Good stuff, Rex. I can’t explain all of that, but I bet I’ve got some clues.

Trinity is timber country. The Sierra Club’s stupid “no footprint left behind” and “spotted owl” and “tree spiking” campaigns hit timber economies hard. After decades of legal battles, the Nature Conservancy et al, stepped in and got the environmental movement headed in the right direction. But people have long memories that still influence that region.

The Sierra Club was led by city dwellers who did not walk the talk. In rural regions, Sierra Club members tend to live on rural ranchettes and rural people, especially farmers, ranchers and timber people, despise those developments. The conflicts between these groups are viscous. While I’ve personally known, two national Sierra Club presidents, I stay as far away from the Sierra Club as I can.

Rex, you write, Colorado’s “Lauren Boebert is… representing the substantially rural 3rd district.” You also write, “Harriet Hageman's resounding defeat of Liz Cheney. …lots of rural voters in Wyoming.” In both cases, I suspect you are conflating rural Americans with transplants. If so, that is a mistake.

One key to identifying rural voters is population density. Rural Americans do not leave their land and move into housing developments – at least, not by choice. We have to be forced off our land or we stay put (it’s a real thing, not a myth).

I’m saying, not bragging, when I tell you my daughter is building us two new homes, from the ground up with her own hands. She’s working on 60 acres of forest land and had to do some clearing and put in a road. She undergrounded utility lines, water lines and septic systems. Yesterday, the first house passed electrical, plumbing, and HV/AC inspections. In other words, we still don’t have electricity out there and are running on generator power. No AC in Kentucky hot and humid either. And we don’t have cell reception. Next week, it will take me about four days to cut 168 pieces of wood trim and fit them in place. My son-in-law, leaves after work on Fridays and joins us. We usually work from dawn to dark. Her father-in-law restores classic cars. He finished a truck for them and now he’s restoring an old dead tractor, cause we need one – badly. These are rural skills, not city ones – right? Did I mention we all have jobs as well?

Now, a look at transplants.

It takes city people about ten years to acculturate to rural life. Most city people can’t do it. They come for the scenery, not the lifestyle. Rural people call transplants newcomers (not outsiders). However, newcomer is not a derogatory term. All it means is that someone lacks the knowledge and skills necessary to lead a rural life. I suppose it also means someone we have to take care of, because they can’t take care of themselves.

Over the last 35 years or so, big developers have built a shocking, even criminal, number of cheap, isolated housing developments in the middle of dumb-fuck nowhere. City people flock to these “cheap-new-homes” and commute back to big cities for work, 3 or more hours a day. For 12 hours a day, they leave their children unsupervised in huge housing developments without an adult in sight. If that isn't the recipe for juvenile problems, I don't know what is.

City retirees sell their city homes and move to rural areas with delusions of small-town life made famous by Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kincaid. When they discover healthcare and senior services are provided by families and churches, (not social service agencies) they feel alone and very frightened.

The prison industry is huge throughout rural America. There are 27 prisons in Kern County alone. when a new prison opens, jobs as prison guards attract people from cities who move into these rural areas.

Rex, these are not rural people – they are city people with city expectations. It isn’t long before transplants are screaming for urban services, urban amenities, urban entertainment, urban this, urban that. My word, they are a block away from wide open country, and they even scream for parks. I strongly suspect, transplants are voting for the Lauren Boebert-s and against the Liz Cheney-s of the modern Republican Party.

As I said, don’t conflate transplants with rural Americans.

PS. I don’t know, but I suspect Comer is some coal mining company’s guy.