Harrisonburg, Virginia, is a ravishing little city nestled within the Shenandoah Valley that’s waking up from a nap because it awaits the arrival of scholars to James Madison University subsequent week.
“They come from New York or New Jersey and register to vote here,” Marla, the supervisor of the Texas Inn diner instructed me. She wasn’t mad about it, it is only a truth of life in these sorts of hamlets.
Marla is a Donald Trump supporter, late 50’s white girl, and he or she was the primary particular person in Harrisonburg who I requested the urgent query of the day: Do who Kamala Harris is?
“Not at all,” she instructed me. “I have no idea.”
This was the reply I obtained from everybody I spoke to, throughout your complete political spectrum, which is displayed in all its shiny colours in Harrisonburg.
Rick was right here for a conference of photographers and is a rural Virginia Democrat, one other older white voter.
“I do wish Harris would do some interviews, make it clearer what she stands for,” he instructed me.
I requested him if he would nonetheless vote for her if she retains stiff-arming the press.
“Yes,” he stated, “I mean, look at the other choice.”
Earlier that day, I had spoken to Jim, from New York, who was dropping off his sophomore daughter in school, and he gave me the inverse response.
“I’m a Republican,” he instructed me, “so I can’t vote for this far-left Democratic ticket. But I’m also a New Yorker [and] I’m not nuts about Trump. But what choice do I have?
Increasingly, this election feels like: 2024 What Choice Do I Have?
Larry, a local in his 40s listening to another talented local play guitar in the hotel lobby, has all but given up.
“It doesn’t matter who the president is,” he said, resigned to an increasingly common political despair. “Until Congress has time period limits, it doesn’t matter, they only do what’s finest for themselves.”
But there are voters still making up their minds, not swept away by either party or candidate. Derrick, a black man in his early thirties in town for a leadership conference, also wants to know what Harris stands for.
“She has no platform,” he said. “All I hear is ladies’s rights and abortion. I wish to know if she is simply going to be Biden once more.”
A lot of people want to know that, but do enough want it for Harris to actually define herself? That remains to be seen.
The frustration of the American voter is increasingly apparent. As one person put it, “these politicians simply discuss proper previous us, no one listens.”
Democrats I spoke to here, like elsewhere across beautiful America of highway and small town, are more excited now that Harris is running. It is palpable, it is real, there’s no question about it, but there is something else, a kind of nervous lack of clarity.
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“Maybe the much less she does, the higher,” one other member of the management convention confided to me, and I might hear in his voice that he knew what he was saying was, effectively, lower than excellent.
In simply over per week, as wide-eyed freshmen fill the dorms at James Madison and Marla begins serving them Cheesy Westerns with selfmade Texas relish, the Democratic National Convention will start. Surely, there should be an look of the actual Kamala Harris, if there’s one.
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But for now, on this charming city of church steeples and faculty greens, the voters wait. They wait to see if Trump can keep disciplined, if Harris can outline herself, or if some new occasion will throw a brand new curveball into this weird election.
The individuals are pensive, however they’re additionally dwelling their lives, and politics doesn’t all the time pierce by way of. That could also be what Kamala Harris and her marketing campaign are relying on. And it simply may work.
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