986: America's two most interesting voters

People are complicated

Who comes to mind when you think about the voters who decided the 2024 presidential election?

I think of a November 5, 2024 article featuring an undecided voter in Nevada. She is watching a Philadelphia Eagles game at a Buffalo Wild Wings. Gabrielle Ludwig is a college-educated registered Republican. She is married and served in the military.

A reporter for The Washington Post describes Gabrielle’s presidential decision in the most swing voter shorthand imaginable:

“She thinks Trump has some good qualities and Vice President Kamala Harris has plenty of bad ones.”

Like many articles about the election, the reporter highlights the They/Them ads featuring trans issues. It takes Gabrielle “a dozen” times seeing the ad of a trans woman playing college basketball - including once during the Eagles game at Buffalo Wild Wings - before making up her mind on who to vote for.

Why is that memorable?

You may remember that Eagles game on November 3rd for Saquon Barkley’s 180 degree leap over a Jaguars defender.

But the truly interesting thing is that Gabrielle Ludwig is the 6’5” trans woman athlete who appears in the They/Them ad:

When Ludwig first learned about the commercials, she hoped they were one-time airs. She is a registered Republican, and she didn’t want to stir up controversy by taking on any of the candidates who were using her face to drum up votes.

“I was hoping it would just go away,” she said. “But it snowballed. It got bigger and bigger every hour.”

Like many community college students, Ludwig’s journey to higher education was unconventional. She spent one semester in college when she was young, then she joined the Navy, where she fixed aviation electronics. She left the military in the 1990s and eventually took a job at a pharmaceutical company. In 2012, she decided to go back to school to learn Cisco computer systems.

Ludwig is 6-foot-5, and when she showed up to register for classes, the women’s basketball coach noticed her. Corey Cafferata had seen Ludwig before. She had coached a youth basketball team in a game that he had refereed.

“He grabbed my arm and said, ‘Are you eligible?’” Ludwig recalled.

Ludwig started laughing. She had played basketball as a teenager, she told him, but she hadn’t competed herself in 30 years. And she’d had gender-reassignment surgery six weeks earlier. Cafferata was undaunted. He talked to the state eligibility association and determined Ludwig could play. She took the team’s final roster spot a few weeks later.

…

Ludwig has voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and when trans athletes such as Lia Thomas have appeared in the news, Ludwig has tried to consider the arguments from both sides.

She sounds a lot like a certain member of Congress:

Rep. Sarah McBride, the first openly trans member of Congress, and her staff have spoken to her Democratic colleagues about the topic, NOTUS has learned. The Delaware congresswoman has cautioned moderate Democrats that the tenor and tone of their comments — particularly on questioning trans athletes in sports, which is where most of the debate has focused — might inflame and splinter factions instead of being productive.

“We have to create more space in our tent. If, for instance, we want to have a majoritarian coalition — not just electorally, but specifically on issues around trans rights — that, by necessity, is going to have to include people who have a range of thoughts,” McBride told NOTUS.

“A binary choice between being all-on or all-off is not constructive for anyone,” McBride continued. “It impedes the very needed path toward winning electorally, winning hearts and minds and, most importantly, winning progress.”

People are complicated!

Which is why empathy is our top value organizationally.

Yesterday, we emphasized a warning from

Matthew Yglesias

about focusing too much on the demographic slicing of voter data. Zooming out, it is clear that what united swing voters was far greater than what we learn by dividing up the electorate into small identity groups.

Ludwig is a case in point:

As Election Day approached, more and more people called Ludwig to say they had seen her in the ads. Many of her co-workers and friends met her after she had stopped playing basketball, and they seemed to view her in a new light. Some turned against her. Others who support Trump suggested she ought to feel good about appearing in an ad with the former president.

…

Ludwig estimates she’s seen the ads 20 times. She even saw it on the big screen at a Buffalo Wild Wings where she and her wife were watching the Eagles play the week of the election. As the ads continued running, Ludwig’s wife urged her to fight back.

…

For now, Ludwig has decided she will take the only recourse at her disposal. She will vote. A few months ago, Ludwig wasn’t sure whom she would cast her ballot for. She thinks Trump has some good qualities and Vice President Kamala Harris has plenty of bad ones, but after she had seen the ad a dozen or so times, