Claire galofaro
10/19/2020 18:00
Clarín.com
World
Updated 10/19/2020 6:00 PM
For most of her life, until 2016,
Lori Goldman
had been politically apathetic.
Had he been offered $ 1 million, he says, he could not have described the powers of the government in depth.
He voted, sometimes.
Now every moment that passes without trying to rid America of Donald Trump feels like a waste of time.
This year, he is going to vote in the presidential elections.
He walks with the determination of a person who believes that the very fate of democracy may hinge on the next door he knocks, head down, shoulders forward.
He's not wearing anything fussy, his company's battle suits: yoga pants and sneakers.
Drop off your Lincoln Aviator in the driveway, with the driver's door open.
And he heads towards the door of a house.
"We don't take anything for granted," he tells his campaign partner.
"They say Joe Biden is ahead.
No.
We work like Biden is 20 points behind in every state," he says.
Lori Goldman, hell-bent on getting Trump out of the White House.
Photo: AP
Goldman spends every day knocking on the door of the Democrats in Oakland County, Michigan, a wealthy suburb of Detroit.
He feels responsible for the future of the country: Trump won Michigan in 2016 by 10,700 votes and that helped him get into the White House.
Goldman believes that people like her,
white women from the suburbs
, could free the country from another four years of chaos.
For many of those women, the past four years have meant
frustration
,
anger and activism,
a political awakening that fueled the women's marches, the #MeToo movement and victories with record numbers of female candidates in 2018.
That energy helped create
the largest gender gap
, the political divide between men and women, in recent history.
And it has already started showing up in early voting, because women are casting their votes before men.
In Michigan, women cast nearly 56% of the early vote so far, and 68% of them were Democrats, according to voting data firm L2.
That could spell
trouble for Trump
, not just in Oakland County, but also on the suburban battlefields outside of
Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Phoenix.
Trump tried to appeal to "America's suburban housewives," as he called them.
Embracing fear, he argued that Black Lives Matter protesters will bring crime, low-income housing will ruin property values, suburbs will be abolished.
In the Pennsylvania campaign last week, he pleaded, "Suburban women, will you like me?"
There is no sign that this is all working.
Some recent polls show that Biden won the support of about
60% of suburban women
.
In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 52%, according to an estimate from the Pew Research Center.
Talk to the women of the Michigan suburbs, and you'll find ample confirmation: the lifelong Republican who says her party has been run by cowards.
The black executive who fears for the safety of her children.
The Democrat who voted for Trump in 2016 but now describes him as "a terrible person."
Together, they create a powerful political force.
Goldman started her group,
Fems for Dems
, in early 2016 by emailing hundreds of friends, saying she planned to help elect the first female president and asking if they would like to join her.
Four years later, their ranks have grown to nearly 9,000.
A married real estate agent with 12-year-old triplets and a 23-year-old daughter, she simultaneously became the
stereotype of a suburban woman
and her antithesis: she lives in a 600-square-meter house with seven bathrooms, and snacks from Aperol.
He also spices almost every sentence with insults and he no longer cares what people think.
Goldman started his group, Fems for Dems, in early 2016 by emailing hundreds of friends.
Photo: AP
"I hate the saying, 'When they go down, we go up.' They are loser phrases," he says.
"You can be right all day, but if you're not winning, what's the point?"
And it worked: She once described her coalition to a newspaper as "a bunch of silly, middle-aged housewives," and a few got mad at her, but many more joined.
Although she is terrified that the constant cycle of crisis has left many women exhausted and that could stop this lurch to the left.
The nation is reeling from a pandemic and protests, the death of a revered Supreme Court justice, the hospitalization of the president, a thwarted plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan.
"Our house is on fire,"
says Goldman, and so he heads his SUV next door at the dead end.
Oakland County stretches from the Detroit boundary more than 45 miles, through wealthy subdivisions, quaint little towns and elegant business districts, on rural stretches with dirt roads and horse pastures.
Goldman covered almost every inch of the county.
Although Clinton won here in 2016, he got fewer votes than Barack Obama four years earlier, while the third-party vote soared.
Had Clinton matched Obama's total, Oakland County alone could have cut Trump's margin of victory in Michigan by more than half.
But in 2018, some political scientists described it as the epicenter of a major political shift when women turned against Republicans.
Lori Goldman poses next to campaign posters in Bloomfield Village, Michigan.
Photo: AP
"Women are pragmatic voters," said Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
"We care about our children. We care about our parents. We care about economic security. And that is why the candidates who defend those values and show that they can be good and decent human beings are echoed. And I think this moment, with this White House, it's sharper than ever. "
Whitmer nearly doubled Clinton's margin in Oakland County in 2018. That same year, Democrat Elissa Slotkin flipped a seat in Congress that was under Republican control for nearly 20 years.
Some of Slotkin's strongest supporters were Republican women.
