Bay Area voters dreading rematch
With a Biden-Trump presidential rematch all but inevitable, a “fight or flight” mentality was already triggering voters casting ballots across the Bay Area on Super Tuesday.
For Velia Dominguez, 73, a Democrat still stewing over the 2020 election, when a Trump-supporting family friend unfriended his own wife on Facebook, it was fight. After she cast her primary ballot in San Jose for Biden, she took aim at Trump supporters.
“It makes me feel like taking my bra off and choking `em,” the grandmother of seven said. “It has plenty of support so it can choke a lot of people.”
Good thing she didn't run into cowboy hatwearing Robert Mitchell, 66, inside the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters office. The Dallas native, who now lives in San Jose, voted a straight Republican ticket Tuesday, with Trump at the top.
“We gotta get rid of Biden as fast as we can,” he said. “I like the country we had when Trump was president — it was patriotic, it was American. … It was Christian.”
From San Jose to Oakland to Antioch, turnout for the primary appeared low — only 16% of mail-in ballots had been turned in by Monday night in Santa Clara County — but many of those who trickled in to hand-deliver their ballots Tuesday were as passionate, divided and frustrated as ever.
The prospect of another eight months of conflict and vitriol were enough for Leslie Hardie of Mountain View to want to disengage entirely: “I'd rather put my head in the sand — and someone can tell me what the outcome is.”
National polls already show that if the presidential race were held now, the general election would be a tossup. A New York Times poll this week shows Trump ahead — 48% to 43% for Biden.
Although there's little chance Trump will hold the same sway in the deep blue state of California, where Biden won more than 60% of the vote in 2020, one in three California voters chose Trump that year. And support for
Trump grew slightly from 2016 when he ended up beating Hilary Clinton for the presidency in the national election.
For many voters, a Biden-Trump redo is a rematch nobody wanted. Over and over, voters expressed concern Tuesday that Biden is too old to lead and Trump is too dangerous for democracy.
As one Democratic voter in San Jose put it: “I don't think one will survive the experience, and the other isn't capable of the experience.”
That sentiment led some Bay Area voters to leave the ballot blank when it came to choosing a presidential contender, or to reach deep into the ballot to fill the bubble for Marianne Williamson or Minnesota Congressman Rep. Dean Phillips, or independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Narcisa Heurta, 40, an East Bay hospital clerk who usually votes Democratic, declined to cast a vote in the presidential race over Biden's handling of the war in Gaza.
“Genocide is wrong, and that's what we are funding,” Huerta of Oakland said.
A similar sentiment led some voters to support U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, for the Senate seat that opened when Dianne Feinstein died last fall.
But Katrina BrekkeMiesner, 72, who works as a grant-writer at a nonprofit that helps the homeless in the East Bay, said that although Lee had “one good vote” opposing the U.S. entry into Iraq in 2001, she thought Lee did not engage enough with her constituents.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, a Los Angeles Democrat with ties to the Bay Area who led impeachment proceedings against Trump, was leading among Democrats in the Senate race in pre-primary polls, ahead of Lee and U.S. Rep. Katie Porter of Orange County. Political newcomer Steve Garvey, a Republican of baseball fame, was surging in the polls last week.
Some voters said they were still traumatized by the aftermath of the 2020 election, when Biden won by 7 million votes, but the election was thrown into chaos when Trump claimed, without evidence, widespread voter fraud. He encouraged his followers to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6. and a violent insurrection ensued.