Here is a thing that I noticed, because my husband and I recently went on a road trip that meandered through the Midwest for various dog-ash scattering reasons.
We have done the Denver -> Chicago drive many times, although not in the last five or six years, I think.
ThIs is the complicated relationship we have with sparsely populated areas. as much as their politics irritate us, we need their resources to support the resource intensive lifestyles of the coastal folks. Obviously they need urbanites as well. Really need each other fortunately/unfortunately.
I think most of the individual people in those areas are probably people who, if we divorced them from the media feeding them tales, would actually be a lot better than they appear at first glance.
My main issue isn't with them. It's with the conglomerate capture.
I personally doubt that many of those people would be voting on a "secure the border" platform if they didn't have media claiming the border was fully open and overrun.
Being originally from a place that overwhelmingly voted Trump in 2020 and with a sizable Latino migrant population, it is a bit of chicken or egg situation IMO. That type of media wouldn’t have worked unless the folks were primed for it. Think the growing education and wealth gap of red/blue is big
