In the first of a series of video comments from viewers, Ann Morrison, who lives in rural Wisconsin, talks about why her neighbors vote for Republicans and Trump and against the Democratic Party.

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I’m Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, and something new on theAnalysis.news. I got a letter  recently from Ann Morrison who lives in rural Wisconsin. The letter was titled “Why should rural Wisconsinites vote for a party that holds them in contempt?” I thought it was so powerful I asked her to do a video explaining why she thought so many of her neighbors voted for Donald Trump, voted for Republicans in state elections, and no longer voted for the Democratic party.

Hi, my name is Ann Morrison, I live in rural Wisconsin, which has a population of about four thousand, and it's in rural western Wisconsin, and I'm going to give my view as to why the Democrats and the left are not appealing to rural voters. I can only speak for Wisconsin so I'll just tell you how I see our area.  When I graduated from high school, 50 percent of my graduating class, which is one hundred and twenty people, lived on working dairy farms.

Ann Morrison

These were small farms, average acreage to one hundred average dairy herd, forty, and at that point in time, which is several decades ago, pre-farm crisis, the average income in this county was the national mean of the whole United States. In one generation, that average income, that median income for Vernon County, where Viroqua is the county seat, is reduced to poverty levels. So, people have gone from the national mean to poverty in one generation.

And how does this affect the Democrats? Well, let's go through what has happened to people in this area. OK, 1980, Reagan is elected. He slashes the milk subsidies and therefore farming has to work like quote a "business" and moves to corporate farming, big giant gross factory farms, this takes quite a while, 15 years to happen, but all the dairy industry goes to giant, unsustainable, polluting, disgusting, cruel to animal farms out in California, out west. 

All the small dairy farms around here, two hundred acres cows were named, wasn't organic, but it was pretty low, intensive agriculture is gone. So, when that goes the towns, it was our primary industry, the towns that support it, start losing money. OK, then we add on top of monopolies, OK, there are no small businesses anymore, anywhere. So, Wal-Mart comes and sits on the town and kills the rest of it. So, everybody's getting poorer and poorer and poorer and one option is to go to trade school or everything's credentialized so what used to be trade school is now Western Technical College.

Oh, I think they took the technical college out of it, but for example, a friend of mine who had been a union welder in Chicago previous to moving to Wisconsin and had worked as a welder in Wisconsin for decent union wages like thirty, thirty-five bucks an hour, gets laid off, goes to WTC, learns how to do graphic design on the Internet. Well, nobody tells him nobody's going to hire old people and the starting wage for that is like $14 an hour.

I mean, this is not apples to apples, and as noted in your previous podcast, the left cannot appeal to rural voters. There is no hope for the left. In the history of Wisconsin, we were pretty much a blue state for the most part. If you lookback at history and the history of the populists around the turn of the 20th century, these were farmers, of course. America was mostly rural at that time, but the farmers, and they worked together with African-American farmers, and Eugene Debs sprang out of that, and, of course, they got squashed,