Understanding Trump’s Voters

I grew up in an area much like this one, where Confederate flags were spray painted on trucks with slapdash exuberance and men walking down the roadside with guns slung over their shoulders didn’t seem out of the ordinary. People in my town took care of my single mother and her four children: stray groceries and fifty dollar bills were always finding their way into our beaten up minivan. And when that minivan broke down, you betcha our mechanic fixed it for free. That’s why I love my area, and the area surrounding Houghton. That’s also why I am so upset at the rhetoric surrounding Donald Trump’s election. It demonizes those people and places I care for so deeply, and I am ashamed to say our college has not done much better at understanding the nuances of the situation.

Before you start feeling too self-righteous (or run away screaming), let me also say this: I consider myself to be liberal, and I understand the situation I described in the first paragraph might not work the same for everyone. I’ve often wondered if the color of my family’s skin would have affected our neighbors’ generosity, had we been a minority group. I’ve also wondered how it must feel for people of color to drive down those rural Western New York roads and see a bunch of white guys openly carrying rifles. Probably not too cozy. I deeply empathize with those who have felt marginalized or threatened in that way, and I understand why Trump’s presidency is so disturbing. It’s disturbing to me too. However, that does not change the fact that he is our president. The only thing we can examine and change now is how we react to it.

Thus far I have seen many of my progressive brothers and sisters act in an unbecoming way when dealing with Trump’s election. I’m not talking about peaceful protests: my husband and some of my best friends have participated in several post-election marches. I’m talking about the riots and the days of mourning without action and the language that tells many of my family members and friends that they are sexist, bigoted racists for voting for Trump. But many, perhaps most, of the people who voted for Trump didn’t choose him because of his immigration policies or his misogynistic “locker room talk.” They chose him because they didn’t think they could survive another term under a Liberal administration. As my uncle so eloquently put it over Christmas dinner, “I know Trump’s bat shit crazy, but at least minimum wage might not go up.”

To many of you, my uncle’s statement might seem callused and unaware. But if you understood that he’s a small business owner, desperately trying to keep a tiny grocery store afloat, what would you say then? What if you could see that grocery store, the only business in town, and one of maybe two job opportunities within a thirty minute drive? My grandfather opened it forty years ago, built it up from the ground, and my uncle is scrambling to keep the doors open. With the incremental climb of minimum wage, along with increased taxes and healthcare costs, he’s worried he might have to lay off more employees.

My uncle is not alone in his feelings of being overlooked by a Liberal administration. A man I spoke with recently, a first generation Chinese-American combustion engineer, was laid off when the coal energy plant he worked at was closed by the Obama administration. He had little sympathy for the environmental reasons behind President Obama’s decision because he and many others in his community no longer had jobs. These are not the people we think of when we sling insults around about Trump supporters.

One of our problems at Houghton is that we don’t have much interaction with the folks in our extended community. We are a city on the hill, so far removed that we can’t see the hurting people who live at the bottom. On the news, we see a man with a beer belly and a trucker hat hurling racist insults in the name of Trump, but we don’t see the moderates, the people who are just trying to survive in the only way they know how. My challenge and my hope is that you would go into our community and actually listen to these people, without defensiveness or excuses. If you can’t do that, I understand, but please: stop asking how Trump was elected and start trying to understand those who elected him.