Wednesday, August 19, 2015

A Rural Perspective on the GOP

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Anyone with an ear for politics should be fairly well attuned to the GOP presidential preferences, at least from a national perspective.  Roughly a quarter of Republicans nationwide seem to be enamored with reality television loudmouth, Donald Trump, while the remaining three-quarters are split all to hell among fifteen, or sixteen, or seventeen others.  Not too surprisingly, those numbers seem to hold even down into some of the remote corners of the Heartland.

Republicans in Newton County, Missouri (Neosho and the surrounding area) recently conducted a straw poll to see which candidates their local citizens saw as most appealing.  The poll was conducted in two stages with the first being at the Newton County Fair in July and the second at last week's annual watermelon feed of the Republican Central Committee and the Republican Women.  A total of 166 "valid" ballots were collected.

The results for the top five vote-getters were pretty much in line with the national polls.  Donald Trump received 27.11% of the vote, followed by Ben Carson at 14.46%, Ted Cruz at 13.86%, Mike Huckabee at 9.64%, and Scott Walker at 9.04%.

So that's the top five, a sad little assemblage of racist, homophobic, Christian fundamentalist greed heads who are angry at most aspects of the modern world including the government they want to lead.    One has to suspect that Eisenhower or Abe Lincoln would not have made the cut.  Heck, in this day and age even Reagan might not have finished in the top five!

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