Missing the Bigger Picture

2020 Election Map by County

If you will indulge me a second political post in a week, I would be grateful. For nearly two days now, while working on a project in my garage and doing my morning rounds through blog world, I see that a lot of people are missing the bigger picture. Everyone is wondering how people could elect Trump for a second time because he.... and then there is a long list of moral and legal shortcomings. Respectfully to those people, you are missing the big picture. What you should be asking is why Vice President Harris failed to resonate with her constituents to such an extent, they showed out in less numbers than the previous election. Not only did she fail to resonate, but the majority of voters found a convicted criminal with large moral problems better than the alternative. 

I think the answer to this lays largely in the map seen above which is actually from 2020 when Biden beat Trump. The current map which I have seen on television but can't find a version not locked behind a paywall, is even more red. When I look at that map, I see a whole lot of red areas of the country. Granted the people living in those red areas only make up 50% of the population but it also tells me that those people living in the blue dots might not understand the needs of those in the red. 

I live among the vast red swaths of the country in a county that is consistently in the top five poorest counties in our state. What those people repeatedly talk about how bad the economy is, red and blue voters alike. Yes you can show them all the graphs showing how wages have largely outpaced inflation and theoretically they should be better but what those graphs show you is an average of red and blue areas combined. They don't show you that wages in most red areas have been stagnate for years if not decades, yet prices have universally gone up, dramatically, due to the more global nature of our distribution systems. People are hurting and they showed their frustrations by voting for a person that you would never invite over to Sunday dinner at Grandma's house even if he were the last person alive outside of the family. 

I see a lot of my more liberal friends hunkering down and pondering how they will survive the next four years and I guess I don't blame them. But I would suggest to them, and I have tried suggesting to them, instead of just hunkering down and coming out four years from now with the same dated and tired party agenda geared mostly to those who live in the blue dots on the map above, perhaps they need to look into those red areas, they would be impossible to miss if we were shooting darts,  and see what those people find important. It obviously is important enough they were willing to elect a convicted criminal with moral impairments for a second time. With the information in hand, truly become the party of diversity and rule the next election.