You might think The New York Times would give it a rest. After all, if the point of writing so many articles where they seek the opinions of low-information, highly peer-pressured, mostly elderly voters was to depress Democratic turnout, I don’t think it worked last Tuesday. Of course that didn’t stop them from running an article headlined:
The Blue Wave Washed Across Much of America. But Not Here.
By some measures, the Republican Party grew even stronger in South Dakota, one of the states that shifted the least toward Democrats in the midterms.
Wow, OK, the people out in the sticks who probably don’t get TV decided to vote the same as they have in past elections, and even more so! The huge Black voter turn out that swept the Southeast barely made a dent in their thinking at all! These voters, less than half a miilion of them, simply said “no” to the wave of anti-Trump, anti-Republican, anti-oligarch, anti-anti-democratic voters that actually participated in the discourse and came out in record numbers to throw the bums out? Did they not like the Democrats’ farm policy? Did they even know what it was?
What lesson are we supposed to take from this continued coverage of corn (and wheat) country voters? Did the Democrats get too big for their britches? Are the Ds celebrating too soon, having failed to make bigger inroads into the electorate of a state that provides, let’s see, well, there are about 600,000 registered voters living there, so the whole state provides as many voters as Portland, Oregon, give or take a few. So, is the New York Times saying that the people of South Dakota are so loyal to Republican causes and Donald Trump himself that the Blue Wave is sure to result in nothing? That the equivalent of Portland, Oregon will sink the Democrats’ chances of getting anything done with their Congressional majority?
It kind of does seem like that’s what they’re implying.
I don’t (and many other people don’t, I’m not saying anything real new here)-- I don’t understand why the alleged newspaper of record spends so much reportage finding and considering the views of low-information, mostly elderly voters who live so far from where the rest of America lives. These people are outliers in every sense of the word. Their interest in government is mostly in farm subsidies, not policies that help the majority of people, the people who live in centers of population. I know the Times publishes these endless diner-interview articles for a reason, but I’ve never heard them articulate the reason.
Anyway, despite South Dakota’s irrelevance, they have two relevant senators, can you name them? Is Thune one? (Yes, he is; I guessed right!) Also Mike Rounds. Their one Representative is good ol’ Dusty Johnson, if you were wondering. Is that even a real name? It sounds like a sad condition, to be sure.