Month: November 2020

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Scenes #7: Trump signs abundant in western Maryland

Posted on by Peter

Taking advantage of unseasonably good weather and clear skies, from October 25 to 28 I was hiking in western Maryland, primarily in Washington County. I did a long tour of Antietam battlefield as part of this, which is entirely within Washington County. Harpers Ferry is also part of the general battle theater, which is where I came up from. (I don’t know how many people do an all-on-foot tour of Antietam, but it can’t be many. The battlefield area is definitely car-oriented.)

Antietam battlefield scene, preserved as it was in 1862

Maybe I’ll have another opportunity, another day, to write about that hike itself. I have done many such hikes and they are always liberating and you always learn a lot, regardless of what you think you know.

The most notable thing in Washington County, Md., was the overwhelming support for Trump. Granted, western Maryland is ‘red’ anyway. But Arlington is ‘blue,’ an there was a distinct lack of signs for Biden around Arlington, which I wrote about in a recent post. This is a strong contrast I was immediately hit by.

It feels like I felt ten Trump signs for every Biden sign in Washington County, which if much higher than the actual likely vote ratio.

One of the few Biden signs I saw actually included a separate sign next to it apologizing for the Biden sign:

Sharpsburg, Maryland, October 2020. The sign on the right says: “Just to be Clear! I support police officers, but not the ones who commit crimes. I support protestors, but not the ones who commit crimes. Yes, it really is that simple.”

This elaborate explanatory note attached to the Biden-Harris yard sign display is something I’ve never otherwise seen. I interpret it as an apology for Biden support in this area, given the strength of Trump support.

The same is true in much of Middle America. Washington County, no doubt has people in it tied economically or otherwise to the Washington DC-centric core, but the basic population stock here is Middle America Whites, the Trump 2015-16 base.

I didn’t bother taking pictures, in part because I was trying to preserve my phone battery and in part because there were just so many houses with Trump signs. Here is one, a very large sign (see the mailbox opposite for scale):

The largely rural landscape here fits with the image of core Trump supporters.

Here someone took it upon themselves to decorate a stop sign at the intersection with the Harpers Ferry Road (which dates back two centuries and featured in the battle at Antietam):

Being here a few days made me think of Iowa, my father’s home state. His home county delivered the biggest margin to Trump in Nov. 2016 than it ever gave to any presidential candidate in history. Trump is the type who tosses around words like “historic,” but in that case it really was, literally ranking number one in the modern political era. There are lots and lots of counties like this, once you step out of core metro areas, which broke much more ‘Red’ than they normally do. Deep-blue areas tended to do the opposite, which led to Hillary’s win in the popular vote.

What to make of clear and strong Trump support in western Maryland and places like it? For one thing, Maryland is a locked-up blue state. Everyone knows who’s getting its electoral votes. The fact that these people in western Maryland are so dedicated to the Trump movement, despite knowing full well they won’t swing the state, speaks to the mystique and power of MAGA many have spoken of.

If Trump wins again in most of the key states, the belt of Obama-to Trump states, Pennsylvania to Minnesota, and thus wins the election, it may be because of strongly motivated core supporters like these. I even spotted evidence of sign wars in Northern Virginia:

(“Vote for Democrats” sign vandalized with a “Trump 2020” bumper sticker, Northern Virginia, late October 2020.)

As I write this, it is just past noon on election day. There are a few more of these types of stories I wanted but I got in mostly what I wanted. There is always more to say. I’ll be in DC in the evening and till late with more stories to tell.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #6: Blue Lives Matter

Posted on by Peter

In the first two weeks of October, I was doing daily census work in the field in DC (their operation was in considerably much worse shape than ours in Northern Virginia was, by late September; there was a tentative October 5 end date at the time. It was announced we were being transferred us over on I think September 29).

I never had time to stroll around making “Election Week” observations, but on several days I did pass in the general White House area for one reason or another. October 10 was one such day.

