A Fresh Idea: Visiting the Provinces to Celebrate a Random Trump Supporter
By 
Above: Let’s drink to the salt of the Earth!
Syracuse — Shannon Kennedy, son of Jack, retired military officer, ex-stockbroker
Whoa, whoa — are we going to find out that a white male former military officer and stockbroker voted Republican in 2016? STOP THE PRESSES! Anyway, on to the only reason for this thing to exist:
voted twice for Barack Obama (“so poised, a really got-it-together guy”) before his conversion to Donald Trump. Now he’s a true believer, even if he thinks “Donald definitely needs to button it sometimes.”
I know you can’t expect the typical columnist to do structural analysis or anything fancy like that. But here’s the thing. In 2008 Obama, a good candidate running in insanely favorable conditions for the out party, got the highest share of the popular vote for a Democratic candidate since 1964, by a substantial margin, and then ran as an incumbent in decent economic conditions. By definition, this means there has to be a significant number of typical Republican-leaners who voted Obama in 2008, and some would have repeated in 2012. Most of them were going to vote for any Republican in 2016 whether Biden or Sanders or O’Malley or Unbeatable was the Democratic nominee. There is, in other words, no reason to think that this random anecdote will actually tell us anything.
We are driving around Syracuse, population 143,000. It’s pretty bleak. Most industry and manufacturers are long gone. Poverty and drugs are scourges, as in countless towns across America. Service industries and Syracuse University are significant providers of jobs now. Kennedy recalls a different town in his youth, a thriving magnet to immigrants.
And I went to to a Byrne Dairy and you couldn’t even get a stale Kaiser roll with margarine wrapped in cellophane!
Seriously, while there are multiple places in upstate or Western NY I’d be happy to live, I wouldn’t really say Syracuse is one of them. But it’s also not clear why any of this is relevant, leaving aside the “drugs, poverty, and a decline in manufacturing” are ubiquitous. First of all, Syracuse was if anything in worse shape in 2008 than in 2016, so this tells us nothing about Obama-Trump voters. And, even worse, while there are plenty of Obama-Trump counties upstate, Onondaga County isn’t one of them ; Clinton carried it by 14 points. So this is just pure, lazy rube-running. “People in this BLEAK URBAN HELLSCAPE registered their discontent with the NEOLIBERAL ORDER by OVERWHELMINGLY VOTING FOR HILLARY CLINTON.” OK. And without any larger trend, we’re left with “typical Republican voter votes Republican in election where structural conditions favor the Republican Party.”
Still, perhaps this profilee has some interesting political insights?
If there’s a main source of Kennedy’s anger, it’s that this has become such a quaint, outmoded question in today’s America of lobbyists and line-my-pockets politics. “Trust the Clintons? Not with the Lord’s breakfast,” he says.
DRAIN THE SWAMP! Why, if we had elected Hillary Clinton, she might be funneling taxpayer money to properties she owns! Needless to say, a NYT columnist can’t really get into how someone might get the impression that Donald Trump was the less corrupt candidate in 2016.
He tells me he leans right, but he believes that every American should have a functioning public transit system (“as in Germany and Japan”) and a good national health service. He thought Obama could be “a breath of fresh air,” and was initially in favor of “Obamacare,” until it “went off the rails because the exchanges were not competitive.”
So why does he support Trump, who has sought to undermine the exchanges and also tried to massively cut Medicaid? Needless to say, we don’t learn. But that’s not the point — to assume that the typical voter votes based on policy is to get cause and effect backwards.
Then along came Trump. “The thing about him,” Kennedy tells me, “is that there’s forward energy. He’s like a horse with blinders at the Kentucky Derby. If there’s another horse in the way, knock it out and ride the rail. I listened to him, on immigration, on draining the swamp, on lobbyists, and I liked that. As I recall, it was ‘We the people’ not ‘We the empowered.’ ”
Again, the lesson here is that “in an election where conditions structurally favor Republicans, Republican-leaning voters will generally find random reasons to vote Republican.” Only if that’s the lesson these things are pointless, and so we get endless examples of these things.
A little over a year in, Kennedy remains a fervent Trump supporter. He insists that he has no illusions. Trump is “brash,” a “rogue.” He’s also “a fighter, a scrapper, the kind of guy who says ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ” He’s proving his stamina against the naysayers “who hate the man with a vileness that is very un-American.” He’s draining Washington “of people with contempt for the people they represent.” The tax cut will be “beneficial.”
And what of the president’s racism, lies, warmongering outbursts, vulgarity, and attacks on a free press and the judiciary? “Go beyond the noise,” Kennedy tells me. “Don’t take him at face value. If I thought he was a racist, I’d be off the train so fast you’d have to mail me my shadow. Respect the office of the presidency.”
“Conservative white guy wants to stick it to neoliberalism with…a massive upper-class tax cut.” Seems like the kind of voter Dems need to be focusing on!
The message is clear. The same old, same old (for example, Joe Biden) won’t work.
Well, I agree that the Dems shouldn’t run Biden. Although I have no idea what in Kennedy’s defenses of Trump compels this conclusion in themselves.
A whiff of got-the-system-rigged elitism from the Democrats will be fatal. A strong economic program for working Americans is essential. Look to purple-state America, not blue-state coastal America, for a candidate who is grappling with the country’s toughest issues and is strong on can-do, down-to-earth values.
“A conservative white guy voted for a Manhattan billionaire who lives in a literally gold-plated penthouse, proving that Dems need a salt-of-the-Earth purple stater, who will run on a strong economic program for working Americans, like a massive tax cut for horse owners.” Sorry, Kirsten Gillibrand — you might have won in one of the actually Republican parts of upstate NY, but you’re out of luck!
The standards at the NYT opinion page are bleaker than any blighted urban landscape.