STOP BLAMING THE VICTIM.

Democrats don't lose in the suburbs and in the countryside because of false consciousness.

In most of the rural U.S., the only messaging anyone ever hears is Republican messaging. The only points of view people are exposed to are right-wing points of view. Democratic and progressive ideas and positions are not ignored; they are silent and invisible.

And this has been going on for a long time. This is a trend that began during the Reagan Administration, if not earlier. And as people old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman have died off, those areas have gotten redder and redder.

Exactly how this happened would take a book to analyze, but the ending of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of right-wing talk radio have a lot to do with it. The erosion of Union membership also impacts many areas, such as coal mining communities, and is causing rust belt communities to get redder also. Unions were a major disseminator of Democratic Party perspectives back in the day.

Before that, a whole lot of white working-class people abandoned the Democrats because of their support for racial equality, especially Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and corrective policies such as Affirmative Action. Rural areas especially do tend to be homogeneously white.

Sorry, no.  The Thomas Frank of What's the Matter with Kansas?  might have thought so, but the Thomas Frank of Listen, Liberal revised his priors on the basis of new information.  Joel Bleifuss is also thinking about broadening the Democrats' appeal, and although he'd like to turf the corporatist Democrats out, he sees something that matters. "In the past two decades, Democrats have sought to forge a governing majority by winning the support of various (and overlapping) Democratic-leaning demographic groups: Latinos, African Americans, the highly educated, suburban women, union members, LGBTQ people and the Left (always as the junior partner and never in charge)."  There might be some United Front of the urban sexual underground, the welfare recipients, the lumpenproletariat, and starveling farmers that can create permanent Democrat majorities, but I doubt it.  An Economist essay, "The Democrats' Disadvantage," gets to the heart of the matter.  "According to Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist, one reason left-leaning political parties worldwide have been doing poorly with rural working-class whites is that their candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from the party's ultra-progressive elected officials from the big cities.  This imposes the otherworldliness of very left-leaning Democratic politicians elsewhere onto the party's candidates in the heartland."  "Otherworldliness" is being kind.  By the fruits of wilding, wokeness, and welfare dependence do we know those big cities.