Here was the scene in Constitution Avenue, south of the White House (visible in the distance):

Here we see the Blue Lives Matter flag, something I was not familiar with before the June riots and the flurry of activity that felt a lot like a color revolution attempt. (I was up close and personal to much of the worst of it in DC. I even got a black eye out of it.)

I have long admired the area around the White House for being what I thought of as a town square, a place for mutual exchange of ideas. Everyone with their little causes, and almost always a crowd of some kind around. You could also see something new. It helped a lot that the Pennsylvania Avenue north of the White House has long been closed to traffic.

While “Open Schools Now” only partially and ambiguously overlaps with “Trump 2020” as a campaign, “Blue Lives Matter” overlaps something near 100%. I can’t imagine many Blue Lives Matter flag-carriers are voting Biden-Harris.

I see a handful of Blue Lives Matter flags around, but in political-Left-heavy areas of Northern Virginia they are far outnumbered by Black Lives Matter. (In non-Black areas, Black Lives Matter yard signs are almost exclusively seen in wealthy neighborhoods. This must be a puzzling phenomenon to foreigners to observe. I was through many non-Black and non-White areas for the census, especially Hispanic areas, and really never saw Black Lives Matter signs at all.)

This good feeling I had for the area of the White House which I have described to others as feeling like a political town square was disrupted in June by the fact that the riots reached there, and then weeks of occupation of the area proceeded — blessed by the mayor, who cynically ‘renamed’ the street Black Lives Matter Plaza.

The protests and street-partiers in which the rioters moved (the rioter, maybe, moves among the crowd as the fish swims in the sea, to quote Mao) were as far as the park north of the White House, a focal point for them. It proved to be unfortunate for them that this became the focal point, because it is so easy to defend. The rioters did the most damage when the battles were scattered all over, looting here, burning garbage cans there, no way for police to mount a defense.

The riots were shocking enough, an if Trump wins I expect a common ‘take’ will be people in Middle America — who really are the forgotten people in national dialogue, looked down on or ignored — did not like the riots.

On this the last weekend before the election, there have been impressive showing of Blue Lives Matter and Trump supporters all over, in marches and car caravans. It’s for this reason I think Trump has at least a 50-50 chance, not the <10% chance the pollsters and pundits give him.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #5: Open Schools Now

Posted on by Peter

Political yard signs are not limited to actual yards in front of houses or windows, and the US has a long tradition now of people putting them up in public places, especially in median strips on roads or other comparable places.

One you’d never have guessed you’d see is this one:

This particular median strip got more crowded with political signs as time went by. If you’d shown this to someone in 2019, they’d never guess what the sign was supposed to mean.

“Open Schools Now” is a defacto political slogan, overlapping with national politics but not identical, though the two positions have grown closer over time as people rearrange themselves into familiar political boxes.

Schools in Arlington remain fully closed, as the Panic crowd demanded and, in retrospect, easily got. In August, there was a sign campaign demanding no opening at all until there were “fourteen days with no new cases,” which I’, sorry but is an insane position. It’s a respiratory/flu virus, people. What are you thinking? And elected leaders caved in.

(Schools never should have closed at all, not in March and not to the present. It was never an evidence-based or data-based position. It was purely a panic-based, emotion-based decision. The negative effects of this decision far, far outweigh any potential positives. This is my position, reached through analysis of the data. But if I’ve learned nothing else from other people in my time, it’s that most people don’t think like that — which is why it’s a good think public policy people generally do, to avoid constant disruptive panics.)

The Coronavirus Panic overlapped this year with regular political currents, but at least at first it didn’t fit previous division lines, so you saw people all over the place in their positions. The media drumbeat terrified people, putting the cart miles ahead of the horse because they never bothered to wait for evidence to come in.

