It’s not that empathy isn’t a conservative trait, the range is the issue.
You can see it in how all the “pro gay” and “pro stem cell” conservatives in the US are ones who had a family member come out as queer or who contracted an illness which could be treated via stem cells.
It’s like they never quite got object permanence down pat. They can only believe queer folks are people if they see one themselves, they can only understand a moral abortion when they or one of their family members needs one, they only believe in welfare when its coming to their community, because they know that their community ain’t mis-usin’ it.
Obviously some of it is down to just plain ol’ bigotry, but a lot of it comes from the fact that these people can’t empathize with what they haven’t ever seen in person.
It’s like the mirror test but for screens, liberals, progressives, and leftists are able to recognize through a screen that the person on the other side is a real person with a real life experience that can really be related to even if only a little bit. A conservative in the modern day is someone who’s just incapable of that, or even worse, someone who is capable of it but has opportunistically chosen to ignore it.
A proper rural political campaign has to bring these issues to these folks front and center, you’re not gonna make progress in small town America unless you campaign on the theory of EXTREMELY visual learning, you need black historians telling the story of Tulsa at town hall meetings, you need queer rights advocates telling the story about how their parents disowned them for being queer, you need folks who have had abortions and people who never would but understand that it isn’t their place to stop others to explain their experiences and journeys.
Most importantly you need to pay these folks a kings ransom because every single one of them is gonna need to be equipped with the patience of fucking Solomon to bring these issues to where conservatives will be able to see it and really have a chance to empathize with, and that’s gonna involve a lot of answering very stupid and insensitive questions, and also dealing with people looking for a fight so they can keep villainizing over everyone else who might be able to get their grok on for these people.