Don Gonyea: These separate discussions about Colorado in 2016 happened today and nearly 200 miles apart. The tone was always casual and very civil. The closest thing to name calling came when the Lenzes, on their farm in Yuma County, started talking about socialism. Here's Becky.
Becky Lenz: Listen to Hillary's speeches. And when she's offering to fix everything for everybody with some government program, that's socialism.
Gonyea: It is, they said, a label that can also be applied to Clinton's supporters. Back in Denver, Becca Sunshine-Dewitt said in response that she has a word to describe Donald Trump.
Becca Sunshine-Dewitt: And that word is bigot.
Gonyea: And she asked, what if she labeled all of his supporters as such?
Sunshine-Dewitt: And I think that if I used the term bigot to describe the farmers on the Eastern Plains, they would say, no, no, no. You don't understand us. That's not how we feel at all. And I think they're probably right. I think they probably don't feel that way.
In Colorado, The Rural-Urban Divide Looks Like 'Core Values' Vs. 'Progress'
One of the things that I've learned about people who throw around words like "Socialist" and "Bigot" as pejoratives to describe people who scare them - is that they've likely never actually met anyone who actually deserves, or would openly claim the label. Having met self-described Socialists and spend time chatting with dyed-in-the-wool White Supremacists, I can say that when people I've met call anyone more likely to vote more Democratic than themselves a "Socialist" or more Republican a "Bigot," they have had no idea of what the actual people who might better deserve these labels actually think or feel.
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