Some Positive Indications About This Year's Election

I noticed this during a recent trip to my hometown

I know there has been a lot of fretting about the election and what if Donald Trump actually wins. (I wrote about such a potential scenario myself just a couple of days ago.) Over the past several months I've seen posts on Substack Notes, Twitter/X, and Threads from people who said that they had previously voted for Donald Trump in the last two elections but now they have decided against voting for Trump for a third time and they intend to vote for Kamala Harris.

I know that this is all anecdotal but it's also the kind of story that the corporate-owned media should at least mention once or twice but they have ignored it because they are so eager to see Trump get reelected. I recently noticed something during a recent trip to the town I grew up in.

I was born in Baltimore and I lived there until I was five when my family moved to the nearby suburban town of Glen Burnie (which is located just a few miles south of Baltimore). When I was growing up Glen Burnie was a working class town that was dubbed “The Car Capitol of Maryland” due to the numerous car dealerships that lined both Maryland Route 2 (also known as Governor Ritchie Highway) and Crain Highway. It was also more of a moderate/conservative place where many of the adults either leaned as a conservative Democrat or Republican. I still remember when the adults in my area organized against a proposed sex education class in my high school because they thought that kids would be encouraged to have premarital sex and end up becoming parents of out-of-wedlock children by the time they turned 18. (The school offered it but it ended up being heavily watered down with little mention about abortion and birth control or what an orgasm is and how to achieve one.) Many of these adults were kind of like Archie Bunker from the 1970s TV sitcom All in the Family and, yes, I heard plenty of them drop racial and ethnic slurs when I was growing up. And if you were LGBTQ you kept your true identity very heavily on the downlow if you wanted to avoid being harrassed in Glen Burnie.

Until her death in 2020 (just a month before the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic) my mother spent the last 12 years of her life in declining health due to multiple sclerosis. There were times when she was hospitalized due to either a urinary tract infection or sepsis or both.

In 2016 my mother was hospitalized once again for sepsis and she was in a hospital in Glen Burnie. I live closer to Washington, DC so it's usually no big deal for me to go to Glen Burnie whenever I wanted or needed to go so I went to that hospital where my mother stayed. After I had visited my mother for a few hours I decided to head home.

I was driving through a nearby neighborhood when I saw two houses that had posted “Trump/Pence 2016” yard signs in the front yard. I pulled the car over and took a closer look. I remember shaking my head because I was once married to a native New Yorker and we used to visit his family and friends in the New York City metropolitan area once or twice a year. They were all very familiar with Donald Trump since he began his career as a New York real estate developer. Not once had I ever heard any of them say anything even remotely positive about Trump. In fact my late father-in-law was involved with a group who were trying to put a stop to the proposed construction of Trump Place because it was going to be built over the last open green space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which the locals had long used as a public park. But Trump's ally Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York at the time and Trump also had his sympathetic cronies on the New York City Council so Trump got his own way. Trump Place was built over that last remaining green space only to have the Trump Place residents vote to remove the Trump name from the buildings after the 2016 election.

I have a WordPress blog called Sagittarius Dolly that is mostly devoted to my arts, crafts, photography, and videography. I took photos of the houses in Glen Burnie with the Trump/Pence 2016 yard signs and wrote a post about the irony of people in Glen Burnie supporting Trump even though Trump has always cared more about catering to rich people so much that the only way that someone from Glen Burnie could ever afford to join a Trump club or live in a luxurious Trump property would be through winning one of those multimillion dollar Powerball lotteries. In that same entry I also embedded a Keith Olbermann video (made during the brief time that he did political commentary for GQ's YouTube channel) where he expressed outrage that Donald Trump had refused to say whether he would recognize the election result if he loses and had hinted that he might not recognize the results. Sounds familiar? Donald Trump didn't recognize the election result in 2020 when he lost and he has dropped hints that he won't recognize this year's election result if he loses next month.

Now it's eight years since I wrote that post about the two houses in Glen Burnie with the Trump/Pence 2016 yard signs. On Monday (which also happened to be the observation of Indigenous People's Day) I was driving around in Glen Burnie through the same area where I saw those yard signs in 2016. This time I haven't seen any homes displaying a Trump yard sign. Not a single one.

It looks like the people in Glen Burnie who were previously Trump supporters are coming to their senses. I don't know what made those previous Trump supporters in Glen Burnie turn away from Trump. Maybe they still have memories of the last time he was president and they weren't impressed (especially with the amount of time he spent tweeting on Twitter instead of the job that he was elected to do and his frequent weekends spent playing golf at one of Trump's own clubs). Maybe they knew someone who had died in the COVID-19 pandemic and they are still angry over how Trump mismanaged it. Maybe they were outraged over Trump's role in the attempted violent insurrection at the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Maybe they are concerned about Trump being too cozy with authoritarian dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un. Maybe they are disgusted with the fact that Trump is running again despite being a convicted felon. Maybe they are turned off by Trump's threat to rule as a dictator. Maybe they are concerned about Project 2025 and how it could directly affect them. Maybe they had heard some of his recent speeches and have noticed his cognitive decline. Maybe it's all of these things that are making them say no to Trump this time around.

It's also possible that the people who lived in those houses with the Trump yard signs in 2016 has since moved out of the area and they sold their homes to people who aren't Trump fans at all.

Whatever the reason I'm heartened by the lack of Trump yard signs in my old hometown. I'll admit that I didn't see any homes in Glen Burnie with a Harris yard sign. Or at least I didn't see one in the areas that I drove through. I've seen more Harris yard signs in the Washington, DC area where I now live. I'm hoping that seeing the lack of Trump yard signs in Glen Burnie is a positive sign that the days of Donald Trump's dominance in the political and media landscape are coming to a close soon and these people are ready and willing to vote for Kamala Harris. I hope so. I am really looking forward to the days where I won't see Trump's name in the news every single day.

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