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

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 what, how I see our. Area, when I graduate from high school, 50 percent of my graduating class, which is one hundred and twenty people, lived on working dairy farms.

These were small farms, average acreage to one hundred average dairy herd, 40. 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 Bergen County, we're. What 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 a business and moves to corporate farming, big giant grass 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 credentials to 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 in a welder as a welder in Wisconsin for decent union wages like thirty thirty five bucks an hour, gets laid off, goes to see. Learned 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 fourteen dollars 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 a pretty much a blue state. For the most part, they look back at history and the history of the populace around the turn of the 20th century. These were farmers, of course, America was mostly rural at that time, but the farmers and and they worked together with African-American farmers.

And Eugene Debs sprang out of that. And, of course, they got. Squashed. Because we can't have all this mingling of working class people. OK, come along to the Great Depression. WPA, it did a lot of good around here, the whole new deal we got, they started with conter farming in this area. It's very hilly. So that was a conservation department. We had the CCC building, state parks and this town we had the WPA, which built a swimming pool.

Things were looking up post-World War Two. The Keynesian consensus was still relatively in place and. Everything went along know pretty much OK, until they cut the milk subsidies,