Voting Red in a Town Full of Blue

Super Super Tuesday...

I live in the kind of town that has Black Lives Matter signs in windows, and “In This House We Believe” signs impailed on lawns. It’s yoga and hybrid cars, sustainable seafood, and organic juice bars. It’s drum circles on Saturday and Farmer’s Market on Sunday.

Every so often, a “Let’s Go Brandon” sticker strategically placed on the hood of a Jeep, and sometimes the “Ultra MAGA” flag flies from a tree branch, but mostly this is probably one of the whitest, bluest towns in all of America.

Evidence of support for RFK, Jr. and Cornel West are proudly displayed, but no signs exist for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. It won’t matter. This town will still overwhelmingly vote for them because that is the kind of people that live here.

Except for a stranger in a strange land like me.

I went to the polling place to register as a Republican and cast my vote for Donald Trump. I’d only voted for a Republican once in my life and that was Larry Elder to unseat Gavin Newsom.

I’d gotten a ballot through the mail, but it said that as an “unaffiliated voter,” I didn’t have the option of voting for President.

Apparently, in California, you can’t vote for a Republican for President unless you are a registered Republican. There isn’t even the option to cross-over vote for Republicans. That meant I had to say out loud in a room full of true blue Democrats, “I’d like a ballot to change my party affiliation to Republican to vote for president.”

I was hoping for dead silence, a few dirty looks. Maybe it would be as awkward as buying condoms in a supermarket. But people barely noticed, and if they had, they didn’t seem to care. It turned out a lot of people were changing their party preference to vote for Republicans in this election. Maybe they were voting for Nikki Haley to embarrass Trump. Nothing would surprise me by now.

I remember in the early days of starting this Substack how much I cared about what other people thought of me. I knew I always had to be careful about how I talked about Trump. There was a “Trump Line” that you could not cross, even if you were what we call heterodox.

The Trump line means as long as you go along with the mass delusion of the Left, they won’t shun you completely from the cult. As long as you have a shared enemy then you will always have friends. The touchstone can be, “the left might be terrible but Trump is worse.”

No, Trump isn’t worse. And I’m not afraid to say that now. I’m not afraid to say it out loud. Others might not want to hear it. They might wish I wouldn’t say it or that I hadn’t changed but the fear inside of me is gone. There are bigger problems to solve than being liked.

Trump is not worse. He might not be what people imagine a president to be. He might says things he shouldn’t say. He boasts. He can be cruel. But Trump is not what they’ve said he was. They’ve been lying about him for seven years. And it’s time to finally end the madness.

I know I am not the only former Democrat disgusted with what the party has become. I know that Americans are waking up to the fanaticism that has driven so many bad policies of late, and caused real harm in the lives of Americans. How that will manifest today, Super Tuesday, I do not know.

I was actually relieved when I saw Trump’s name on the ballot. I thought, yes, there it is, our only way out of this mess. I voted for anyone with a Republican next to their name, Steve Garvey among them. No, it probably won’t move the needle. The Left is united, mobilized, and willing to do as Rachel Maddow orders them to do.

I for one am grateful that we had a Supreme Court with sense enough to smack down the fanatics on the Left because if they hadn’t, all blue states would have attempted to remove Trump’s name.

The Democrats lost me in 2020 when I watched them rig the election. I saw how much power they had across so many institutions and in the media that it scared me. I thought we’d never have a fair election in this country again. But that didn’t mean I was prepared to vote for Trump.

What drove me to be a Trump supporter was the lawfare - the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the four indictments, the ridiculous $455 million they handed down to destroy Trump’s businesses, attempting to toss his name from the ballots in several states.

Trump, because people like Rachel Maddow and so many on the Left have gone insane. They’ve become Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now - thoroughly corrupted by power and unable to see their way clear to reality.

I’m sure somewhere down the line, someone is going to yell at me, or out me on Twitter, or maybe even do a story about me, “Oscar Blogger Radicalized by Far-Right Extremists Votes for Trump in California Primary.”

I wasn’t radicalized by anyone on the Right. My perspective changed because of what the Democrats have become. They can’t outrun the tragedies they’ve left in their wake. They can blame Trump all they want, but sooner or later, that bill is going to come due.

Ihe truth is, it isn’t really about Trump. It’s about an underclass rising up against a ruling class that has assumed power that never belonged to them. Or, as Gerard Baker said so eloquently in the Wall Street Journal:

The implementation of the left’s agenda—dismantling the border, a massive stimulus into a supply-constrained economy, the regulation of American capitalism and a federal industrial policy, taxpayers forced to foot the bill for the education of the privileged, the rewriting of social relations in line with the dictates of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” ideology—all this would have been ruinous in a country that had actually voted for them. In a country that simply sought to escape the chaos and lunacy of the Trump years, it is almost criminal.

The common element in all these miscalculations is the familiar flaw in the left’s mindset—hubris, the absolute self-assurance that they alone know what is good for the rest of us. Disdainful of the concerns of regular people, supremely confident that, even in their dotage, they should make choices for us that we can’t be trusted to make for ourselves, their unshakable faith in the ability of government to order our lives better than we can.

They might try to flee the crime scene, but their muddy footprints will remain for decades. Only the Republicans, as fractured and chaotic as they are, can guide this vessel out of the storm. We should be grateful for them and that we still have elections to vote our way out of this mess.

Godspeed, Republicans.