New Hampshire Voter Canvassing: Here Comes Honey Boo Boo

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. 
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming!
Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
 And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


--W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"




Sunday was the kind of day you move to New England for: crisp, sunny, leaves turning a hundred shades of orange and yellow and I was out going door to door with my fearless, intrepid neighbor talking to voters not in our town, but in Kingston, New Hampshire.


We saw far more Trump signs along Route 125 on the way to our designated neighborhoods, and our list included not just Democrats but voters who the computer thought might just vote Democratic. Let us just say artificial intelligence is not yet ready for prime time.


We were thrown out of one yard with a snarl.


We saw yellow "Don't Tread on Me" Tea Party flags flying from homes, and as stickers on cars.

We were greeted with uncomfortable smiles by women who said they hadn't decided how they were gong to vote and who declined to say if they were leaning in one direction or the other, which meant to me, they were voting for Trump and just didn't want to prolong our visit.


We met one man who I had pegged as a non starter--shirtless, scraggly hair down to his shoulders, who said emphatically he was voting against Kelly Ayotte. Staggered, I asked why and he said she was for making Social Security into a voucher program and he was only 3 years from retirement.  So this guy, who looked as if he might not be aware of the end of the Vietnam war or about the invention of the internet, knew all about Kelly Ayotte and her stand on privatizing Social Security.


Go figure.

I am hoping our experience In Kingston is like David Brook's report about Idaho where he said a man told him that he is voting for Trump and everyone he knew is voting for Trump, so he figured Trump would win in a landslide. And when Brook said the national polls tell a different story he said, "Well, nobody's asked folks around here."


I sure would like to ask folks around there.  One thing I'd ask is, "When you say Hillary belongs in prison, exactly what crime do you think she has commited?"
For the most part, this seems to be more a chant than an actual complaint. The people I talk to get all vague in the eyes when I ask and say, "Well...you know." And then they start mumbling about Benghazi and emails and the Clinton Foundation as if any of that might, at the farthest stretch of imagination might constitute a crime. 

 

 I've asked folks around Kingston, NH, and if they are a reliable indication, we have to look forward to 4 years of President Trump, Heaven Help Us. And that's because Hillary belongs in prison, for some reason, and we need a wall and the country is going to Hell in a hand basket despite all evidence to the contrary. It just is.


I'm just saying. Not thinking, you understand, just saying.

Driving home, my neighbor and I talked about the value of a "ground game."  Trump has virtually no ground game, but that doesn't seem to matter in Kingston. Nobody is going door to door for Trump, but he's reaching people somehow.

Maybe, before the internet, before Facebook, neighbors going door to door mattered.

But Trump has found another way--throwing big carnivals, getting people to rallies as if they were going to a Patriots game. Getting them worked up by bringing them to the candidate, rather than by trying to bring the candidate's fans to them.

I never got an answer about why they liked Trump.


One woman said she did not like Hillary. When I asked her specifically what she did not like about Hillary,  she simply said, "She and Bill should have retired years ago."  I didn't get any accusations that Hillary had murdered Vince Foster or had compromised national security with her emails or any of the usual Rush Limbaugh stuff.  As we chatted, she did nod in agreement that Trump might just push the nuclear button if he got annoyed with Putin over some slight to his masculinity.  So, I don't know how she'll vote. She just doesn't like Hillary for inchoate reasons.


And that's the report from New Hampshire, specifics don't matter; inchoate mists shroud the mind and pull the levers. Slack jaws, unfocused eyes, inarticulate angst, head scratchers, not exactly knuckle draggers, slouch toward the polling places November 8.