How turned off are voters?
At Tommy’s Diner in Columbus, Ohio voters consider staying home
COLUMBUS, Ohio — So here we are, nearing the end of 2016’s he-said, she-said race to the bottom. Through it all, through his ugly caricatures of Mexicans and Muslims, through her pretzel contortions to explain her emails, through the Russian hacking and the 3 a.m. Twitter rants and the rest, this was always going to be a “hold your nose and vote” election.
But at Tommy’s Diner, a colorful Columbus institution in a working-class neighborhood once known as The Bottoms, “hold your nose and vote” is giving way, for some people, to “hold your nose and don’t vote.”
The distaste for the presidential election is obvious almost anywhere you look here in the capital of a swing state where in July 2015 Gov. John Kasich of Ohio (remember him?) became the 16th of 17 Republicans who hoped to succeed President Barack Obama. Aaron Burnside, 23, a first-year law student at Ohio State University, was at the student union that day, listening with optimism as Kasich declared that “the sun is rising” in America — words that now seem so quaint.
Never for a minute did Burnside, who described himself as a “right-of-center, fiscally conservative, socially liberal” Republican, imagine himself not casting a ballot on Election Day. But Thursday, with early voting underway here and Trump and Obama in town, Burnside had no idea whether he would vote for president. “It depends on how I feel that morning,” he said. He will go to the polls — it’s his civic duty — to back his party in down-ballot races; Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican, is fending off a challenge from Ted Strickland, a Democrat and former governor. Clinton seems too far to the left for him, he said; never a Trump fan, he found the Republican nominee’s vulgar boasts of grabbing women’s genitals “disgusting.” So he feels stuck, as do many voters. As early voting begins in Ohio and elsewhere, many Americans are approaching the election with a sense of dread. In a CBS News poll released this month, just 46 percent of likely voters said they were very enthusiastic about going to the polls, down from 62 percent in late October 2012, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. What’s uncertain this year is how many people will cast reluctant votes and how many won’t
vote at all.
At the diner, Tommy is a gregarious Greek immigrant and American citizen named Tom Pappas, who loves politics but keeps his business nonpartisan. The walls are covered with photos of Democrats and Republicans in equal numbers, and of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Tommy’s grandchildren and Ohio State football stars.
Pappas, 63, and his wife Kathy, 57, have owned the diner for 28 years. Kathy Pappas, who bakes the baklava and bread pudding, pays little heed to politics (she leaves that to Tommy), but this year finds it impossible to escape.
“I turn on the radio, looking for the traffic or the weather,” she said, “and what do they talk about?”
Kathy Pappas said she has always voted.
“But I don’t know if I’m going to this year,” she said. “I just don’t care for either one, and I don’t trust either one. There’s just not a good feeling either way you look, and that’s sad.”
Every day 400 to 500 people pass through Tommy’s; customers run the gamut.Breakfast on a recent Thursday brought a group of retirees, middle-aged white men in red T-shirts who had spent the morning building tables and chairs at a furniture bank for the needy; two retired social studies teachers with their daughter, an acupuncturist (also an herbalist), and her boyfriend, a tattoo artist; a group of bus drivers; a retired firefighter, plus the usual smattering of lawyers and state workers.
The acupuncturist, Keri Ondrus, 31, has given up on voting; she has taught English in Costa Rica and was involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, describing herself as a “total idealist” and “anarchist” who feels there must be another way to repair the world. Her parents, Charlotte and Bill Ondrus, the retired teachers, will vote for Clinton.
“You guys are not enthusias- tic about Hillary,” their daughter said.
“I know,” her mother replied, “but I’m scared to death of Donald Trump.”
Lunchtime brought a fatherand-son team of bail bondsmen; an Air Force veteran and gunrights enthusiast wearing one of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” ball caps and a 9-millimeter pistol in a sleek, black Velcro case on his belt; and a half-dozen young black hip-hop artists, pre- paring for a show at Wright State University in Dayton.
“Why would I waste my time?” Kyle Steed, 23, a composer with the group, said of voting, adding that he would rather spend his time helping the homeless as a volunteer. His friend Shamere Griffin, 21, another of the artists, shook her head wordlessly, seeming to fight back tears.
She said she could never vote for Trump, given his characterizations of blacks, Muslims, Mex- icans and women. She wants an America in which she doesn’t have to remind “my little brother, when he walks down the street, to walk with his hood down,” and has no confidence that Clinton can deliver that. She will stay home.
“Let’s just be real,” Griffin said. “What has she done for us? That’s what I want to know. What has she done for my people?”
OGeorge Wolf, a 73, a retired firefighter who owns a small heating and air conditioning business here, comes to Tommy’s every morning for the crispy corned beef and a dose of friendship. A longtime Republican, he says he “cannot allow Hillary Clinton to get in,” and proceeds to tick off the reasons.
“When you mention Benghazi, I get really upset,” he said, referring to the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya. “Four people died; she doesn’t seem to care.” Then there are her emails. And her paid speeches: “I just don’t like the fact that a politician is out to make money,” Wolf said, adding that he would vote for Trump, which he views as better than not voting at all. He does not feel good about it. “He went bankrupt; as a small-business man, that doesn’t help me pay my bills,” said Wolf, who added that he did not like Trump’s nasty nicknames — “Crooked Hillary,” for example. “That’s a child talking,” Wolf said. He backed Kasich in the primary, but came around to Trump after the Ohio governor dropped out of the race.