552 Postcards

I had a conservation this morning with one of my red friends who I text with daily as a member of a motorcycle group. There are four of us and two of us are decidedly blue and two are just as red. But the truth is that as convenient as the clarity of red and blue might seem, reality is never that neat and tidy. The truth is that the four of us are all at different places on the spectrum. It is fair to say that there is one member who is deep red. He has homes in both Florida (the Palm Beach area) and New Jersey and plays a lot of golf. He is a regular visitor to Mar-a-Lago and he has done business with Trump back in the bad old Atlantic City casino days, since he has a construction company in Atlantic City. In the 2020 election he acted as a Republican polling place sentinel, assigned to Fulton County. His report after that stint was to say to me that he had no evidence of election fraud, but that he “knew” it was going on. One of his daughters was actually present at the Capitol building on January 6th as part of the crowd of protestors. He says she did not go into the Capitol, but I can’t tell if that last part is accurate or judiciously tailored for outside consumption. His news feeds are all notably conspiracy-driven from what I can tell from his occasional references or postings on our text thread. Everything in our communications by text make his politics crystal clear and it is as extreme as any rational person could possibly have (obviously I am discounting what I will call the MAGA crazies in that description).

Obviously I am at the opposite end of the political and general thought spectrum from my deep red friend. I used to think he was more aligned with me on social issues even though his economic issues were radically different from mine. But as time has gone by, there is little or no ability to see any alignment and I do not think it has to do with any organic growing militancy on his part. Rather, I believe the radicalization of the Republican Party over the past few years have caused otherwise reasonable people like my friend to choose whether to also radicalize or risk ostracization. We have seen this play out in Congress and the broader, public stage of the Party, but it has also happened at the more grass roots level for other Party faithful. In other words, his views are now extreme as well…by what he considers necessity, I imagine.

My blue compatriot in the group is, I suspect, more like me in his views than not, but he has a different style of engaging with the others and where I come straight at them with my head down, rarely trying to spare anyone’s feelings, he is more about what I think of as hit and run or glancing blows rather than direct frontal attacks. He rarely gets into the wrestling matches that I do, but that may also be because they consider it better sport to bear-bait me. He is also a recently new addition to the group, which I think was added to take some of the tension off the situation in hopes that I might calm my rhetoric somewhat.

That leaves my other red friend and I save him for last because he is much, much harder to define than any of us. He clearly has both mixed views and, at the same time, he happens to love being mischievously contrary whenever he can. Unlike the other three of us, you can define us politically by understanding where our wives are positioned on the political spectrum. But his wife is a lovely and caring woman who has pretty much the same sensibilities as Kim. That has always confused us when he makes particularly troubling or strident assertions and causes Kim to say to me that she cannot understand how his wife lives with him, given their differences in views. It is what has always made me suspect that he likes acting red in his conversations with me, but that he might be more blue than not. He is the first to openly admit that he voted for Trump both in 2016 and then again in 2020. But for most of the past 3+ years, at least in our text string, he has said “Fuck Trump” about a thousand times. He is openly disgusted by the January 6th insurrection (note that Deep Red refused to accept that it was an insurrection, but rather says it was a peaceful protest). He was loudly against Biden on the basis of age and his sense of Biden’s cognitive impairment and was pleased when Biden stepped down. While Biden was yet to step down, we put on a $40 bet on the election, with him taking the Trump side. The bet is being held by our mutual blue friend in the group.

As for Harris, he took a position that her choice of a running mate was critical to her positioning. he felt strongly that she needed to be as centrist as possible to have a chance of beating Trump. He was in favor of Mark Kelly of Arizona, who he referred to as “The Astronaut”, who he thought was more conservative than Tim Walz and others. He went on and on, as he likes to do, about how she lost his and lots of other people’s vote by choosing Walz. He has recently distilled his negative view towards Harris down to her position on two issues. The first is her support of what he calls price controls and the other is her support of a wealth tax. I have sent him many arguments about why he is mistaken about Harris and her positioning (which I claim has moved decidedly to the center) and why his perception of her views on price gouging and taxing the rich is more reasonable than he thinks. I didn’t think I was making any progress with him because he just wouldn’t budge in his criticism of Harris.

This morning, he was poking the bear as usual and it was just the wrong thing to do to me. Yesterday Kim had a bit of a meltdown over what she was hearing in the news about Trump gaining back some of the ground Harris had gained. Kim cares deeply about this election. Instead of responding to my direct observations about the state of the election, he began pulling my chain again and I had suddenly had enough. I told him that this was not a joke and that I was tired of his churlish attitude about something so important. I went on to tell him how upset Kim was about everything. We then actually had a very good and honest text discussion with no joking. I mentioned that I was doing what I could to help Harris in and he challenged me by asking me what that was.

I went through the litany of donations and that Kim and I might go to Arizona with the Democratic Club of San Diego. And then I mentioned that both Kim and I had written postcards to voters in swing states as part of a larger effort being undertaken for the Democratic ground game. Today I mailed our ballots and bought 550 stamps for the postcards we had written. Tonight I put them all on the cards and I had two postcards left over. It turns out we had written 552 postcards (I guess I need two more stamps). I have no idea if they will have any impact. They took a long time to hand write and it coast $308 for the stamps, but at least we did what we could do. As for my red/blue contrarian friend, at the end of the text discussion, he told me he had decided to vote for Harris. Maybe those postcards WILL do some good after all.