Gov. Sarah Sanders

Rural resentment, that morsel upon which Governor Sarah Sanders and other Arkansas Republicans feast, is based on distortions and outright lies that are often and easily debunked.

New York Times opinion columnist and economist Paul Krugman tried again with the facts this week, almost surely for naught. Krugman’s Yankee academic credentials don’t carry much weight around here.

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“Rural rage” is what Krugman calls it, and he pointed to fresh research on the rural Republican shift. Read all about it. In short, rural voters see red and vote red out of insecurity that they’re being ignored and shortchanged by politicians and looked down on by city slicker Democrats.

You might have noticed Arkansas’s new governor taking expert advantage of these very divisions and insecurities as she snarls about D.C.’s merciless attacks upon our rural state. Sanders is undeniably a messaging maestro, unrestrained by any inconvenient fidelity to facts. Her dramatic warnings about Biden an Co. swooping in to steal our liberty, freedom and cash seem to really hit the mark.

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If anything, the feds and blue state Dems are Arkansas’s generous patrons, and Governor Sanders is an ungrateful welfare queen. Krugman notes:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new governor of Arkansas, has pledged to get the “bureaucratic tyrants” of Washington “out of your wallets”; in 2019 the federal government spent almost twice as much in Arkansas as it collected in taxes, de facto providing the average Arkansas resident with $5,500 in aid. So even if Democratic policies greatly improve rural lives, will rural voters notice?

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