My life as a swing state voter
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Today, we will be talking about how I have lived in swing states for nearly all of my adult life, as well as my observations from “on the ground” here in Philly. I wish I were in a state of swinging a golf club right now, but instead I am in the swing state of Pennsylvania, posting this blog.
Make sure you read all the way to the end for a brand-new Media Events Content Module called A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar.
I first voted in 2008, the year when Obama won North Carolina by a little over 14,000 votes, which nobody since Jimmy Carter had managed to do. We were in play! Obama’s edge came from the Raleigh-Durham triangle area, aka the part of the state where I was because I was going to UNC at the time. Go Heels.
Oh my god people were so excited. Can you imagine how crazy it felt, as a college kid, to happen to exist at a time and place where you and thousands of other people who’d just voted for the first time actually helped decide an election? That was a cycle when youth turnout helped sway the election Obama’s way across the board, but this shit was OD. That spring, our basketball team won the NCAA tournament. We absolutely do not need to talk about Tyler Hansbrough and Ty Lawson’s NBA careers, just as we do not need to talk about Obama’s actual presidency. All of those things really did seem like good ideas at the time.
Thus began my career as a voter. Ever since, I’ve happened to live in swing states for all but one election — 2012, when I lived in New York and voted absentee back in North Carolina. I live in Philadelphia now, and the media and pundits and pollsters say Pennsylvania is one of the like three states that will decide the election this year, and it is kind of emotionally exhausting. I’m used to “paying attention” to politics during election season, or rather I’m used to noticing politics, because the battle for my vote is always happening right in front of me. It’s weird to be told your vote matters more than someone else’s does, especially when it’s actually true.
In the past few days, we’ve begun seeing small groups of people wearing gorpy clothes that signify off-duty affluence, crowded around a phone in a state of bewilderment. These are clearly people canvassing for Kamala Harris.
Just for fun, I did some googling and saw that the Harris campaign makes its canvassers download an app called MiniVAN whenever they go out and knock on doors. It has a fairly long web page about how to integrate its tech into your canvassing flow (I assume that this is the sort of language that its creators used when pitching it to various campaigns), along with a PDF containing a lot of detailed instructions on how to properly canvass.
I remember my experiences canvassing for Bernie in 2020 with Emilie as being fun, low-pressure, and app-free. I think they just gave us a list of addresses to hit on a clipboard and to mark the people who said they’d vote for our guy. I will never forget when a woman told us to go away because they were “a Warren household,” only for her husband, who turned out to be a well-known indie musician, to sneak back outside and tell us he was secretly voting for Bernie. Good times.
Emilie and I recently made a new friend. He is the boyfriend of the woman who lives across the street from us. We had our first real conversation with him one Friday evening ago, when we came home from walking the dogs only to find him standing on the railing of his stoop. He was holding an iPad that was blasting Soundgarden, craning his neck for the best look at the moon he could muster.
He is a Gen X dude with spiky gray hair and told us about how he’s been getting up at five in the morning to look at a comet; a few minutes later, he told our dogs that he was drunk. I told him that Soundgarden kicked ass; he said “hell yeah” and said that Chris Cornell did not, in fact, die from a drug overdose, but instead was killed while trying to take down a pedophile ring.
“He was gonna expose ‘em, so they took him out,” he said, before mumbling something about Jeffery Epstein. His girlfriend is the kindest person on our block and her family has lived here for generations; he just moved in. He rides around the neighborhood on a motorized skateboard, which is an important detail that I could not fit in elsewhere. He has mixed feelings about wearing shirts in public.
We asked him how he knew so much about astronomy and he told us that he thought earth was boring, not in a “I’m a crazy guy!” kind of way but instead a Gen X “over it” one. He showed us an app on his iPad that tracked the movement of the moon and stars and could even show you where all the Starlink satellites were, which was enough for him to start telling us about how much he loves Elon Musk. “He does so much stuff, he’s really trying to save the world,” he told us. “He’s here right now, campaigning.”
I was initially confused as to why our new friend was at home when he could have been watching Elon Musk talk, but he had told us how fucking kickass the moon looked that night, so it made sense the more I thought about it.
