Thread:Blue in the Red Zone/@comment-681745-20150504042642/@comment-71.94.164.238-20150505032415

I've really no experience with Pennsylvania (over 2000 miles away), but Budford County seems much like other rural Counties. It escapes the notice of most folks, but the democrat/republican division in this country is also nearly identical to the urban/rural division. Bedford County, PA is a rural county, 49k population. I was able to find a reference that said voting was about 3/4 Republican in the last Presidential election, and it seems to have a fairly active Tea Party. So, my guess was that Higgins was just playing politics and trying to please his conservative base.

Many rural areas also are agriculture areas, and have families who have resided in the area for generations, and have demographics which are very different from urban areas. Typically, these rural areas have very limited employment opportunities, and very few of the local children are able to find employment in the area. Sometimes these areas can have a fairly large percentage of disabled or otherwise unemployable people who choose to live in rural areas because housing costs are low. Generally, these rural areas have a higher percentage of older people and more self-employed, small farmer, micro-business people too. Rural areas can also have a larger percentage of WASPs.

The generation of small farmers and small-business people who remembered what FDR did for them is gone now, and the conservatives have these areas pretty much locked up.

As for helping with that article, I've kind of concluded that attacking bad behavior of these ultra-conservative types is almost impossible without educating their constituents first. They can be pretty dismissive of outsiders, but that doesn't mean they're not intelligent and fair minded. One of the reasons I added the page on disestablishment is that many people really don't know why there's a seperation of Church and State. It can be tough to understand disestablishment if you live in a small homogeneously WASP community and if it wasn't taught well in school.