Some of the progressives in the audience at Beth Macy’s listening tour event in Waynesboro earlier this week chafed at hearing her say that she plans to reach out to disaffected MAGA voters.
Here we go again, is the complaint, just like last year, when Kamala Harris seemed to bend over backwards to the wrong people, who aren’t going to vote Democrat, no matter how hard you try.
ICYMI
My guess here: the people complaining didn’t grow up with folks who would become the backbone of MAGA, don’t have family members who vote MAGA, don’t understand, like I do, that these folks are, yes, misguided, and yes, they vote against their best interests, but also, they’re starting to realize that they’re getting screwed over by the people they vote for every two years.
You can write them off if that’s easy for you, and it probably is – they get what they deserve, right?
I can’t write them off; they’re the reason I do what I do.
Macy, who announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination for the Sixth District congressional seat last week, is far more widely known than little ol’ me.
I wrote and self-published a book, Poverty of Imagination, in 2019 on my experiences as somebody who grew up poor in rural MAGA, became a journalist, and is trying to bridge the divide.
Nobody read it, but I tried.
Macy is a bestselling author of books like Factory Man, Dopesick and Paper Girl that have gotten that story out to millions.
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I haven’t yet met or spoken with Macy about her motivations, but I’m reading Paper Girl, and it’s like we knew each other as kids.
We both grew up in working-class homes in circumstances where you’re not expected to do more than finish high school and settle for a low-paying job and struggle from paycheck-to-paycheck like your parents and grandparents.
We both got out, so to speak, because of Pell Grants and scholarships from civic groups – though I shouldn’t say so much that I “got out,” because I made the conscious decision after college to stay in the hometown to try to advocate for the people that I grew up with, even if they don’t so much advocate for me.
To wit there: I’ve run for office twice in my lifetime, for student-body president in high school in 1989, and for a seat on Waynesboro City Council in 2008.
I’m not only 0-for-2; both were landslides.
So, I write – I report, I try to make sense of why things are the way they are, and effort to figure out how I can convince people like the ones who grew up with me in the trailer park that things don’t have to be the way they are.
But here I’ll say, and it’s hard for me to say, and to admit, it’s not automatic that voting Democrat is the solution for them.
I mean, it should be, but being somebody who has toes in both worlds – Augusta County, which voted 70 percent-plus for Donald Trump three times, and the elites of journalism and Democratic Party politics in Richmond and DC – I don’t see my cohorts in the Democratic Party elites doing a single thing to try to understand the folks in the trailer parks, the apartment complexes, the small houses with big mortgages on country roads.
The approach is, basically, well, they’re all racists, misogynists, all they care about is their guns and their churches with White Jesus, they’re … irredeemable.
I know for a fact that, yeah, plenty of the folks that I knew and still know fit that description – but plenty don’t, and it’s those folks, the ones who think they’re Republicans because their parents and grandparents were Republicans, who need to be the focus.
Plenty of working-class Republican voters only got health insurance because of Obamacare, and are going to either see their premiums increase dramatically because of the end of the subsidies, or are just going to drop back off the rolls entirely again.
Plenty want their kids to have a chance to climb the ladder, and want better schools – and aren’t better off with the MAGAs taking money from public K-12 education and giving it to rich people to put toward their kids’ private-school tuitions.
We saw this past cycle in Virginia that not as many of these voters are motivated by the LGBTQ+ hate as the MAGA elites think – the Winsome Earle-Sears campaign put millions toward TV spots about trans kids in bathrooms, and rural areas up and down the spine of the I-81 corridor moved noticeably toward the Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, because her campaign focused its messaging on kitchen-table issues, not where your kid goes potty.
A big criticism that I’ve had of the MAGA movement is that it’s just rich people pretending to be looking out for the best interests of average folks, while distracting its base with social issues – where kids go potty, rounding up brown people – as they plunder the U.S. treasury to their own bottom-line benefit.
Where Democrats piss me off is, it feels like their leaders are also just rich people, who, in our case, pretend to themselves that they’re looking out for the little guy, the problem with that being, they don’t know the first thing about average people, because they don’t know a single one.
The folks giving Beth Macy hell at her listening tour event the other night are part of the root cause of our disconnect with working-class voters.
They want Democratic candidates to give up on those voters.
The reason I do what I do is, I want those folks to have just as much a chance to make it as Donald Trump’s kids do.
It’s a fever dream, I know.
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Chris Graham
