The Republican Party's Fatal Attraction To Rural [and Reality Denying] America

I many times express my confusion as to why the Republican party continues to focus on diminishing demographic groups in the larger voting public. Here in Virginia, the GOP base is increasingly the rural socially, culturally and educationally backwards areas of the state. The only excepts are cities like Virginia Beach with high numbers of military personnel and/or wealthy voters who care nothing about the nation so long as they get to hoard their wealth and pay low taxes. But Virginia is not unique in the GOP grand scheme of things. Forbes has an article that looks at the GOP's focus on the rural shrinking populations as opposed to the growing urban populations which increasingly reject the GOP message of intolerance and division. Here are some highlights:

Rick Santorum’s big wins in Alabama and Mississippi places the Republican Party in ever greater danger of becoming hostage to what has become its predominate geographic base: rural and small town America.

If America was an exclusively urban or metropolitan country, Mitt Romney would be already ensconced as the GOP nominee and perhaps on his way towards a real shot at the White House. In virtually every major urban region — which means predominately suburbs — Romney has generally won easily.

Outside the Mormon belt from Arizona to Wyoming, however, sophisticated Mitt has been a consistent loser in the countryside. This divergence between rural and suburban/metro America, poses a fundamental challenge to the modern Republican Party. Rural America constitutes barely 16 percent of the country, down from 72 percent a century ago, but still constitutes the party’s most reliable geographic base. It resembles the small-town America of the 19^th century, particularly in the South and West, that propelled Democratic Party of Nebraska’s William Jennings Bryan to three presidential nominations.

Yet like Bryan, who also lost all three times, what makes Santorum so appealing in the hinterlands may prove disastrous in the metropolitan regions which now dominate the country. Much of this is not so much particular positions beyond abortion, gay rights, women’s issues, now de rigueur in the GOP, but a kind of generalized sanctimoniousness that does not play well with the national electorate.

We can see this in the extraordinary difference in the religiosity between more rural states, particularly in the South, and the rest of country. Roughly half of all Protestants in Mississippi, Alabama and Oklahoma, according to the Pew Center on Religion and Public Life, are evangelicals . . . . In contrast, evangelicals make up a quarter or less of Protestants nationally and less still in key upcoming primary states such as Pennsylvania, New York, California and Connecticut, where the percentages average closer to 10 percent.

All the nation’s strongest tech clusters — Silicon Valley, Route 128, Austin, north Dallas, Redmond/Bellevue in Washington, Raleigh-Durham — are primarily suburban in form. High tech tends to nurture a consciousness among conservatives more libertarian than socially conservative and populist.

The political pace in rural America today still is being set by an aging, overwhelmingly white and modestly educated demographic.

Until the Republican nomination fight is settled, the party’s pandering to the sensibilities of such conservatives in rural areas could prove fatal to its long-term prospects. A Santorum nomination almost guarantees a replay of the Bryan phenomena; no matter how many times he runs, he will prove unlikely to win, even against a vulnerable opponent. Even in losing, his preachy, divisive tone — on contraception, prayer, the separation of church and state — has opened a gap among suburban voters that Obama will no doubt exploit.

The battle will then shift to the suburbs, including those urban areas, common in the vast cities of the South and West, that are predominately suburban in form.

Personally, I hope the GOP continues its misguided focus on the rural, backwards and in relative terms, ignorant areas of the country and that the result is an electoral defeat. A defeat that will hopefully also expose the long term suicide that pandering to the Christianists represents. The Christianists need to be exiled to the political wilderness.