The Mind of a US Swing Voter

Luke Richard Castray was a British Army officer who came to Australia in the late 1800s as Commissary in Charge of the Colony of Tasmania.   He was a prominent citizen, honoured by having the boulevard adjacent to Salamanca Place named after him, Castray Esplanade.

He was the great-great-grandfather of my wife, Barbara, and, incidentally, was nearly the indirect cause of the death of both of us when we went searching for the Castray River in the North-East of the State. On a very narrow and winding mountain road, a logging truck travelling at speed just about swiped us over a precipice. We decided to content ourselves with numerous pictures of Barbara standing next to the Castray Esplanade sign in Hobart.

Luke Richard’s great-great-grandson, my brother-in-law Warren, had a successful career as, eventually, vice-president of the Asia Pacific Region for NCR Corporation, based in Dayton Ohio, where his three youngest children grew up and went to college.  They are all now US citizens and the youngest of them, Tim, and his wife, Christine, who now live in Columbus, Ohio, were recently in Australia for a family wedding.  I thought it might be interesting to get their thoughts on the upcoming election.

My first question for Tim, an unabashed patriot, was what does America mean to you?

America is home. I was born in New Zealand raised in Australia and everybody asks me ‘Do you miss Australia and New Zealand?’  I’m good coming here for a couple weeks but even now I’m getting the edge to get back home. I love America. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. I know as long as my kids work hard, graduate from high school,  graduate from college and put the  work in, then they’re gonna have really nice life.

If you drive through America everyone has the flag out. Even at the high school football games, when they play the national anthem everybody stands, everybody puts their hand on their heart, everybody takes their hat off, everybody is silent.  And if you don’t do that you’re gonna get a look, someone’s gonna say something. It’s paying respect to those people who came before you and laid down their lives for the freedom that we enjoy.

Christine agrees but she feels there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.  ‘We live in a great area so we get to see all the positives,” she said, “but there is a lot of work still to be done. For example, medical care is so expensive in the States and so out of reach for many people.” I asked Tim why he thought that was so?

I have no idea but it can be shocking.  I tend a little right of centre but healthcare is one of those things where you see people go bankrupt. That’s insane. I have a very good friend at work who got sick. He had insurance through his work – in the US that’s basically how it works: if you’ve got a job you’ve got health insurance – he got very sick and they put him on short-term leave and then long-term leave. He told me they could still let him go, in which case he would lose his health insurance.  That’s a bad system.

Tim and Christine are both swinging voters.  Tim tells me he was a registered Republican voter and supported George W Bush. But after the Iraq War he switched to Democrat and supported Obama in both his terms, regarding him as a great communicator.

Changing topics, I was interested in his views on gun control, particularly as he has a son still at school.  I found his views somewhat surprising:

It’s funny, every time we come to here there’s a couple things Australians always bring up.   Gun control is number one, and the other one’s racism.

As to gun control, that’s a very tough issue in the US.  It’s obviously one that divides people.  Personally, I’m not concerned when my kid goes to school.  They’re aware.  We’ve educated the kids about guns. They have drills at school where, if there is a shooter, they know what to do.  They have had issues at their schools where people have had guns in school. 

There are some commonsense things you can do which I think would be easy, but they [the gun lobby] push back on. I know why they do that — it’s a ‘slippery slope’ argument. They think if you give one inch then they gonna go the next step, then the next step, then the next step.

I know Americans say you need guns for hunting and stuff.  But when you talk to people in private it’s basically they want guns to defend their freedom. Like they don’t want a tyrannical government saying ‘Hey, we’re charge now’.

If you’ve got a gun it’s going to help protect you and your family against crime, and it’s going to help protect you against a government that turns sideways on you.  We don’t have guns, but I 100% understand why people would want them.

There’s a weird stat in the US that the states and cities with the most [legal] guns have the least amount of crime and least amount of gun deaths. You start thinking  it doesn’t make sense, but then when you really look into it you think, ‘Well if a guy’s gonna pull a gun on someone, but there’s a good chance the other guy also has a gun, well maybe he’s less likely to pull his in the first place.   

We then moved to politics.  Tim told me that during the 2016 election he was ‘super disappointed in both Hilary and Trump’. He believes most Americans were and how it was shocking those were the two best options available:

I didn’t remember anyone at the time who was excited about either, so I voted Libertarian.  Then during Trump’s term, I saw how well he communicates. He is definitely not politically correct but he he showed good judgement on some things.

One of my main issues is I’m anti-war and, surprisingly,  Trump is the anti-war candidate.  He was the first US president in twenty-something years not to get us involved in another conflict, so the second election I voted for Trump.

And what of America’s role as the world’s sheriff?  How did he feel about Ukraine, for example?

Yeah, I hate that role for the US. Part and parcel of that is we’ve got two kids – our daughter is 18 and our son 16 – and the thought of them going off to a war horrifies us. It seems like America is constantly at war, and I would like the USA’s role in the world to be the peacemaker, the one bringing people to the table to discuss things.

One of the things Trump did, which was shocking, was he went to North Korea.  Who does that? Who does that! He stepped across the border and shook hands with Kim Jong Un. To me that showed genuine leadership.

I see a country that’s got a lot of problems, and I would like to see the money that we’re sending to Ukraine go to our veterans.  How about our veterans that fought in the wars for us?  They don’t get the best care. We’ve got homeless veterans and the suicide rate amongst our veterans is insane. America first!  Let’s take care of those guys.

