Choose Your Own Political Narrative: Iowa State Fair Edition
Photo by Phil Roeder via Wikimedia Commons
Imagine going to the state fair and having nearly as many candidates for president walking around as there are rides.
Such is the plight of Iowans during presidential primary season. Over the weekend, most of the Democratic nominee hopefuls took their turn on the “soap box” stage at the Iowa State fair, and made the rounds of food, glad-handing, and trying to win votes. Which, of course, brings plenty of media and campaign marketing attention, and the tried and true content filler of “pulse of the people” interviews.
This clip, from MSNBC, started quite the debate on social media not so much for what was said in the interview, but in how so many folks took different meanings from it all. The lady talks of being a “lifelong conservative” and references working on Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) 1980 Senates campaign nearly 40 years ago, but now likes Sen Kamala Harris, doesn’t like President Trump, but bemoans “there are all these stump speeches but I really don’t know what they believe.” She wrote in the late John McCain in 2016. The man replies he “didn’t vote for anybody I voted against the Democrats” before clarifying he did vote for Donald Trump in the general election, and stating when asked if he could vote for a Democrat this time stated “everyone’s running to the extremes of both sides, so events will probably shape for whom I vote.” The young lady, who is 17 but will be eligible to vote in next years election, says she cannot vote for President Trump before running through several issues, says like her mom she likes Kamala Harris, but finishes with a “I know a lot of my friends like Warren and Sanders but they are a little too far left for me,” with a chuckle.
So…what is your takeaway from the Miller family?
This clip of a conservative mother and daughter explaining why they can't vote for Trump in Iowa should have Republicans scared. pic.twitter.com/Ip0L5syyt8
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 11, 2019
Can’t wait to hear Saul complain about Mrs.Miller. “How dare she make demands of Democrats!”
I watched David Letterman’song interview with Barack Obama on Netflix last night. I disagreed with that man, passionately at times, but he never embarrassed me. Never thought I would be wistful for the good ol’ days of the Obama years… I feel certain Trump is going to bleed off a lot of voters, but I’m far less certain Democrats will produce a nominee that can pick them up.Report
You share my general concerns about Democrats as well, though probably for different reasons. Honestly I’m not paying much attention yet to the Democrats – the field needs to winnow significantly, and we have a spectacle of a governor’s race going on in Mississippi right now – Two prominent republicans are going neck and neck into a mini-runoff in two weeks . . . and neither is actually popular in their home counties. Meanwhile the centerist Democrat running unopposed is rolling along with his farming and guns adds . . .Report
My takeaway of the parents is the same as it is of most self described moderate Republicans.
They don’t seem to have any powerful interests in this fight. They aren’t farmers who are being hurt by tariffs. The immigration raids don’t affect them or seem to alarm them. The general drift towards authoritarianism and corruption aren’t on their radar.
So their decision process is reduced to tone and mood. If Trump spoke with the vocabulary and diction of Mitt Romney their votes would be locked in. If Harris were to raise her voice or use a curse word they would revert to Trump.
If they have no powerful ideas or principles that motivate them then their vote isn’t going to be gotten by articulating some new idea or principle.Report
Here is the paradox though. Romney tried to be really hard on immigration and other cultural stuff (remember “self-deportation”?) and he lost. He lost the popular vote and the electoral college vote rather handily. I think the reason for this is because Romney is too formal, too country club. Romney received two million less votes than Trump. There is something about Trump’s demeanor, that combination of rich slob, blowhard in the bar, and carnival barker that repels as much as it attracts. Trump’s demeanor was enough to get a freak electoral college victory.
I don’t know if your first and second paragraphs are completely right. Maybe for some of the electorate. I think that some people who might have been traditionally Republican are turning away quickly. This is most pronounced in college-educated white women (who take the anti-abortion fanaticism very seriously) and spreads to other groups at lower but noitceable rates. At the current pace, the GOP is becoming more white and more male as everyone else leaves. This might accelerate their nihilism, authoritarianism, etc.Report
I alternate from optimism to pessimism daily.
