Could They Flip?

This is a fascinating story about a white, college educated woman from Augusta, GA.  With all the usual caveats about the plural of anecdote not being data, it sheds an interesting light on a prevailing issue.  When Clinton lost in 2016, much was made of the fact that she lost white women.  However, she did barely prevail with white women outside the South (52%).  She fared much better overall with white women who had college degrees. 

The question is whether those white women with college degrees in suburban Atlanta and Charlotte and Charleston and Tampa and Nashville could flip their allegiances (the way many did in the suburbs of Philly in 2018).  That's the appeal, frankly, of someone like Joe Biden. His basic normalcy is reassuring to those women (and men) voters who are thinking of moving away from Trump's GOP. It's unsure that they will, but if they do....

Equally fascinating in the piece is the husband of the woman profiled.  He's the sort of person who tried college, hated it and returned home.  He made a conscious choice to reject that outside world and return to the ways he grew up in.  He will never live anywhere but the county he was born in. When he speaks about Trump, he describes a man that bares no resemblance to the grotesque in the White House.  Read the following:

Besides her, his world had been a world of men. He kept the deer heads on the garage wall because they reminded him of some of the best times of his life hunting with his father, his brothers, his friends and the bonds they formed then. He went to the Sunday men’s group at the Baptist church and prayed the prayers of men who wished to be “godly,” by which Phillip meant “honest” and “responsible,” the sort of man a neighbor could call if a limb fell on his driveway and he needed help removing it. He kept guns not just because he liked to hunt but because he felt that being a responsible man meant protecting his family, and protecting his America from a rogue government if things came to that.

“All it takes is for the wrong guy to get in there,” he said. “I want to be in control. I don’t want to be defenseless.”

He preferred an America that left him alone: one where government was small, gun rights protected and borders secure, all of which he had felt was threatened during the presidency of Barack Obama, and all of which he felt was restored by the election of Donald Trump.

“I feel like I got somebody on my team,” Phillip said. “Someone to look out for me in the world. I feel I have someone on my side, helping me look out for the safety of my family.”

He knew that Miranda had some issues with Trump’s behavior.

“She finds Trump sometimes a little off-putting with his personality,” he said. “She does get kind of like, ‘I wish he wouldn’t say that.’ But I’m more of a results guy. I’m not as concerned about his brash statements as Miranda. I think he’s probably grown a lot as a man in a good way. I see him as being a gracious man.”

He thought about why he and Miranda might see things differently.

“She tends to run on emotion,” he said. “Not to make a sexist statement, but a lot of women do. I run more on logic. I think that balances us well.”

Here he is: the man who can see in Trump...graciousness.  Who can see "results."  If Covid-19 turns into a worst case scenario, with a million dead Americans and a global recession, he will explain it all away as being China's fault or God's will.  He's lost to reason.

But if white Southern women link arms with the Democratic party, it puts into play Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and perhaps eventually Tennessee and Florida.