Worlds Apart, Living Right Next Door
Chapter Five. The Undecided Voter.
To be honest, when I first met Violet, I thought she was an all-hands-on-deck Democrat. She was at a progressive church with her teenage daughter and I just assumed. I wasn’t completely wrong. She is a Democrat but she is an undecided one, and, she might vote for Donald Trump. She cites the economy.
There is a lot Violet doesn’t like about Trump. She doesn’t like his character, nor the way he behaves. She doesn’t like his position on LGBT rights and she certainly doesn’t like his position on a woman’s right to choose. She doesn’t want to go back. But. The last four years have been difficult financially for her and for her clients. She says that she is “torn.”
Violet is a life-long Democrat. Her parents are Democrats, her grandparents too - on both sides of the family. Her great grandmother was alive when women did not have the right to vote, and was part of the movement to change that. Her grandmother, her “granny,” as she describes her, lived through the Civil Rights Movement and believed in equal rights for all. “My granny taught me that women should have rights,” Violet says. “She remembers a time when women didn’t have choices.” When Violet’s cousin came out as gay her grandmother was his biggest supporter. Her mother tells her that her grandmother would roll over in her grave if she thought her granddaughter was voting for Trump.
We meet for a coffee in the artist community town of Marshall in Madison County. It is August, the week of the Democrats’ National Convention in Chicago. Kamala Harris has yet to make an impression on Violet and yet she isn’t planning to watch. Biden however has made an impression on her, and when it comes to the economy she doesn’t think he has done a good job.
Violet is a mental health professional. Many of her clients are from lower income families and so she gets a first hand view of the struggles they face: children going without food, parents making choices between medication and groceries. She has walked into homes that were cold because families were afraid to turn on the furnace for fear they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills.
“I know some people might say that's not Biden's fault,” Violet says. “Maybe it's just the times, maybe it's where we are. I don't know, but I just feel like right now we're really in a bind.”
Even though they do well, “my husband makes good money,” Violet says, sometimes it feels like they are living paycheck to paycheck. Her daughter is off to college next year and she is applying for scholarships because, otherwise, they will need to take out student loans. I ask her what she knows about Biden’s efforts to forgive some student loans and she is not enthused. “The frustrating thing about that is, if he does that, that will come out of taxpayer dollars, and so that could set us back too.” She recognizes that her family was doing fine before Trump, but says that, in planning their summer vacation this year she had to, as she puts it, “pinch my pennies.”
She brings up the media. “Sometimes it's hard to know what to believe,” Violet says. “There’s people that sit and watch Fox News and they get one side, and [there’s people] they watch CNN, and they get another side. And so it's very hard. I mean, it feels like we're in some kind of third world country, or some dictatorship, where we're fed this information and propaganda, where we're told what to believe.”
And then she tells me the lie I hear often here: Biden’s decision to shut down the XL pipeline means the US is no longer producing its own oil. The exact opposite is true. And, Biden oversaw the largest sale of oil ever from US petroleum reserves to try to combat fuel price increases in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Violet relies on her newsfeed algorithm to stay informed. She’s not oblivious to what is going on, she tells me, but, in truth, her focus is local news. Her world is Madison County. She is a proud Appalachian. “These are my mountains,” she says. Her grandmother used to say the same thing. And, while she has traveled - she’s been to Cancun, she’s been to Alaska, she’s been on cruises to the Bahamas - given her preference she would rather beach on the Outer Banks in North Carolina, holiday in New Orleans, Louisiana, St. Augustine, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia. “I love the South,” she says. “They are my people.”
She hasn’t heard that Trump has said that he would be a dictator on day 1 - “he said that?” - and she hadn’t heard that he had told a room full of evangelicals that they only needed to vote this one time. She seems quite nonchalant about this. Politicians, she says, “they'll say whatever they think that those people want to hear, and that’s frustrating too.”
Violet is worried about climate change. “You can’t say it’s not a real thing,” she says. “We will eventually get there,” she says, but not as fast as “some” democrats would like. Violet imagines a day when the only cars our great, great grandchildren drive are electric, and how hard it will be for them to believe that their great, great, grandparents once drove gasoline cars. “They’ll be saying how awful we were.”
Violet shows me around Marshall, and as we walk she tells me about a teenage girl who came to her for counsel. The girl was struggling with her sexuality, and thought she might be gay. Her father, who is a Baptist, told her that if she came out as lesbian, she would go straight to hell. The girl, visibly upset, asked Violet if she thought this was true. “That’s not what I believe,” Violet said to her. And then, to me, quite incredulous: “can you imagine saying that to child?! A father?!”
Violet describes a sermon one of the pastors at her church gave not too long ago. The pastor had said that everyone finds God in a different place, and that it might not be in church. It could be in nature, she said, or, you could find God in the person you are sitting next to.
“My daughter was sitting beside me,” she says, “and I got teary-eyed, because, you know, my daughter is my life.”
And yes, unless Kamala Harris makes a convincing pitch on the economy, Violet may well vote for Donald Trump.
Addendum: In late September, what had then become Tropical Storm Helene pummeled Madison County, NC, with 30-40 mile per hour winds and wind gusts up to 75 mph. In three days, Helene dropped more rain on Western North Carolina than the previous record for one month’s rainfall, which was in 2004. Ryan Cole, neighbouring Buncombe County’s assistant emergency services director described the devastation as “biblical.”
Violet and her family are safe and well, and she, as you can well imagine, is devastated by the destruction and heartened too by the way the community has come together to rebuild.
If you would like to support the town of Marshall as they rebuild, please go to HelpMarshall.org. There are several options to assist there. Thank you.