politics

It means nothing, it's feelings, like all of this other culture war bullshit.
However, that doesn't mean he won't try, like what we've seen with Disney, FL schools, etc. If you consider people who vote/voted for Democrats (a center-right party in the grand-scheme of things), who have won the popular vote in 5/6 most recent presidential elections, as leftists then you are considering the majority of Americans as enemies that need to be 'destroyed'.
As you said, what the fuck does he actually intend by that? Does any pro-Desantis chucklefuck think that America could even stand, much less maintain their standard of living by "destroying" over half of the population?

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They got what has been their platform for the last 50 years. Overturn Roe v Wade, cut taxes, stop any kind of gun control, and ignore the pandemic.

They got Roe v Wade and now they don't have the anti-abortion single issue voters that they can rile up. They got their tax cuts under Trump and the economic situation for everyone except the wealthy few has drastically declined, and gun deaths are on the rise to the point where gun deaths are the most common cause of death for kids in America.

Initially the pandemic hit cities harder because dense populations spread diseases faster. But then it really hit the biggest republican demographics hard and many of their voters permanently aged out of voting.

Through their policy they have either killed off their own supporters or radicalized people into opposing them. If I were a kid in high school who survived a mass shooting and some tomato faced blowhard with a million listeners was calling me and my family anti-american crisis actors, it would radicalize me. Hell I wasn't even targeted by the rhetoric and radicalized me further against Republicans.

The actual rural population is less than 20% of the total US population. The GOP cannot possibly win elections by appealing to the needs and concerns of rural america. They are instead following Nixon's well worn racist strategy of appealing to the white suburban voters, and in particular to economically insecure white suburban voters.

Because rural voters have spent decades dialed in to talk radio, their pastor, and more recently cable news. They talk each other around in circles, obfuscating the actual issues, and any time a real issue does creep into the discussion, they lay blame at the out group who has historically had no power in their communities.

You can't appeal to the best interests of rural voters because rural voters themselves have no idea what to care about until the man on TV tells them how to say it to piss off "liberals."

I don’t understand why they could not concentrate on providing support for issues that relate to rural voters... issues related to providing affordable health care

The last 13 years the Republicans have been railing against the Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA, aka Obamacare). To come out now and say that affordable healthcare is an issue that needs additional resource and effort would destroy their carefully cultivated narrative against the ACA.

They really just need to look at the nation and see what the problems are and make solving them their platform.

The problems the Republicans appear to champion are:

• what clothing people wear
• how they choose to engage in sex among consenting adults
• what bathroom a person chooses to relieve themselves in
• what mates they choose to marry
• what regulations can be removed to increase corporate profits
• whitewashing history which would otherwise reflect the reality of the USA's checkered past
• legal support for entrenched companies in their industry against alternatives

Most of this can be viewed easily through the lens of Wilhoit's law:

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

They can't do any of that because it runs counter to their actual platform of giving tax breaks to the super rich while fucking over the poor.

So the only way to get the poor to support republicans is to engage in culture war bullshit.

If you look at any of the issues you raised, Republicans have been on the wrong side. They hate affordable healthcare, they want farm subsidies to only apply to the super rich mega farms, they want to punish opioid addicts while letting the Sackler family off scott free, and generally just want policy that will make life harder for everyone but themselves.

But they do want to hurt the people they've told their base to hate, even if those same policies hurt that base too.

That would involve boosting government programs, which they've built a whole ideological and propaganda edifice against because that's money that could go to corporations. Anyone who does something like this leaves himself open to attacks from the right. There really isn't a lot that Republicans could run on anymore, they're pretty much locked into their strategy of populism in service of wealthy interests.

That would require them actually caring about veterans and the military, which they don't. They say they do and hype it all up about supporting the troops and then when it comes down to actually assign any sort of legislation to do so they always turn the other way.