Home / General / NYT does 2000th story on why nobody is doing stories on America’s most ignored demographic (white people who voted for Trump)

NYT does 2000th story on why nobody is doing stories on America’s most ignored demographic (white people who voted for Trump)

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When I first became a baseball fan as a child of tender years in the early 1970s, Joe Rudi couldn’t ever come to the plate in any nationally televised baseball game in which Curt Gowdy was doing the play by play (which meant essentially all such games during that simpler, more innocent time) without the audience being reminded by Curt Gowdy that Joe Rudi was a terribly underrated player.  Even at that age I began to perceive a certain tension — even irony — in this situation.

Issac Chotiner interviews Jeremy Peters about his recent piece in which the mystery of why a woman who founded a hard-right PAC voted for Donald Trump is explored, and the results are not pretty:

Chotnier: On the PAC website, it says about her, “Having long been passionate about American politics, she became active in Dr. Ron Paul’s presidential campaign in 2012, and completed the Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership’s basic- and advanced-level training in grass roots activism. Gina also served as Co-Coordinator for the Campaign for Liberty in West Virginia before founding the Liberty Political Action Committee of West Virginia. An avid liberty activist and Constitutional scholar, Gina puts her skills and experience in advocacy and sales to work to fight for the individual rights of every West Virginian as enshrined in our Constitution.”

Peters: Right, I’ve read that. Here’s the thing: She is not a political operative. There is an effort by a handful of liberal journalists who write for liberal publications and Democratic activists and strategists to portray her as some kind of bigwig political operative, and that I was somehow dishonest or misleading by not identifying her as such. She is not a political operative. She is an accounting executive who had apparently done some politics in the past in her spare time.* There was also this false information on Twitter about what her political role actually was, saying she was the chairman of this PAC. She isn’t the chairman of that PAC. She isn’t even on the board. She is a senior adviser or consultant or something. And when I talked to her, she never brought this up. She never said, “Oh, by the way, I ran this PAC for Ron Paul.” You would think that if it was something that was a big part of her life, she would have mentioned it. She didn’t.

That’s some ace investigative reporting there Jeremy.

Peters: I don’t see this line of reporting as a Trump supporter story, or a Trump supporter beat. These are Republicans, Republicans who are being constantly confronted with the question: How can you still support this guy? And a lot of them ask themselves that, and a lot of them really wrestle with it.

Chotnier: When you say, “wrestle with it,” I have no doubt they are thinking about it, but that phrasing implies there is a chance they could go either way, and that I am wary of believing.

Peters: You don’t think there is a possibility that a lot of them stay home in November? I absolutely do, and I think Gina could be one of them.

Oh yeah, there’s a real good chance of that.  I mean just because this woman is in — conservatively speaking — the 99.9th percentile of political engagement relative to the voting public as a whole that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t have sat out the midterms because of Donald Trump’s rhetoric, if only the “left” hadn’t been so shrill in response to that rhetoric.  (Always both sides. Always.)

I mean I don’t even know where to go with this.  Note that one question Peters never “wrestles with” is whether the claims of this founder of a far-right PAC that the media and the left are being “unfair” to Trump have any basis in reality whatsoever.  Because that would seem kind of relevant to this heartwarming little excursion into the hearts and minds of these deeply conflicted Republicans, who are apparently 100% certain to vote for Trump because a sophomore at UCLA complaining about Taco Tuesday being a form of cultural appropriation turned them all into supporters of an outright fascist. Or something.

 

 

 

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