A week before the election, my dad was visiting and talked to me about his gut feeling that former President Donald Trump might win. He was clear about his choice to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “But what are they doing?” he asked me, exasperated.
“They need to level with people about the economy,” he continued. “I know so many people who can’t afford a place to live any more. People do not want to hear, ‘Well, actually the economy is good.’”
Then suddenly he pivoted away from Harris to liberals more generally, and away from the economy into culture.
“You know, another thing: I’m tired of feeling like I’m going to get jumped on for saying something wrong, for using the wrong words,” my dad confided, becoming uncharacteristically emotional. “I don’t want to say things that will offend anyone. I want to be respectful. But I think Trump is reaching a lot of people like me who didn’t learn a special way to talk at college and feel constantly talked down to by people who have.”
At 71 years old, my dad is still working full time, helping to run a delicatessen at a local farmers’ market. He didn’t go to college. Raised Mennonite and socially conservative, he is nonetheless open-minded and curious. When his cousins came out as gay in the 1980s, he accepted them for who they are.
I recognize that I’m likely part of the problem, but was there a lot of, “well, actually the economy is good”?
What I remember from the campaign (from my own limited media stream) is that Harris openly acknowledged that prices were too high, both for groceries and housing, and gave admittedly broad plans to address those challenges, e.g. home buyer credits, home building targets, and child tax credits. I’m not trying to be an asshole, but I legit didn’t see this as the “abandonment of the working class” that has been the popular narrative recently.