Somewhere in America
Somewhere in America, a washed-up MMA guy with an IQ of 85 debates whether his next career move will be declaring himself transgender or running for office as a Republican.
Somewhere in America, a fat man listens to a podcast where RFK Jr. says Americans are fat because "they" put seed oil in the food supply. He doesn't know exactly who "they" are, what "seed oil" is, or where exactly they insert it into the food supply, but he's drawn to the message that his obesity is the fault of someone other than himself, so he votes for Trump and hopes he'll have RFK Jr. take the seed oil out of the food supply.
Somewhere in America, a conspiracy theorist drives his beat-up pickup truck through a California suburb where the average home value is 2.5 million dollars and mutters, "these people live in the pod and eat the bugs." He briefly experiences cognitive dissonance when he notices that the neighborhood is so much nicer than his own Arkansas hometown. Aren't blue cities supposed to be crime-ridden sh*tholes? But then he gets to the beach and sees the disgusting homeless encampment and thinks, ah, there’s the sh*thole. Later, he drives back to Real America and reads conspiracy content on Instagram.
Somewhere in America, an affluent white female liberal logs onto Twitter and argues with a conspiracy theorist. She chuckles at his attempts to insult her. He calls her a pedophile, a Satanist, and says she's gonna drop dead from the vaxx any day now. It all runs off her like water off a raincoat, until he calls her a childless cat lady, which hits home. Only at the age of 35 did she start looking for a husband. Only at the age of 40 did she get married. She has since sunk $80,000 into fertility treatments with nothing to show for it. She did everything right, she studied in school, got into a good college, worked hard and got excellent performance reviews. Yet she finds herself envying her loser dropout sister, who had a string of drama-filled relationships and dead-end jobs but somehow got two children. It doesn't seem fair. But instead of pondering whether her own actions, and the wider subculture that encouraged them, are responsible for her situation, she decides the solution is to force insurance companies to cover fertility treatments. She vocally supports Kamala and hates J.D. Vance.
Somewhere in America, a fifty-two-year-old man stands in line to vote for Donald Trump. His twenty-one-year-old daughter is what some would call a party girl and others would call a slut. That doesn't sit well with him, and he pines for an older, simpler time. He doesn't have much confidence in Trump to bring that old America back, but he knows with certainty that Kamala Harris would take it in the wrong direction. Maybe banning abortion, he thinks, would make things right. He has a positive view of Christianity and occasionally attends church. After every sermon, he's reminded why he doesn't regularly go, as he finds them boring and not relevant to his life.
Somewhere in America, a thirty-one-year-old man prepares to cast his vote. His first election was 2012, when he voted for Barack Obama. He thought Obama was kinda-sorta cool, at least, he was infinitely cooler than Mitt Romney. He didn't like the way stodgy, aging conservative men would disrespect him for being a grown man who played video games. Now, in 2024, he's still a gamer and finds that the people disrespecting gamers are aging liberal women. He thinks Donald Trump is kinda-sorta cool, at least, he's infinitely cooler than Kamala Harris.
Somewhere in America, a sixty-four-year-old stockbroker winces as he fills out his ballot for Donald Trump. He thinks the man is a petulant child but is reassured by his first term that he'll pursue business-friendly policies in office. He's voted Republican in every election since the Reagan era and, so long as the policies remain business-friendly, will vote Republican until the day he dies. He'd much rather have a Romney than a Trump, but if only a clown can deliver the policies he wants, he'll vote for the clown.
Somewhere else in America is another stockbroker, newly wealthy, only he's thirty-five years younger. He identifies as center-left. He feels like government policies sometimes wind up incentivizing poverty. He likes to think of himself as open-minded, so he toys with voting Republican, but then he remembers the abortion bans and the embrace of Hulk Hogan and says, nope, no way, never. Not only will he reject Trump, he concludes that if conservatives are willing to degrade themselves by embracing Trump, conservatism itself must be rotten. He's relieved by Kamala's embrace of business leaders and her claim to own a gun for self-protection and hopes she'll govern as a moderate.
Somewhere in America, a young black man receives his ballot in the mail. He voted for Biden in 2020 and thought at the time that he'd be a lifelong Democrat. But he's since encountered a lot of feminism, both online and off, and it doesn't sit well with him. He's had some messy breakups and doesn't like the idea that society should just default to believing women when they accuse their ex-boyfriends of abuse. A few months ago, right after the attempted assassination of Trump, he and a friend made a half-ironic pro-Trump rap video. But he's since been unnerved by the Republicans' anti-abortion views and their identification with Southern preachers who bear an uncanny resemblance to the Southern racists of old. So he takes his ballot and throws it in the trash.
Somewhere in America, a white nationalist fills out his ballot for Donald J. Trump. Trump, he believes, is the embodiment of the historical American nation, the leader of the Red Tribe in its fight with the Blue. He identifies with the Red Tribe even though, in some ways, he has more in common with the Blue: he lives in a big blue city, is a college graduate, spends his spare time reading Hacker News rather than watching football, and doesn't believe in God, though he identifies as a "cultural Christian." He tells himself that immigration is the only thing that matters and is reassured by Trump's professed position that abortion should be left up to the states.
Somewhere in America, a normie swing voter votes for Trump because she blames Biden for inflation, which is less interesting than the above examples but perhaps is more important.