Longtime
elected township clerk
Nancy Strole
had been unable to vote for Trump.
She considers herself an "old-fashioned republican."
He said that it has not changed and that his party
was "kidnapped".
"It's not just Trump," he said.
"It will not happen unless there are others who accept it and are willing to follow it, be it because of their silence, because of their lack of will, because of their lack of courage."
When Trump began his presidency by undermining international alliances and routinely denigrating the people, he became frustrated that the Republicans
did nothing
about it.
Strole said he called his congressman, Mike Bishop, and he never responded.
Meanwhile, Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, announced his offer against Bishop.
His reason for running was affected by Strole's growing consternation: He had seen Bishop in the White House, smiling, as Republicans worked to disarm the Affordable Care Act.
In her entire life as a Republican, Strole had never volunteered for a Congressional campaign.
But it knocked on the door of 1,000 homes for Slotkin.
Andrea Moore, by contrast, grew up in a Democratic family.
But she voted for Trump because she was fed up with career politicians who seemed interested only in money and power.
"It was an unknown amount, but now we know," said Moore, 45, who lives in a suburban community in Wayne County.
You can't recall the precise moment you decided you made a mistake.
It felt like
a toxic relationship: you
can make excuses for a while, but eventually
the disgust sets in.
"A million little things, the rapid fire attacks on people, the division, the fear of manipulation." All the motives came together. "
Any other person
He cannot understand how anyone can support Trump after his own response to the fight against COVID-19, how
he mocked the masks
and held meetings, downplayed the threat, did not acknowledge that he had access to treatments others do not have, he said.
All this when more than 219,000 Americans have died.
Moore, a homemaker raising her 9-year-old son, does not love Biden.
But if the choice is between Trump and anyone else, he said,
anyone else
is fine.
He hopes the administration will be led by Kamala Harris - a black woman, daughter of immigrants, young, sharp.
An old recipe
Trump's pitch to try to recruit female voters from the suburbs is based on a version of America's past.
He warned that "Biden will destroy his neighborhood and his American dream."
He reversed an Obama-era housing initiative that sought to reduce racial segregation, claiming that property values would decrease, crime would increase, and the suburbs would "go to hell."
"I think if this were 1950, your message would be perfect," said Karyn Lacy, a sociologist at the University of Michigan.
"The problem is that we are not in 1950."
To Alison Jones, Trump's description of the suburbs strikes her as a nostalgia for "a time gone by," when people who look like her couldn't have lived in her subdivision, where no home costs less than a million dollars.
Alison Jones poses in front of her home in a neighborhood where no home costs less than $ 1 million.
Photo: AP
Now when Jones, a black woman, sees Trump's signs, she wonders: Do her neighbors really want her here?
Suburbs like this were once
exclusively white
by design: The federal government had long subscribed to segregationist policies that kept black families out.
Even now, Oakland County is
still very white
, but not as
white
as before.
In 1990, the county was 88% white.
By 2019, that number dropped to 71.5%.
Jones watched as Trump stood on a debating stage and
refused to condemn white supremacy
, telling a hate group to "stay behind and stay alert."
She was a girl in the south in the 1960s, when schools were beginning to integrate, and the message was very familiar: it's us against them.
She fears for her two children, perhaps more in this predominantly white community than in a city, she said.
In 2018, a 14-year-old black boy got lost not far from where she lives and knocked on the door asking for instructions to leave.
The white owner
shot him.
A critical point
Jones believes that the United States has reached
a critical point
.
Police killings exposed systemic racism, COVID-19 disproportionately kills black people, and they also bore most of the economic consequences.
"I think 2020
reopened the wounds
, the curtain was drawn so we can see what is really here."
An executive of a Fortune 500 company, Jones moved here for the same reason everyone else did:
good schools
, safe property values,
safety.
Lori Goldman doesn't like knocking on strangers' doors, asking them to vote for the Democrats.
He is hungry because he often does not take the time to eat.
His knee hurts from a replacement surgery six months ago.
Homes often have
Trump flags hanging
from porch railings.
"But this is war," she says, and considers herself a street fighter.
People look at it and make assumptions, they say: a $ 2 million house, a luxury car, a black American Express card that you always lose because you keep it in your bodice.
But she grew up in a city of steel not far away, she was one of six children raised by a poor, single mother, dependent on state money.
Most of his family and childhood friends are Trump supporters, so he knows there are many whose minds he will not change.
But some things have happened to spur more women to fight Trump.
Sometimes Goldman stands up in the middle of Starbucks and yells, "Who here can't take it anymore? Who wants this guy out of office?"
One part of the room will be furious, but they don't care, because another part will ask
how they can help
.
Fems for Dems grows.
His group has about 8,900 members.
But that's not what Trump would say, so it's not what he does either.
"More than 9,000," he says.
"And on the rise."
* The author is a journalist for the Associated Press
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