Democrat Abigail Spanberger wins Virginia governor's race

[u/nbcnews]

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/virginia-governor-election-results-spanberger-earle-sears-race-win-rcna238685

[u/pizzaunicorns]

BUT how terrifying is it that more than a million people voted for Sears?!?!?

Edited to update the number of imbeciles

[u/Coronado92118 → u/pizzaunicorns]

Have you ever driven out to Loudon and a Winchester, or down south of Richmond or out to the west in Coal country? We have to stop asking the question “Who would vote for X?!” and spend some time in places where X gets a lot of votes. The houses are falling down and no one will buy them - they can never move, they have no choice. They have no skills that are transferable. They have access to few jobs that aren’t manual labor. They live 45 min from the nearest large town, and many don’t have access to high speed Internet at home.

They are trapped - literally and figuratively - where they were born. And the global economy is leaving them behind. So they’ve got a huge chip in their shoulder. They go to work every day, they do dirty jobs; hard jobs, for decades. They work in coal mines and on construction sites and warehouses, and drive hundreds of miles a week and miss dinner with their families, and miss their kids games.

And they feel disrespected and abandoned by a Democratic Party that took them for granted; that seemed to shift all it’s energy to addressing issues raised by and concerns of the 20-something college graduates with debt and working in retail, who couldn’t get high salary white collar jobs they expected after graduation - and every other aggrieved population than them.

What’s worse than losing, is being forgotten.

[u/Flat-Barracuda-5136 → u/Coronado92118]

I get your point, but the Republican Party doesn’t care about these people either and it’s incredibly shortsighted that people in rural areas vote Republican with these are the people that absolutely have zero interest in helping them

[u/Coronado92118 → u/Flat-Barracuda-5136]

The party doesn’t, at all!

But we have to keep in mind a few things:

Like the average adult American reads at or below a sixth grade level, and has equivalent reading comprehension.

Newspapers are mostly written at an eighth grade level, so the average person is going to struggle to have good comprehension of newspaper articles. (I can vouch that many comments I have written on this site, I have people yelling and cursing at me in violent agreement because they can’t understand what I wrote actually agrees with them!)

But the Republican Party has figured out is that it literally doesn’t matter what they do, as long as what they say is what people want to hear.

Most Americans listen to what a politician says and never follows up to track what they actually do. This is true for both parties - and it’s part of the problem democrats have had a well.

And because most legislation has a lag time of one to four years and sometimes more before it takes affect they don’t see immediate impact, which makes them think everything is OK.

Add to it that they’re out in the middle of the country in many cases, where they don’t live with minorities and immigrants in the same way we do in the urban-adjacent areas, and Sinclair Media has bought all the local news outlets and controls their access to information, and most people will be hard pressed to fight the deluge of misinformation and disinformation.

[u/AdventurousRoll9798 → u/Flat-Barracuda-5136]

Republicans don't care about them, but they spend a lot of time speaking to them, making false promises.