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Why Are Democrats Losing Rural Voters? We Need to Talk About 'Camouflage'

August 25, 2024 ,

Democrats just don't get small-town and rural people.

It wasn't always like that. My parents, children of the Great Depression and members of the Greatest Generation, described themselves as "Truman Democrats" and maintained their voter registration as Democrats, as far as I knew, throughout their lives; although, I know they supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, and both of them were disgusted at the turn national Democrats began in the '90s towards being a party of the welfare dependency class, urban elites, and academics. Near the start of the first Obama administration, when President Obama was setting up his cabinet and staff, Dad expressed one of the few political opinions I ever heard my taciturn father express: "Not one man among them ever plowed a field."

It's gotten worse since then. And what's more, any attempts Democrats make to appeal to the small-town and rural voters they not-so-secretly despise has been well past cringe-inducing, and into the realm of nausea-inducing. But that doesn't stop them from trying. Remember John Kerry's horrible, faked attempt to show he's "one of the boys" with the fake, waterfowling photo-op?


And Barack Obama's patently trumped-up (hah) claim that he shoots skeet at Camp David "all the time," despite being one of the most anti-Second Amendment presidents in the history of the republic?

Well, they've gotten worse, and their efforts are about as effective as a LEGO fire extinguisher. In the latest round of stupidity, "Second Gentleman" Doug Emhoff's stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, showed up at the DNC wearing a "Harris/Walz" cap - and it's camouflage. In a column at The Free Press, scribe River Page explains just how stupid that is.

The vice president’s stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, has been seen at the DNC wearing a camouflage brball cap with “HARRIS WALZ” emblazoned in orange on the front. Rolling Stone tweeted a picture of the 25-year-old model, commenting that her stepmother’s merch was “genius”—and linking to a piece that opined: “The camouflage hat reclaims the rural and Southern identity that mainstream Democrats have long ignored.”

For the record, Ella Emhoff is neither rural nor Southern—she grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Los Angeles, and is now a “multidisciplinary artist” in Brooklyn. But more importantly, the camo hats—which sold outearlier this month, netting nearly $1 million for the Harris campaign—were made for girls and gays, not deer-hunting rednecks in Alabama. They are actually a nod to pop singer Chappell Roan, a lesbian and self-proclaimed “drag queen” who sells a nearly identical hat on her own website, except the slogan is “Midwest Princess,” in reference to her hit album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. 

Oh, for crying out loud. How ridiculous can you get? The Democrats, seriously, are "reclaiming the rural and Southern identity" because one dimwit who isn't even an elected official wears a camouflage cap? Seriously? Can these people be this utterly lacking in self-awareness?

Never mind, we all already know the answer to that - of course they are.

Look, every nation, every people, have their color or colors: The Irish, green, the Germans, black, red, and gold, the Swedish, blue and yellow, just to name a few. And here in the United States, of course, we have red, white, and blue. But we have a backup: Out here in the sticks, in rural and small-town communities across the fruited plain, that second national color is camouflage. We wear it hunting and fishing, we wear it to school, we wear it to work, we wear it when sitting on the porch, watching the burgers on the grill - and some of us even wear it to get married.

And here's the thing: It's ours. Camouflage doesn't work on airheaded urban elitists like Elle Emhoff, just like it didn't work on John Kerry.

But Democrats keep trying to find stupid, transparently fake ways to pander, to try to appeal shallowly to a constituency that slipped away from them in the Reagan years. And why? Because they think we're stupid. That also dates back to the Reagan years.

It's failing, though, and the more cringe-inducing and fake these efforts are, the easier they are to see through. That's because, no matter what Kamala Harris or other Democrats might think, we're not stupid. We can easily see through their attempts at pandering - even when they are camouflaged.



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