The next morning, I decided, because I am a sicko, to watch the entirety of Elon Musk’s “town hall for Trump” in Philadelphia. I don’t actually know if that was its name, but I use quotes here because, within the first five minutes, it became clear that neither the audience or Musk himself were actually that into Donald Trump. The event consisted of Elon standing on a stage in front of a big American flag like he was trying to do the world’s dorkiest recreation of the opening scene in Patton, half-heartedly delivering Trump talking points in the style of a TED Talk, and then fielding questions from the audience.
The Q&A portion of the event was genuinely fascinating, if only because of the insight it offered into the sort of person who is really into Elon Musk. The questioners were usually young and usually men, often very nervous, and almost always there to give a long, stammering speech that was followed by a request for business advice or a job, and it felt less like a political event than it did a Reddit atheism version of a TV church show.
One guy began his mic time with a long preamble about how he lost his job because of the “woke mind virus,” and then asked Elon if he could incorporate his app, which involved farts or butts or something, into X. Another was wearing a t-shirt with the name of his beef jerky company on it and asked how his beef jerky company could become the biggest beef jerky company in the world. There was a 12-year-old girl there, who calmly and assertively announced that she helped design some sort of navigation system on rocket ships and then asked Elon when people under the age of 18 would be allowed to go to space, and Elon was like “yeah sure we gotta get some damn kids up there.” There were a lot of questions about science that felt like the result of a post-Rick & Morty Wikipedia binge, and one guy who looked like he’d seen some serious shit in his life harangued Elon about how an extremely self-published-on-Amazon ebook has revealed the truth that SpaceX has secretly been putting glitter in clouds in order to cool the earth and asked if he would be allowed to disclose this to the public under a Trump presidency.
Elon responded to each question as if it were a commonplace thing for someone to say to him, because this is the social world he hath wrought. He comes from a business scene where you have to take every moonshot you’ve got — you do not become the next Elon Musk without asking the current Elon Musk to put you on, no matter how unlikely it is — and so it is likely that most random people he meets are annoying supplicants whose fawning sublimates into a “big ask” faster than you can say “Y Combinator.”
Needless to say, this was not a political rally as much as it was some other, very confusing thing that happened to be punctuated by dorky College Republicans beamed in from Wharton asking questions about fiscal policy that everyone hated. It is worth looking up, I think, though, because it lays bare the political strategy that Donald Trump and his allies are following during these final few weeks of the race, which is to be as incoherent and apolitical as the American body politic itself.
Following two assassination attempts, there’s been a shift in Trump’s public behavior, though correlation does not imply causation in a man who claims, depending on the audience, that the attempts on his life have either made him a deeply religious person or had no effect on him whatsoever. But ever since then, for whatever reason, he seems to have rededicated himself to the things he loves most: going on TV, hanging out, and acting weird around people who love him enough that they will pretend he’s normal.
He’s created one pseudo-event after the next, from asking Theo Von about cocaine to blasting “YMCA” and all of his other favorite songs to serving fries at McDonalds while wishing Kamala Harris a happy birthday. If this kept going for six more weeks, I would bet a thousand dollars that he’d end up doing a cameo in a Fivio Foreign music video just for the hell of it, but since it’s only two weeks away I’d only bet a hundred.
MAGA, for all the odious things it espouses, has in my view evolved into a benign lifestyle brand, centered around this ostensibly political figure whose entire thing is that he says shit he doesn’t actually believe so the audience never takes it at face value. His words are like Phish lyrics, secondary to the jams which are secondary to the spectacle of the gathering itself, the feeling of being one with thousands of others while you watch somebody noodle on a stage. It feels like he doesn’t actually care whether or not he wins, which means, somehow, that he probably will.
The Democrats’ “closing argument,” meanwhile, seems to be focused on two things. First, they’re trying to bring in voters from the non-MAGA parts of the Republican party by bringing in the Cheney family, talking about how great the military is, and doubling down on their support for Israel. Second, they’re trying to prevent the left from leaking away into protest votes for Jill Stein or not at all because of their appeals to the right. With the right, the Democrats are making concrete promises: Moderation on taxes, Republicans in the cabinet, keeping a Palestinian speaker off the stage at the DNC. With the left, they’re Judge Smails all the way: We’ll get nothing, and like it.
The other night, we randomly cut the TV to MSNBC. This is something we are not in the habit of doing but did anyway, compelled by a force greater than either of us. For we are swing state voters, temporary weathervanes for messaging in all forms.
