GOP Should Vigorously Support Rural Broadband and Net Neutrality

The 2016 election of Donald Trump said it all.   Democrats won the big cities, thanks to welfare and open-immigration programs.  Trump and the GOP won nationally because of the rural voter.  The big urban areas have all the television stations and high-speed internet, owned by rich liberals in distant cities. 

     Democratic Party candidates can easily sucker in urban voters with one mega-billion promise after another. It really doesn’t matter if they are sincere about delivering.  Free stuff is alluring.  Lotto ticket buyers always think they have a chance. 

     “Democrats are offering President Donald Trump’s rural supporters a reason to turn against him in 2020 — his failure to bring them the high-speed internet he promised,” suggests John Hendel in the Politico article “Democrats torch Trump failures on rural digital divide.”  Using the internet is a bread-and-butter issue to people who live in the country.  They try to use it daily for education, keeping in touch with family, and entertainment.  Anything to escape the impoverished ultra-liberal, commercial-laced programming on television.

    Problems exist even in one-party GOP states which are largely rural.  Incumbents know that they can be easily re-elected if the token Democratic Party opposition tries to run on radical leftist ideas.  Many such GOP don’t fight for anything that isn’t safe and non-controversial, risking nothing. 

      It’s easy to send out lots of press releases extolling the necessity of high-speed internet to rural life, but most rural people are still struggling with extremely low bandwidth speed compared to their neighbors in nearby cities. 

     One South Dakota man just outside of Rapid City, but  barely in the country, says that his ISP bills him for 20 mbps, but frequent speed tests using fast.com hover right about 9 mbps, with only slight variation.  Meanwhile, his friends in Rapid City easily top 100 mbps for the same monthly fee.           

     So the GOP should get ready.  Democrats might decide that they already own the cities and identity-bloc voters.  A single-minded campaign focus on supporting net neutrality and high-speed broadband for rural people might not be easy for GOP incumbents to brush aside.