Coexisting with this meth epidemic were a bunch of loyal old-timers who knew the place in better times.
Consider how those old-timers must feel as they watch the mainstream Democratic party make transgender-bathrooms priority #1 while their own hometowns are turning into shit...
That is, however, one of the greatest failings of the Democratic party over the last 15 (20? 25?) years: letting the Republicans choose the battlefields.
As the Republican-lite party, it is entirely their fault that the Republicans set their agenda.
Just a few examples:
> Spending nearly a trillion dollars every year to expand the police state and robot bomb innocent people in countries that have done nothing to us.
> Locking people up for minor offenses and not giving them an adequate defense or a speedy trial.
> A healthcare system that costs almost double that of its western european counterpart, but with spotty coverage and poorer outcomes--effect being that common injuries and illnesses can be financially devastating, even to the insured.
> Once vibrant manufacuring towns up and down the Mississippi that have been gutted by free trade with China, soon to be buried by AI.
To the average guy in flyover country, the luxury of having your biggest worry in life be which bathroom you get to use seems every bit as out-of-touch as some guy like Donald Trump flying around in his 747 eating caviar.
There is also another way to look at this that doesn't involve social justice and privilege examination. The problems you listed require ACTIVE solutions. Big, active solutions. The kind of solutions the Democratic party, and this really pains me to say, is too much of a clusterfuck right now to deal with given their internal struggles and, yknow, the entirely red government. Now, this red government on local levels as been aggressively targeting LGBTQ communities and trying to dehumanize them and strip them of their rights and safeties. The republicans are taking first swing at this, so all the Dems have to do is create REACTIVE solutions, which is a helluva lot faster and easier to do. Trans people under attack in public? REACT with legislation to protect them and fight to repeal legislation meant to attack them. These are solutions that the party is able to do, so it is what they are publicizing and what is being covered and discussed. Now that Republicans control all of government, there really isn't much for the left to do at all on the federal level, so the most they can fight for during the next four years is protecting civil liberties under an openly homophobic and LGBTQ hostile government.
For the past two administrations, we have been dropping bombs on innocent people. Both presidents could have stopped or curtailed this, saving billions of dollars in the process, with a simple "no." Some of those innocent people were small children who didn't quite make it to the gender-identity stage.
I will examine my gender privilege if you will examine your western privilege.
What country were you living in that transgender bathroom access was priority #1?
The modern Democratic party caters so exclusively to urban elites that these people are mostly unrepresented, so they stay home on election day.
It's not so much that they voted for Trump (his numbers were worse than those of Romney and McCain even though the population is larger now), it's that they didn't vote for Clinton.