Late last year, I moved home to Michigan. I did so primarily for family reasons, but also because I wanted to get back in touch with parts of the country where D.C. journalists often visit but rarely stay for long.
There exists in today’s media, as one colleague recently grumbled to me, “an institutional bias against hearing what voters have to say.”
The snow was coming down sideways as I encountered a growling pride of pickup trucks jockeying for position in what was once a parking lot, searching for a place to stop searching. Some drivers had given up on circling and sat idling in anticipation of a coming vacancy. Others got creative, dropping into low gear to mount glacial embankments where yellow lines were once visible. The one thing nobody did was speed off entirely. They had come too far, defying the elements, and now the destination was in sight: the Mid-Michigan Gun & Knife Show.
It wasn’t long ago that your average working-class white voter in mid-Michigan, be they involved in agriculture or manufacturing, was a quintessential swing voter—if not a loyal Democrat. But the party’s decade long leftward drift on cultural issues, paired with Trump’s not-unrelated ascent, pushed huge numbers of them into the GOP column in 2016. This alone would not have delivered Michigan to Trump had black voter turnout been anywhere close to Obama-era levels. But the falloff was so dramatic with Hillary Clinton atop the ticket—20 percent in parts of Flint and Saginaw, not to mention Detroit and Lansing—that the door was cracked open just wide enough.
Growing up in Michigan, guns never struck me as partisan issue, at least not in the mold of taxes or abortion or labor laws. Lots of people owned them, Democrats and Republicans alike, and those who didn’t never seemed to have a problem with those who did. No successful politician that I could recall went around campaigning on gun control.
MICHAEL SCHENK leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Wait a minute,” he said, squinting as if he couldn’t see me standing two feet away. “You think there are Democrats”—he glanced from side to side—“here?”
NATE WHITE, a 58-year-old retired military man from Auburn, Michigan, said he never votes a straight-party ticket and supports both Democrats and Republicans at the local level. “I’ll probably have to vote for Trump again,” he scoffed, “because there’s not a Democrat worth a shit.”
White then corrected himself: “Except Tulsi Gabbard. But they won’t let her on stage.” What about any of the others? Bernie Sanders? Elizabeth Warren? Joe Biden? “Biden?” White howled. “He’s a bigger crook than Trump!”
MELISSA GILLET, a 53-year-old social worker who lives in Birch Run, described herself as politically independent. She rarely voted prior to 2016. The reason she came out for Trump was because he spoke to her concerns—specifically the threats facing her kids, 18 and 20, in terms of “the crime, the drugs, the jobs leaving, everything.” Like many of the people I spoke with, she disapproved of the president’s antics. “Should he be more professional, more president-like?” she asked. “Yes.” And unlike many of the people I spoke with, she said Trump’s presidency hasn’t helped her bottom line. “Things aren’t any better for me,” she said, “but then again, they’re not getting any worse, either. So I guess I’ll take that.”
I spent all day at the gun show. Seven hours. Interviewed people until my hand cramped up from writing. And Schenk was right: Not one of them identified as a Democrat.
There was another level of uniformity that surprised me. Of the roughly two dozen Trump supporters I ended up speaking with, they were evenly split in terms of their certainty on Election Day 2016. One half recalled holding their noses in voting for him; the other half swore they never had a second thought. But when I asked the members of the former group how likely they were to vote for him again, every single person said their reluctance had vanished. There were no more doubts, no more concerns. He had passed—well, if not every test, the most important ones.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... ers-102790
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan