Thread by @annbauerwriter

I have a theory. It has to with the ardent converts Dems since Obama have won over - middle-income aspirational state college grads in what we used to call pink-collar jobs.
The DNC's marketing goes straight to people with a consumerist mindset & an external locus of control. 🧵

https://twitter.com/LeadingReport/status/1834274372460155153

Remember my thread about Tom? (below, for ref) He was one of those guys: looking for the next, cool edgy thing (RenFaire! Polyamory!), eventually finding his identity in White Dudes for Kamala. Now let me tell you about "Becky" - a distant cousin of mine.

https://x.com/annbauerwriter/status/1817361213300347246

Becky grew up in Iowa, in a conservative Catholic family. Pro-life, patriarch ruled the house. She got a 4-year degree in business and a job in a bank. Becky was newly married during the Clinton years and thought the president's cheating was immoral; he should be removed.

When she voted, she voted Republican. That's what you did. But mostly she didn't care. She kept up on fashion and got her hair balayaged and rose to be an assistant manager, even while having three kids. She once told me the most awful thing she could imagine was getting fat.

Her husband, a guitarist in a backwoods country band, homeschooled their kids. They moved to a still-smaller Iowa town for space and "family values." Then, around the time Becky turned 40, something changed. George W Bush was elected president & the tide turned. Suddenly...

You were STUPID if you voted Republican. Becky and her husband owned a truck and a bunch of big machinery. They certainly weren't Al Gore/Inconvenient Truth people. But for the first time, she was judged by her conservative politics and traditional life. Becky didn't like it.

I'm almost certain she voted for George W the first time. I wouldn't be surprised if she sat the next election out. But by the time Obama came along with Hope/Change posters and his promise of kindness and a better world, Becky was sold.
She was 45. The worst had happened:

She'd gained weight. She was no longer the prettiest woman at the bank. In fact, no one even looked at her. Fashion didn't fit the way it used to. Her husband's band hadn't caught on; he played smaller and smaller venues. Her hair was going gray. But! She was a good person.

She showed it by putting Obama signs in her lawn and preaching to her less-educated rural neighbors about the necessity to elect America's first Black president. Her children are sweet & successful and she's (deservedly) a proud mom. But in other ways, she felt overlooked.

She & her husband started going to Disneyworld for every anniversary. It made them feel magical, like there were possibilities. They Facebooked photos from every trip and around 2013 Becky (who used to talk about "the queers") started putting rainbow frames around everything.

Covid was the best thing that ever happened to Becky - then 55 - and her husband. She'd risen to a low-level administrative post at the bank and as of 2020, she's been told she can work from home, for the rest of her career. I think everyone felt relief when the bars closed.

For 30 yrs, they'd been telling us his big break was just around the next corner. But Covid closures gave them a natural end to that story. Sadly his art was cut short by a global pandemic. He had to return home and give up on his dream. He even got some gig-work Covid relief.

Today, there is no more cheerful or ardent promoter of Harris and Walz than Becky. She's just two years from retirement; she will spend much of that working time in an RV just outside the Magic Kingdom. Every day she posts a new meme about how dumb Trump is or how racist...

Every day, she gets 300 likes from people who congratulate her for "doing the right thing." She follows Mark Ruffalo and Sean Penn and Stephen King and re-posts whatever they say. She's no longer beautiful or thin or fashionable, but she's rolling in approval.

God knows,

it's hard to support a man who says the bewilderingly ridiculous things Trump does. It's embarrassing, it's almost impossible to defend - even when the alternative is demonstrably worse.

You have to know who you are and find your power somewhere other than in the zeitgeist.

People with an internal compass can make decisions w/o bowing to the mechanisms of public approval. Working class people, outsiders. Those who didn't go to college & don't have anything to prove - they can put aside the elite Disneyfied glamor of the DNC.

Sadly, Becky cannot.