
The lesson? “That the more moderate to conservative Democrat needs to come back in order for us to get the majority,” said Baron Hill, the former Democratic congressman from southern Indiana who lost in 2010. “The Democrats have got to do a better job of appealing to what was described awhile back as the ‘deplorables,’ if you’ll recall.”