As to the Ukraine:

Putin’s not a good dude. But once again, a shout out to Trump.  NATO’s got to pull their weight.  It’s their home turf, so why why do American soldiers need to cover their backs? Why does the American taxpayer need to send money there?

I’ve driven through suburbs and areas in the US which are horrendous.   The drug problem is horrendous. The  southern border is bad. I think there’s something like 100,000 US deaths due to meth and fentanyl. It’s all coming across the southern border, but we’re sending billions and billions to foreign countries while we have serious problems at home. Again, America first: take care of our own people first. With Ukraine, it’s Europe that needs to step up.

As far as the economy is concerned, Tim and Christine are feeling reasonably comfortable in terms of accumulated wealth but they do note that the cost of living is higher than it was.  Their family can cope, but they’re also aware many Americans are going under and that greatly concerns them. We next moved to the border crisis, and I asked if it had affected them personally:

No, I think we’re far enough north where it doesn’t impact us.  But it’s shocking.  We are we are very close to Springfield. There were some bad things that did happen in Springfield. I think a young boy was hit by a Haitian immigrant who was driving, didn’t have the correct licence and was new to driving. So, yes, some bad things have happened.

I asked if he thought that 20 million illegal immigrants in the last four years is a good thing?

If they come in legally and are paying taxes, fine.  And they’re becoming good members of your community, that’s  great. But if you’re talking about anybody coming across illegally, it’s a burden on the system.

We don’t need to be throwing money at wars, we don’t need to be throwing money at people who aren’t Americans. I feel for them — if I lived in one of those countries I’d want to come to America too. There is a stat I saw that says more immigrants came across the border last year than were naturally born to US citizens. 

Finally, we got to Trump and Harris. I asked Tim to outline Trump’s pros and cons:

Pros, he’s got good instincts, surprisingly good instincts — the southern border is an example.  He’s not politically correct at all.  He doesn’t give a crap if something doesn’t look good on paper.  For instance, he’s like ‘You’ve gotta fill out the [immigration] paperwork on the other side, and for that he gets called a scumbag and a racist.

The Democrats, they repealed all that stuff.  But Trump’s instincts were right. He didn’t care about being politically correct.  He didn’t care about being called racist.  He was like ‘Hey this is bad for America. I’m gonna do what’s good for America’.

Another pro, he’s funny. I think it’s good for American politics to have a guy like that in there.  And he’s a survivor.  Holy crap, I mean when he first started his presidential campaign he was going against the Bushes,  a Republican dynasty.  And then he took on the Clintons, and every news agency was against him and he beat them all. 

The Democrats have 100% weaponised the court system against him. They talk about him as ‘a threat to democracy’,  but how they corrupted the court system to target a political opponent is itself an attack on democracy.

I was reading [former US Attorney General] Bill Barr’s book and he mentioned how he was concerned about being attorney-general because he thought Trump was gonna go after Hillary Clinton and he had a quote in there that stuck with me: ‘I’ll be your attorney general but I’m not going to go after Hillary Clinton’.  And Trump is like ‘That was just something I said.  That’s only something that happens in Third World countries’.  And yet when he’s out of office,  they go after him.  

He’s a narcissist and a hypocrite on some things. The fact the religious right backs him is shocking to me. I mean, he’ll walk around with the Bible, but when the world’s not looking he’s hooking up with porn stars while his wife is pregnant.

As to January 6:

He could have chosen his words better, but it depends what video you watch.  I mean they’ve got some video them beating up cops.  That’s not on, just not on. Don’t do that.

But stop calling it an insurrection. It wasn’t an insurrection.  There’s video of people politely walking within the guidelines of the Capitol. It’s not like they were rampaging.  It wasn’t insurrection.  Yes, certain aspects were absolutely horrible. I believe he could have done a little bit more to get there to tell them to push off.

I believe [January 6] was on Nancy Pelosi to make sure the correct amount of support/defence was there. Trump even asked for more support and defence, but [Pelosi] didn’t do what TYrump warned would be needed.

On the other side, him refusing to admit he lost the election, that’s my main negative with him.  Dude, you lost and it’s OK — shake hands, comeback and fight another day. But he cannot let go of it. Even though he knows it’s hurting him to keep bringing it up, he can’t let go of it. I guarantee he’s got good people around him that are saying ‘Don’t!’, and he cannot bring himself to stop.

And Kamala?

Cons, she’s kind of an unknown entity who’ll tell anybody what they want to hear whenever they want to hear it.  I think she’s a shockingly bad communicator for someone who was California’s Attorney-General. 

Plus she was border czar and the border literally collapsed under her. Honestly, I don’t have a positive for her.

What I found fascinating in my discourse with Tim is that we in Australia either support the US alliance (most of us, I would guess) or don’t. Our support or otherwise tends to be black and white.  We have a binary view, and those who support the US want to see it made great again, primarily because a strong America is in our best interest. Some of us might be puzzled at Tim’s more nuanced position.  But this respect he and his fellow Americans are no different from most Australians when considering how to vote in our own elections.

Making America great again really means making it safe again for American citizens, physically and financially. How many times have you seen a report in the local mainstream media that puts the election in those terms? Not often or, more likely, never, I’d hazard.