And maybe I shouldn’t be so critical of low passion voters. Like I keep saying, in even the worst regimes there are plenty of people who live placid untroubled lives, and wonder what all the fuss is about.Report
Romney was also running against Barack Obama. I don’t know who could have run against Obama without seeming like an Old-Guy-Racist Dude or I-Need-To-Speak-To-Your-Manager Woman; but Romney definitely wasn’t that person.
I mean, in 2016 suddenly we had Democrats talking about how great Romney was and why wasn’t he running and The Adult In The Room and blah, blah, blah…Report
Both are… more or less true.
My really spicy take is the two archetypes in question are heads of the same coin.
Also like I have never been a fan of Romney even when I kind of hoped he would turf out Ted Kennedy’s horrible old ass in ’94, but one of the little-remarked-upon things about his campaign is it was better than McCain’s (and he did better electorally, not that the two necessarily have much to do with each other).Report
Here’s a good example-
Rod Dreher’s interview with J.D. Vance, on his conversion to Catholicism:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/j-d-vance-becomes-catholic/
Dreher asks him about how his faith informs his views on politics, and Vance gives the sort of bland anodyne answers about social teaching:
“I hope my faith makes me more compassionate and to identify with people who are struggling….
Part of social conservatism’s challenge for viability in the 21st century is that it can’t just be about issues like abortion, but it has to have a broader vision of political economy, and the common good.”
That’s very good! Very uplifting, and something we can all agree on.
But then:
“To me, fundamentally the issue that most Christians confront is, which of these two political parties is the least offensive to my faith? When that’s the question, the answer is almost always going to be unsatisfactory. I am definitely critical of the way some Evangelicals have reacted to the president. But I also know that most of them aren’t doing it because they are sycophants. They’re doing it because they don’t think they have a better option.”
He views the Trump Administration as being roughly equal to the Obama/ Hypothetical Clinton Administration.
Although he didn’t specify the “equally offensive” parts, what else could it be except abortion/ same sex marriage/ trans rights?
Did he find the ACA to be offensive to Church teaching? Did he find the expansion of opportunities for women offensive?
Conversely, the pattern of deliberate racism and hostility to the personhood of immigrants isn’t offensive to him, it doesn’t violate the entire ostensible premise of Christianity?
For Vance, none of these issues seem real, or urgent. There isn’t any compelling issue at stake.
Instead, it is all abstract theology, or reactionary disdain for other people’s sex life.
The very real terror and anguish that is being inflicted on millions of people doesn’t even cross his mind as a consideration.
No matter how he ultimately votes, it won’t be in solidarity with his brothers and sisters in Christ, it will be determined by whichever candidate offends his personal litmus test the least.Report
J.D. Vance is a super-conservative through and through in generally super-liberal San Francisco-Bay Area. We do have them believe it or not. They generally come in three flavors:
1. Really, really rich venture capitalists or those that aspire to be really, really rich venture capitalists. This is J.D. Vance;
2. Old immigrants from the former Soviet Union/Eastern Bloc that have an automatic distaste of anything left-sounding even though most of them live in government housing for low-income people;
3. A small group of really old people who can remember a very different San Francisco that existed before 1967.
Now the kicker with people like Vance is that they are almost certainly interacting with people who are LGBT and/or very liberal on a day to day basis in their professional lives unless J.D. Vance figured out how to never interact with anyone.Report
Just taking this opportunity to publicly reiterate my loathing of JD Vance as a person, author/commentator, and marketing brand. That is all.Report
You have something in common with the radicals of LGM!Report
And decent and clear-minded folks everywhere, I hope.Report
He is definitely one of those people I like less with every new thing I learn about him.Report
3. Is there anybody that really remembers what Kevin Starr calls High Provincial San Francisco? They need to be practically liches now to have any clear memories of it. You need to be born somewhere between 1920 and 1935, and I might even put the cut off date at 1930, to have young adult memories of pre-hippie San Francisco.Report
I don’t know if they need to be that old but there are a handful of people in the 60 plus range who remember the more working-class SF from the pre-hippie days. Some moved here in the 1950s, others are born and bred. There used to be a guy with a shop front in Noe Valley filled with GOP kitsch and a sign that proudly said “it will always be Army Street (it was renamed to honor Cesar Chavez)Report