“Yes, and I’ll vote for whoever is on the Vance ticket in 2028,” said a mediocre white man I met last night.
He said that to me across a high top table at a bar in Colorado, minutes after we’d all been toasting the fact that abortion is protected in Colorado’s constitution. He said it with the ease and confidence of someone who has never once been made to pay a social price for his politics. Shocker, see his descripter above. Here’s what’s happened.
I had bought tickets to see my fave DJ with a friend and went to visit him for the weekend. We went out for a drink after the show with his new partner and a few of her friends. The conversation turned to politics, which was apparently unusual for this group. I genuinely forget how this came up but as per usual with me in any social setting, the conversation turned to abortion, specifically how voters wrote abortion rights into their state constitution in 2024 because Colorado is full of baddies. From there we drifted into other issues where we disagreed at the margins but stayed pretty firmly within shared progressive values.
One guy sat at the corner of the table, quiet through all of it, until someone turned to him and asked JOKINGLY, “What, did you vote for Trump?” When he said yes, the table fell silent. Nobody seemed to know what to do next. Because genuinely WTF. My first thought was that I wanted to know exactly what kind of Trump voter he was. If you voted for Trump in 2016, I can give the benefit of the doubt that you were hoodwinked and have corrected your vote in the subsequent elections. That’s very different than having voted for him in 2020 or 2024. Trying to give this guy an out, I asked: “All three times?” I was thinking to myself that certainly the answer would be no and we could move on. That’s when he gave me the answer I opened with.
Yes, and I’ll vote for whoever is on the Vance ticket in 2028.
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