Are rural voters the "real" voters? Wisconsin Republicans seem to think so - Polidicks

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/upshot/wisconsin-republicans-rural-urban-voters.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage In much of Wisconsin, “Madison and Milwaukee” are code words (to some, dog whistles) for the parts of the state that are nonwhite, elite, different: The cities are where people don’t have to work hard with their hands, because they’re collecting welfare or public-sector paychecks. That stereotype updates a very old idea in American politics, one pervading Wisconsin’s bitter Statehouse fights today and increasingly those in other states: Urban voters are an exception. If you discount them, you get a truer picture of the politics — and the will of voters — in a state. “State legislators are the closest to those we represent,” Scott Fitzgerald, the majority leader in the Wisconsin Senate, said in a statement after Republicans voted on the changes before dawn on Wednesday. Legislators should stand, he said, “on equal footing with an incoming administration that is based almost solely in Madison.” Mr. Fitzgerald was essentially recasting the new Democratic governor, Tony Evers, not as the winner of a statewide mandate but as a creature of the capital city, put there by people in the cities. Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the Wisconsin Statehouse, drew this distinction even more explicitly after the midterm election. “If you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” he said. “We would have all five constitutional officers and we would probably have many more seats in the Legislature.” In Wisconsin, Democratic candidates for the State Assembly won 54 percent of the vote statewide. But they will hold only 36 of 99 seats. They picked up just one more seat than in the current Assembly, a result of a gerrymander drawn so well that it protected nearly every Republican seat in a Democratic wave election.

"If we remove the districts that vote for our opponents, the map favors us". No shit idiot, it also makes you an enemies of Democracy.

Rural elitism is a legit thing that never gets talked about

Institutionalized rural elitism with things like Georgia's old county unit system and Mississippi's gubernatorial election process. The funny thing is that the biggest liberal projects in American history, the New Deal and the Great Society, both helped rural areas tremendously. The New Deal brought not only jobs to the rurals, but electricity, water, communications, and infrastructure.

So, what, because they live in cities they don't deserve to have their voices heard? They're not "real" citizens or something?

City votes already count for very little, we shouldn't be weakening them further. Especially when rural voters are so bad about voting against human rights.

Why would people vote for something they don't know about, doesn't affect them, and their two sources of information which are propaganda (Fox/Sinclair) tell them it's bad.

That's pretty much right. White rural voters have never actually spoken to the people whose rights they vote against. City dwellers are exposed to them.

If my experiences with the more extreme types are correct, that is unapologeticly their position. You are some liberal urban scum, you have been brain washed, thus you are a non-person, you deserve no rights. Double if you are from California.

I've heard the inverse of this too. People who live in the countryside are uneducated morons, living in dying towns, all the smart people move to cities, so they don't deserve to vote.

This is dumb but it doesn't hold any weight when the former is the actual reality of our electoral politics.

that's the entire argument for the electoral college. proponents say the rural states deserve to have a larger voice because they're geographically bigger.

Close, it's larger part of the vote because city populations are bigger. The founders were worried that the country would be dominated entirely by a few cities, and that the needs of Farmer Joe out in Kansas would be unheard.

Without the EC farmers in California or New York would have a vote that matters too.

I don't think the founders were worried about the rural vs city vote, they were more concerned about the EC acting as a check against ignorant idiots electing an ignorant idiot. That has failed spectacularly as electors are high position party officials.

I have a feeling this line of reasoning will become more pervasive and states will start to make changes as drastic as giving all presidential electors over to whoever wins the majority of house districts in the state.

That would probably be shut down by SCOTUS given their one man one vote rule, unless they want to shit all over the Warren Court.

Urban voters are just as bad. For example there are thousands of homeless people in urban centers yet urban voters rarely care about their rights to housing. These individuals are dying in the streets from the weather and they don't even bother letting them in their homes! Yet they think they're somehow more virtuous than rural folk.

You're fucking kidding me. Have you ever had to deal with homeless people before?

There are tons of homeless people in rural environments too. The rates for homelessness in rural areas is about equal to urban areas if I remember correctly.

Yes they are people just like you and me. They are mostly down on their luck. Don't be so bigoted.

Answer the question the Peachy made about the godforsaken trite you shat out to try to make urban people look bad.

It's a gargantuanly more complicated problem than that. You have some homeless people that are down on their luck, you have some that are mentally ill and difficult to get into a permanent residence, you have a number that are drug addicts/recovering drug addicts that lack the fiscal responsibility to secure housing, victims of abuse that are left destitute and on and on and on. Homelessness is not a problem that will be solved by simply opening your door or donating to charity, and that's not even the point here. Claiming that apparently city dwelling people are not virtuous because homelessness is a thing is a real non argument and screams of virtue signalling. Lastly, I think it's an affront to democracy when representation is skewed so heavily towards a minority of people as to make most of the population irrelevant, virtuous or not.

It is my moral obligation to call out someone for viciously criticizing a class of people who had little choice in their current economic state. To state that it is mere deflection is vile. I am only trying to convey that urban voters having harsh opinions of rural voters is quite silly. Both sides claim the other side is ignorant, contemptible, and immoral WITHOUT any self-reflection.

"You're fucking kidding me. Have you ever had to deal with homeless people before?" Zero "vicious criticism" in that statement.

I'm not viciously criticizing a class of people. I'm talking about how much of an objectively statistically awful idea it is to invitw a homeless person into your house. Homeless people are homeless for a reason; that doesn't mean that it's their fault that they're homeless, but they sure as shit aren't the kind of people you want in your home, let alone when it would be most needed (overnight). Shelters exist for a reason. I've voulenteered at them for a reason. But I'm not never gong to let homeless people into my home.

What are you even going on about? What does homelessness even have to do with the urban/rural divide?

It was a single example I thought of while volunteering today here in the LA metropolitan area

Having lived in the middle of bumfuck nowhere for 20 years i can testify to this, anyone with two brain cells to put together moves to a city or has moved from a city and bought a shit ton of land in the middle of nowhere for dirt cheap to setup a ranch.

"Have you looked at any maps? America is a RED country. Compare the amount of red vs blue on any map and you'll see that America is a God fearing nation."