PITTSBURGH (TNS) — One set of televisions showed the Penguins game, the other the election. Some people watched the first, a few the second, but most were paying pool or darts or just talking.
I’d come down to my townie bar to watch the returns and ask people how they thought and felt about the election. Everyone I talked to was a friend of some degree.
The bar has an informal but well-observed rule against talking about politics, though the owner has put a few Trump stickers around the place and one of the regulars has a pickup truck with two American flags flying from the back. I’d guess that most of the people who voted, voted for Trump, but I’d also guess that many didn’t vote.
Not big into politics
”I’m not big into politics,” said Kelly, a bartender at a local club, who had voted, “but I know something has to change.” She wanted to ban lobbyists, who are “bribing politicians to vote their way,” and return to the founders’ vision of citizens without parties.
Through the evening, she paid most attention to the news of local elections running in the tiny letters at the bottom of the screen. “I was taught in civics class that your have to focus on the locals. The presidential election doesn’t matter as much as the locals.”
When someone on the television news talked about a delay in getting the votes counted, Kelly remarked, “They still have to go to the cemeteries to count the votes.”
An older man, about 70 and retired, with a fascinating work history that included being a tugboat deckhand who worked himself up to be a pilot, Chickie didn’t like the way Trump talked about Harris, and let someone call Puerto Rico garbage.
”You can’t talk like that,” he said. “I mean people’s people. People who sit on a toilet seat just like you and me.” That is a description of the human condition I will treasure.
”I was kinda leaning toward him. What she says, she means well,” he said. “But they both lie.” He said this two or three more times, with disappointment, not anger, as if that’s the best we can expect.
He worried that Harris didn’t have enough experience in managing the economy and foreign policy. “The country’s in bad shape,” he said. “Got to do something about that border.”
THE SILENT MAJORITY
Both about 40, Greg’s a computer whiz and Julia’s a sales whiz in the same company. We were talking when it had begun to feel as if Trump were going to win.
”What it comes down to,” said Greg, “is that a lot of people are what they used to call the silent majority. They think Trump’s going to come and make things better.” He thought he understood why some people thought that. “What used to be the blue looking out for the blue collar is now the red looking out for the blue collar.”
He asked a man walking by what he thought about the election. “I don’t give an [expletive],” the man said. “It’s going to be four years of something.” That “something” was a pessimistic “something.”
”I just want all the campaigning to be done,” Julia said, which almost everyone I talked to said in some way. We talked about how all the television ads made you feel you’re being punched over and over.
Julia wasn’t happy with the election. “If he’s going to be in office, I hope for the best. Lots of people think it’ll be the end of the world. I’ve never thought that.” But some day “we’ve got to get to the point where we’re not so divided.”
Greg asked her about Roe v. Wade. “Trump bragged about overturning Roe,” Julia said. “Abortion shouldn’t be a state issue. It should be a federal issue. It’s not fair that some people should have rights that others don’t have. It’s a health decision. There will always be a need for it.”
She wondered “what other rights would be taken away, chopped up” and thought people who didn’t care about the issue should worry that they’d lose rights they cared about for themselves.
Trump’s “not isolationist,” Greg said when I asked about foreign policy. “But we don’t want to be so involved in other countries’ internal power struggles. Like in the Middle East, Ukraine. We don’t need billions going to Ukraine that could be going to infrastructure, health care,” and other national needs. “I don’t know how the tariff thing goes, but I like the idea of bringing business back.”
THOSE TWO
Rich, one of those jovial men everyone likes, was sitting at the bar with a cigar and a lite beer. “We have millions and millions of people in the United States, smart people,” he said when I asked his thoughts on the election. “How did we get those two?”
He wasn’t as impressed with Trump’s business skills as others. “He bankrupted a casino!” he said, and laughed.
Rich has small children. “I’m not worried for myself,” he said, pointing to his cigar and beer. “I am worried for my children.” Mistakes made today may make an unlivable world for them a decade or two from now.
Bob and Denise are an older couple. Bob’s the talkative one. When I asked Denise if she wanted to say something, she held up her hand palm out and shook her head, which to be fair might well have been my own response.
”I try to stay on the fence, look at the good and the bad on both sides,” said Bob, who wouldn’t be upset if either candidate got elected. “I can’t change what we get. I just have hopes. And fears.”
TWO THOUGHTS
I talked to more people than I can quote here, but my evening at the bar left me with two thoughts.
The first is that Trump doesn’t bother most people there the way he panics and enrages the more affluent people with more leisure, people for whom politics is much more an occupation — who are also the people who dominate our political discourse.
The people at my townie bar take Trump seriously but not literally, as the saying goes. To the extent they like and support him, they like and support what they think he stands for and see all the other stuff as performance. And they have their limits.
The second is that most people there feel a degree of estrangement or disengagement from national politics. It’s like the election is occurring at one remove, or two. My friends don’t see politics as making as much difference to their lives as the political people do.
They don’t have the same faith in politics, thus don’t feel so anxious about it, though they’re more vulnerable to politicians’ choices than the more political people. I wouldn’t endorse everything my friends think, but I do think their distance from political life gives their reading of our politics a judicious skepticism the rest of us could learn from.
