“Daily Blast” Podcaster Greg Sargent reports rural Trump voters are starting to feel the pain from their November vote for President Donald Trump.
“There’s the Trump tariffs, which hit farm country hard. There are these enormous health care cuts, … which are creating these huge problems for rural hospitals across the country. Again, that’s a real lifeline in those places. Many of them have very little access to health care,” Sargent told guest Lynlee Thorne, political director for organizing network RuralGroundGame.org.
Thorne’s organization calls and visits registered Western Virginia voters who don’t consistently participate in recent elections, alerting them of upcoming cuts to Medicaid and the insurance marketplaces as well as cost increases from Trump’s tariffs.
She said breaking the news to residents has not been easy for the organization’s field workers.
“People are stunned that this is happening,” Thorne told Sargent. “Sometimes our volunteers are emotionally struggling because they feel like they are breaking horrific news to people in real time. And people are p—— and scared and feel a little blindsided. So, while those of us who have been paying attention are well aware of these cuts, this is devastating news to a lot of people in rural spaces.
A recent New York Times article covered the anger of Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) at her fellow Republicans’ willingness to eliminate pivotal public radio broadcasts her largely rural state, and others. Public radio is often the only lifeline to local news and weather because piped in music and talk radio — which is frequently the only signal on rural station radios — rarely alerts listeners to hazardous storms and local events.
Murkowski told the Times she was outraged by her co-workers readiness to deprive their voters of critical information for Trump.
“You had, I think, a blind allegiance to the president’s desires when it came to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Murkowski told the Times. “… what I … object to is when we, as the authorizers and the appropriators, do our job, and then we have the White House come around and say: ‘We don’t care what you did. We want you to do this.’”
Sargent said for years Republican lawmakers “could be counted on to defend their constituents a little bit” despite their prejudice against public radio. But now “Trump comes along and waves a magic wand, they just fall in line.”
“It’s a real gut punch,” said Thorne. “And I think something for people to keep in mind is that it’s not just the radio stations — because a lot of rural people even now cannot get radio reception in their rural area from their home. So often when there is a crisis or a power outage or something similar, people are having to go to their neighbors who might be able to get radio reception and hear that news through the grapevine.”
Hear the “Daily Blast” podcast and read an edited podcast transcript at this link.
Alternet: ‘It’s a real gut punch’: Rural voters ‘stunned’ by Trump’s damage
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