Are There Rural Voters in Pennsylvania?

Originally published at Daily Kos: http://tinyurl.com/3p2y8p
Wed Apr 16, 2008 at 03:45:45 PM CDT
Also at http://tinyurl.com/6opynh

Smalltown voters (and which candidate despises them most) are getting a lot of discussion -- in blogs, the mass media, etc. Urban voters get some discussion.

But I don't see discussion of rural voters. The people who don't live in towns of any size.

Yes, I know they're being included in "smalltown voters" -- but they shouldn't be. The answer to "It's the same thing, isn't it?" is almost always "No."

The differences between town people and country people can be larger than those between city people and suburbanites. I don't know of any case in which urban-suburban animosity has led to respectable people shooting at each other.

The relationship between small town people and rural people is probably different in every area. But sometimes their economic interests are very different. (Less so these days, when farmers are a small minority of rural population.) They might speak different languages at home, belong to different religions. And even if the differences are small, they might be seen as being large.

Ignorance and stupidity from the mass media, I'm resigned to. I expect them to be mentally lazy. But I expect better from kossacks.