We were greeted by the sunken, sallow face of Lawrence O’Donnell—a haughty man whose entire bearing goes a very long way towards explaining why the working class is abandoning the Democratic Party—giving a long, paternalistic speech aimed directly at swing state voters such as ourselves. The gist of what he was saying was that people who were upset about the Biden/Harris administration’s response to the crisis in Gaza—which has lately alternated between deference to Netanyahu and impotent appeals to his morality accompanied by imaginary red lines that he will inevitably cross with glee—had to vote for Harris no matter what, because if Trump won then democracy would be over and it would be our fault.
He was stern, cajoling, actively aggressive, and his deepest ire was reserved for those who, on moral and/or “fuck it” grounds, were planning on voting for Jill Stein. Take it away, Lawrence:
Jill Stein is never going to be elected to any office in the United States of America. Never. She will never matter. It’s easy to be perfect on difficult issues when you’re not trying to win more than one percent of the vote. [...] [Stein and her running mate] are not running against Donald Trump. They are running against Kamala Harris and running for Donald Trump.
He went on to say that, while he’s voted third party in the past, “I’ve never voted in a state where my presidential vote matters.” He went on to directly address some guy named Bob, a Michigan resident who’d been quoted in some article saying that he was tired of voting for the lesser of two evils and, after sucking it up and voting Dem for years, had enough and was going Stein Mode. “A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for mass deportations,” he said, tossing in the implication that if a Stein voter’s friend were to be deported, that friend would absolutely blame them. The performance was breathtaking, a mask-off speech for the ages.
The problem with this tactic—telling people that they’re naughty if they don’t vote in favor of the Constitution and polite society or whatever—is that appeals to responsibility and duty do not work. Everybody hates being told what to do, especially by the proverbial adults in the room whose entire project is centered around staying in the room, twiddling their thumbs while scolding the children. Meanwhile, the more people are told that voting for Trump is a bad idea, the more they will do it, because the thrill they get when they push the button will be compounded.
The next time we saw our across-the-street neighbors, it was the middle of the day. They were holding hands, bounding down the street like a couple of gleeful teenagers in love, wearing matching white hats that read “TRUMP FORCE CAPTAIN” on them in gold. They stopped to chat with us, vibrating, with the help of the beer in his koozie and the joint that we could still smell, on a completely different wavelength. They’d woken up that day with nothing to do and had decided to go out canvassing because why wouldn’t they do something to save their country; they asked if we wanted a free Trump sign and we politely declined.
Whenever Emilie and I talk to Trump supporters, we sidestep any potential conflict by saying that we hate both parties, which is true, but remain vague about the details. It usually works. They were going canvassing, they told us. There were no apps, no sense of grim determination, just a list of addresses and unbridled joy.
They were headed down to the Trump field office to pick up the relevant literature; the last time they’d gone out they’d left handwritten notes. They were convinced — convinced! — that he was going to win Philly. It did not matter that Biden got 80 percent of the vote here last time, and that Kamala would likely carry Philadelphia County as well, because statistics cannot kill vibes. “It’s incredible,” the woman said. “Everybody we’ve talked to is all in for him.”
I didn’t have the heart to bring up that campaigns send people out not to sway undecided voters but to remind the already converted that it was time to vote, because it is cruel to challenge someone’s optimism especially when they’re drinking a beer at 2 p.m.
It was impossible for them to envision a world in which Donald Trump did not win the election. The alternative was too horrifying. He would win, he had to win, not for any concrete reason but simply because, like so many MSNBC watchers with Harris, the consequences of him losing were as existential as they were vague. So instead, we wished them good luck, watching as they skipped down the street to go save America.
A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar
Stelios Kazantzidis — “Υπάρχω”
This dude was one of the main Greek singers in the latter half of the 20th Century, but I’m not gonna sit here and pretend that I’m some sort of expert on Greek music. Instead, I am an expert on places to take my dad and his two buddies, one of whom is Greek, when they come to Philadelphia. And by that, I mean I took them to this cafe near our house that’s owned by a deeply eccentric French man who loves Italy, and also apparently Greece, because when he found out my dad’s friend was Greek he put this song on and started singing it, and then my dad’s Greek friend started singing along too. It was a whole thing, and also I get it because this song kicks ass.
By the way, if you enjoyed this, wanna kick me a dollar?
Drew Millard
