Don’t even try to win it.
Matt L. Barron, Daily Yonder: Analysis: Democrats Turn Their Backs on Rural America
Candidates do rallies in the main city of television markets because it is convenient.
As the media scratched their heads at why Trump was holding rallies far off the beaten path in places like Lisbon, Maine, Atkinson, New Hampshire, Fletcher and Selma, North Carolina, Clinton never deviated from a schedule that looked like a rock band’s tour of major urban centers.
Campaigns do no realize that local media in those media cities cover events in their hinterlands to preserve audience share. They used to cover rural county county and city council meetings, but now it’s just the police blotter.
At any rate, this deprived Clinton of having rural people meet her (or was that considered a risk?). And it deprived her of more substantial free media. (Or was that too unpredictable?)
Selma is in the Raleigh-Durham market and Fletcher is in the Asheville market. Trump benefited from having his rural rally broadcast all over those market areas’ rural areas. This analysis said that that hurt badly in some formerly blue states. Especially when rural counties have been bypassed economically and culturally (thus the attacks on Hollywood, media, and intellectuals) by mainstream American society.
I fault Barron on his plugging for a rural class of consultants and media professionals (campaign infrastructure) who might have the same issues he describes just with certain twists.
Carville’s appeal in 1993 was his appearance of being in touch with Louisiana and the Southern rural areas. Whether real or contrived, even that has disappeared as the Carville-Matalins became just one more bipartisan power couple in the Village.
