Deconstruction 5.2 -- lead up to the debate

I continue to work on this novel as a discipline on the weekends.

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The climax of the election frenzy on campus in the fall of 2016 happened the week after the “grab them by the p* video” surfaced. That came out on a Thursday, October 6. The history professor, Dr. Todley, was worried that the students might not vote for Trump after the video. For him, a Christian could only vote for the Republican. There was never any other choice in a presidential election.

He was from Indiana. He wasn’t quite as much a Yankee as someone from New York, but there were definitely times you could tell he was an outsider. The South was a little more complicated on the “you can’t vote for a Democrat” line. Most of our grandparents and before had been staunch Democrats. Now our parents were Republicans.

The big change came after the whole desegregation mess of the 60s and 70s. President LBJ may have been a Democrat, but our grandparents thought he was a traitor. In the Reagan years, some of those old-time Democrats started to change parties.

I’ve decided that people come up with all sorts of different reasons for why they vote the way they do. Most of them aren’t the real reason. Although he was a smart man, Dr. Todley would always find a reason to vote for a Republican. Even down-ballot, where abortion wasn’t at stake, he would find a reason to conclude the Republican superior.

Several of us took his US History class that spring. In a moment of weakness, he admitted that he had only ever voted for a Democrat once for county council. The candidate was one of his neighbors. But he went on to regret it.

I had an interesting conversation with my grandfather about Trump. In the same conversation, he both ripped on Reagan as an awful president and then gave his unbridled praise for Trump. Wow, I thought to myself. I’m looking at an archaeological dig here. I’m seeing the Democrat layer that was still in place in the 80s and the Republican layer of the 2000s. Each corresponded to a different wife.

So Dr. Todley was right to worry that some professors and students might vote for Clinton. They might be Republican of late, but there was a deeper history of voting Democrat in their families hiding in there too.

For an opponent, it was hard to find a professor on campus who would admit they planned to vote for Hillary. The biology professor, Dr. Baine, finally agreed because he felt there needed to be a counterbalance. He had already admitted to our table that he was voting for Clinton. So Matt was quick to call him a liar when he said he hadn’t decided who to vote for yet. The position he took in the debate was that a Christian couldn’t in good conscience vote for Trump. The only real Christian choice, he argued, was to vote for a third party candidate, Clinton, or not to vote at all.