Meanwhile, the “Open Schools Now” people are like figures out of the Twilight Zone, the kind of episode where the protagonist is the same and everyone else one day is different (“they were all like that,” Seinfeld said). Very few, early on in this virus panic, would have wanted schools closed for a full one and a half school years, as may now be the case.

So this “Open Schools Now” campaign seems hopeless, with the people in it, mainstream just months ago, are now cornered into looking like malcontents or perennial candidates for office, like the Clement sign behind the Open Schools Now sign. Clement is a perennial candidate and critic of the local one-party state of total Democratic Party machine control. She won’t win because most Arlington voters are transients (don’t know much about the local area, nor care) who vote straight Democrat.

Arlington is the kind of place where schools were shut down and have not reopened as of election week. It’s impossible to trust the media on Corona and all topics related to it, given their responsibility for frankly creating the Panic and leading the digital lynch mobs that demanded shutdowns. I don’t know if Open Schools Now is a position from which a candidate could win, if an election were a pure national referendum on it.

In April I started to sense that the November 2020 general election might be a partial referendum on Shutdowns/Lockdowns, and that prediction has turned out quite right. In simple form:

Pro-Shutdowns/Lockdowns, Vote Biden. Anti-Shutdowns/Lockdowns, Vote Trump.

It’s not that simple, but both candidates have made moves suggesting they are comfortable carrying that banner. The all-important question is which direction that pushes Pennsylvania and the rest of the key states that swung to Trump in 2016. Demanding schools stay shut indefinitely feels to me like it’s more like a Blue Bubble position, but it’s hard to say. It’s really not political, of course, but more personality based.

I must say, in any case, that I pity students and am glad I am not one just now.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #4: Honk for ‘Black Lives Matter’

Posted on by Peter


At this same intersection at the corner that would be visible if you peeked behind the poll from the previous post (“No Photo ID Required to Vote”), there are often two wheelchair-bound men, one Black and one White, silently glaring at passersby. They have been staging daily hour long “Honk for Black Lives Matter” protests since the riots in June.

Usually they have one to three hangers-on with them. Here they are on October 30:

This protest elicits lots of disorganized honks and therefore causes considerable noise, making it seem like perpetual, angry traffic jam is in place.

Why are people honking this much? I know Arlington and I know the answer: It’s a signal of how much Arlington types want to signal their support for the trendy movement (support rates shot way up during the riots and the aftermath), and therefore signaling their social status, their social prestige, that they are one of the good people. Though yard signs are plenty sign enough of that. Yard sign ratio is such a very much low-hanging-fruit observation that I decide to spend a few hours quantifying it with personal data collection which I published yesterday.

But there are plenty of people not on board with the Black Lives Matter agenda. It is also not hard to see this for what it is, a political campaign in no small part directed against Trump and as a rallying call for anti-Trump forces and to some extent a grab-bag of left-wing ideas. I’d go so far as to say Black Lives Matter isn’t even primarily about Black people, at least not in this manifestation, the dynamic of the two wheelchair-bound guys and the mainly White honkers and sundry passersby.

Some passersby distinctly express their disapproval. One of the times I passed by, I witnessed a pair on bicycles shout “Trump 2020!” several times at the protestors, which about sums it up. Supposedly there was, for some days, a solitary counter-protestor who silently carried a US flag and stared at the Honk for Black Lives Matter grouplet, which again sums up the point of what the dividing line is, I think.

But there is also a non-political argument against this kind of protest in this kind of area, a largely residential area. It causes a constant assault on the auditory senses.

I did a few census addresses in the area. There was one resident in the area complained bitterly of the constant noise, saying he couldn’t sleep, saying he didn’t understand why they were doing that. I could barely conduct the interview for all the steady honking. He was a Spanish speaker. Anyone living, working, or just passing through the area is subject to this noise for an hour a day.

Will it end if Biden is elected? Will it continue if Trump is re-elected?

The newspaper profiled the pair, and the man was a professor of history at Howard University and adopted the other man, paralyzed from birth, from Lesotho.