{"id":931,"date":"2009-07-30T07:09:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-30T11:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/07\/30\/republicans-a-rural-party-and-a-southern-party\/"},"modified":"2009-07-30T07:09:00","modified_gmt":"2009-07-30T11:09:00","slug":"republicans-a-rural-party-and-a-southern-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2009\/07\/30\/republicans-a-rural-party-and-a-southern-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Republicans a &#8216;rural party and a southern party&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Appearing on the MSNBC show <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/3036697\/\">&#8220;Hardball&#8221;<\/a> with Chris Matthews, former Virginia congressman Tom Davis laid out a pretty stark assessment of the Republican movement.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Politics has been defined by culture over the last few cycles, and we&#8217;ve become a rural party and a Southern party. We&#8217;ve been losing inner suburbs and the like. A lot of this was the policies of the Bush administration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Davis points out, rather bleakly, that conservatives are winning the counties with the lowest education and economic achievement, while Democrats are winning in the high-achiever counties.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>As we move to cultural politics, that&#8217;s been the shift.  It&#8217;s a terrible move.  It&#8217;s also rural vs. urban in the Northeast and the Midwest and everywhere else.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Davis concludes that hard-right activists such as Rush Limbaugh &#8220;want a private club with an admissions test.  They don&#8217;t want a party which is by definition a coalition.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Here in New York state, this begs the question:  How long can the GOP position itself as the &#8216;Party of Upstate&#8221; and the &#8220;not-NYC&#8221; party?<\/p>\n<p>Is that a working formula for future majorities in the Assembly or Senate?  Or for winning statewide races?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Appearing on the MSNBC show &#8220;Hardball&#8221; with Chris Matthews, former Virginia congressman Tom Davis laid [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}