Across the strait, voter divisions are no joke
Will Sanders supporters turn to Clinton or open the door to Trump victory?
The woman with the Bernie Sanders decal on her car is shaking her head. No, she says, she won’t vote for Hillary Clinton. “I’m tired of choosing the lesser of two evils.” If it comes down to Clinton versus Donald Trump in November, she’ll write Bernie’s name on the ballot.
There are plenty of Bernie fans here in Clallam County. They outvoted Clinton supporters three to one in the Democrats’ state caucuses.
The question now is whether the Bernie backers will A) vote for Clinton or B) feel the spurn, snub their fellow Democrats and open the door to a Donald Trump victory.
Oh, you don’t have to go far from Victoria to see what a serious election looks like, one in which the emotions are so raw, the divisions so wide, the consequences for the world so great that it makes Canada’s Trudeau 2.0 vote look like a power struggle in the volunteer fire department. Even our friendly, folksy neighbours across the strait aren’t exempt.
Port Angeles, pop. 19,000, is a terrific little place. Great hiking and biking trails, and a walkable downtown that, while still showing too many empty storefronts, has plenty of places to find good food, good coffee and good beer. Livability.com rated it the fifthbest small town in the U.S.: “Low food costs, low crime and high community involvement help make the city one of the nation’s best places to live.”
It’s just 30 kilometres across the strait from Victoria but isolated from everywhere else. The Olympics loom to the south, while Seattle is two hours to the east. Nothing lies to the west except the vampires and werewolves of Forks, the focal point of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels.
That makes us their closest neighbours. They listen to Victoria radio stations, watch CHEK for the weather forecast and — bless ’em — can even buy the Times Colonist at Port Book and News. Port Angeles feels as familiar as it does foreign.
But have no doubt, this is the U.S. of A. On Lincoln Street a classic American courthouse with a Back to the Future clock tower sits beside a war memorial that features a replica of the Liberty Bell. Among the plaques are those naming five Clallam County men who died in Korea and nine who fell in Vietnam.
There’s no plaque honouring those who died in Iraq, though in 2004 I met a grieving father whose Marine sergeant son had been killed there. In a high-on-ahill house from which he could see the lights of Victoria, the dad — a highly decorated, twice-wounded Vietnam helicopter gunship pilot — raged against George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld for dragging the U.S. into a bad war.
Others felt just as strongly that the war was just: Bush took 51 per cent of the Clallam County vote that year. Four years later, Barack Obama won the county by a similar margin. Four years after that, in 2012, the blue-red split was almost dead even.
Port Angeles has changed a bit since then. The Twilight tourism boom, in which tweenagers and their parents flocked to the north Olympic Peninsula, has abated. (The Dazzled By Twilight shop has closed, though you can still get mushroom ravioli — the same dish ordered by the series’ teenage heroine — in Bella Italia, the real-life restaurant featured in the first novel).
And recreational marijuana is legal in Washington state now, though Port Angeles’ three government-licensed shops charge more for their pot than do Victoria’s medical (cough, cough) dispensaries. (Don’t Drug And Drive warn the roadside signs on the highway to Sequim).
But otherwise things appear much the same. The Democrats have even filled the display window of their First Street campaign headquarters with the same life-sized cardboard cutouts of Michele and Barack Obama that they used before. (They should at least have greyed Barack’s hair. After eight years of fending off birthers, bigots and opponents so rabid that they would rather see the whole country fail than the president succeed, it’s a miracle that the cutouts don’t show him curled in the fetal position, or drinking bourbon out of the bottle with one hand and firing a shotgun at the moon with the other.)
Not sure things really are the same during this year’s campaign, though, not after a year that feels like the whole country is gripping a live electrical wire. U.S. political divisions are usually more bitter than ours, but this time the splintering goes beyond a simple Republican-Democrat split.
Roger Fight, the chairman of the county’s Democrats, doesn’t put much stock in the grumbling of Sanders supporters who say they’ll shun Clinton. “I think Bernie is going to be good to his word and do anything he can to see Donald Trump is not elected,” he says.
Maybe. But that woman with the decal on her car, and another Sanders supporter encountered down by the Coho ferry terminal, were snarlier toward fellow Democrat Clinton than toward Republican Trump. Others on the street were reluctant to express a political opinion at all, at least not without looking around first to see if anyone was listening. The volume control on this campaign’s toxic discourse only has two settings: shout and whisper.
Over on our side of the strait, we like to make fun of the lunacy of this year’s presidential race, but when you pop across and talk to our neighbours — decent, friendly people in a decent, friendly town — smugness turns to sympathy. In the United (?) States, the divisions are no joke.