I Hate It Here by Matthew Ferrence
Matthew Ferrence isn’t the first writer to bemoan the loss of small-town America to the GOP. However, he actually tried to do something about it. Ferrence ran for the legislature as a Democrat in Crawford County, PA, against a Republican incumbent. He lost by a wide margin, but his dispiriting candidacy inspired I Hate it Here, Please Vote for Me.
Ferrence identifies the problem of “registration deficits”—areas where Democratic Party membership is so low that state and national committees write-off the regions as lost before the battle begins, diverting money and manpower to constituencies more amenable to a Democratic victory. Ferrence reviews Crawford County’s decline into the Rust Belt, where hope and prosperity were supplanted by anger and opposition to the “elites.” He decries the unthinking Red State stereotypes held by many Democrats, and yet he seemed confronted by people embodying those very stereotypes. He lost against a lawmaker who promised to cut college aid to anyone studying “poetry or another pre-Walmart major.”
Ferrence writes with irritable passion of how the Crawford counties of our nation have chained themselves “to the mysteries of Reagonomics” even as the promised trickle-down became a golden shower of catastrophe. He condemns the Democratic Party leaders as tone deaf, neglecting rural voters, essentially writing them off and leaving them in the red zone.
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