I know I said just the other day that I wasn't really interested anymore and I wasn't going to get into it, and as far as Biden v Trump, I'm still not. However, two stories crossed my timeline this morning.

The first one was so wildly off-base about the so-called "rural voter" that I read it a few times just to try to figure out what they were saying. Without spending the time to look up all of the people involved, I'm going to say that this is the never-lived-in-rural-america take on it.

https://www.rawstory.com/gop-rural-voters/

I get the idea the idea that they're going for here. It's the old "Why do rural voters vote for people who laugh behind their back? All of those Ivy League educated people aren't their friends."

I get this a lot from my friends out west. It's really hard for people who have never lived in the rural south to get it. Believe me, they're not voting for people who "stab you right in the front." It's completely missing the point. It's not the performance itself that they're voting for.

This comes up a lot when people I know send me some absurd thing that Matt Gaetz does or says with a note like "Florida's finally going to be rid of this idiot!" I always write back something along the lines of "No, you really don't get it. This will make him more popular. This is what people here want." They laugh, go "Yeah, sure, whatever. Just watch. He'll lose his next election" at which point he inevitably wins by even more than he did before.

Let's take a look at the second article.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-voters-dont-care-about-winning-elections-just-owning-libs

Now we're getting somewhere. Really, all of my leftist and liberal friends, you have to understand who you're up against. The people of rural Florida in Matt Gaetz' district don't understand you any more than you don't understand them, but they're going to vote for Matt Gaetz because he meets three criteria:

He's trolling you, which makes them laugh.

He does what he wants and doesn't care about your rules and laws.

Perhaps most importantly, he "proves" their most deeply held belief that the federal government doesn't work. Why doesn't it work? Because of people like Matt Gaetz, which just proves the point. Get it?

They've been told since the Civil War that the federal government can't work. States rights, right? Don't you tell us what to do. You and your fancy educations in things we don't understand like CRT and IVF.

When the first article says "They claim Democrats are insulting, but Democrats are doing something for them and getting none of their votes." And that's the POINT. They don't want things done for them by the federal government because they don't trust it. When the federal government goes "Here's millions of dollars for improvements in your district" they read "Hello. I'm a Nigerian prince."

They don't WANT it, and even if they learned to trust it, it would break that belief inside of them where their granddaddy told them that the federal government was bad and would never work.

When a New Hampshire voter says "he liked Trump because he’s “a wrecking ball. “Our system needs to be broken," he means it literally. Take it literally.