So, Oil & Gas and Industrial Services worker here... If you're concerned with people reducing the UCP supporters to uneducated hillbilies, you shouldn't be doing the same thing to everyone who supported Notley and NDP. I have an "I love Oil & Gas" sticker right next to my Notley sticker in my car, and being on the finance side of the industry, I understand quite well how much the Notley government did for the industry, rather than destroying it.
Realistically, we all know not all UCP supporters fall into that category, and you're right, a lot of people, especially in rural AB, have reasons to vote UCP. Most of these people are voting UCP because they want their subsidies kept, don't want to see money go to the major cities or to policies that they feel are "too progressive", etc (and some of this is largely due to a lack of education on how a lot of these policies could actually benefit them).
The major issue is that these people have a disproportionate amount of representative power in the provincial government. We have rural MLAs that represent only a fraction of the amount of people an MLA in Calgary or Edmonton does, and this ends up skewing the balance of power towards the UCP and, more specifically, towards the fringe, nutjob side of the party (the Danielle Smith's of the world).