The Man On The Street On The Internet

I have various friends through whom I follow on Facebook closely due in part to politics. The most obvious reason to do so is that they have something insightful to say, and sometimes that’s why, but there’s another subset I watch for another reason: The man and woman on the street.

I have a longstanding friend named Tony and, by my reckoning, Tony should be a Republican. He has a Republican mentality, to the extent that there is such a thing. Most people, when they talk to him, will assume that he is one, unless politics comes up. He’s an independent. Up until recently, he was a right-leaning one. The thing about Tony is that he’s not a swipple and has no aspirations of swippledom. He is very independent-minded and believed that he could do a better job of educating himself than some fancy-schmancy college good. He works hard and makes a good living. When he has lost his job, he has never so much as applied for unemployment. He has a disdain for those who do. He’s not a big fan of OWS and should have been a big fan of the Tea Party.

I’m relatively sure he voted for Bush twice and think that he voted for McCain. Now, Tony is just a guy and he’s not even a guy in a swing state, but I feel that the GOP needs Tony’s vote to thrive. Unfortunately, they’ve lost it at least for the time being. His Facebook feed has gone from about 50/50 making fun of everybody to 75/25 making fun of conservatives and Republicans. The GOP has lost him on gay rights (they never had him, but they did have his ambivalence) and really lost him on contraception. If I were to psychoanalyze, it’s driven home the ways in which he is not a Republican. He’s an atheist. He’s married and divorced twice, to the same woman, and was “living in sin” with my ex-girlfriend Julianne in between the marriages. His parents divorced when he was young and he is glad that they did. He has a child (conceived in wedlock, born during separation) and pays child support on a couple of former step-kids. His is a complicated situation. In the GOP’s narrow version of the way that families work, he’s on the outside. I don’t think he cares to do the mental gymnastics that would keep him in the fold of a party that might like him personally but doesn’t like where he comes from.

Now, Tony is just a guy, and he’s a guy that doesn’t live in a swing state. But I think that there are a lot of guys like him. I can think of a number that I know that I believe the GOP has failed by not picking up. I do this a lot, asking myself not just how the parties are doing with Tony, but with the Tonies of the world. To be fair, sometimes things work the other way. At some point, the GOP apparently picked up our ex-girlfriend Julianne. Julie was always apolitical, and I doubt that she still has much in the way of beliefs, but I think a lot of the Obama-bashing has, for some reason (and not racism), taken with her as she really doesn’t like the guy. And she’s a little dour on liberals more generally. If I were to psychoanalyze, it might be related to her very conservative vision for herself (marriage, picket fence, kids) that never worked out (thanks to me & Tony, in large part) but that was always a part of her vision of the way that things should be. Or it might just be that she got a whole lot of Republican friends.

One of the reasons I keep an eye on the Tonys and Julies are that I can’t rely on what most of my other closest friends think. We all went to college and largely fit a swippley profile. My peer group is moving left (including my wife, and to a lesser extent myself), but we’re a relatively narrow demographic. One of the advantages to having known people like Tony and Julie are that they represent people quite different from myself. One never went to college and the other dropped out. Neither spend a whole lot of time thinking about grand philosophy. They’re more what I would call intuitive voters. I’ve named a couple here, but there are others (I don’t want to get too tedious).

I believe there to be more of them than more of us. Not among the voting population (since most voters are in one bag or the other), but among the potential voting population as well as among potential swing voters.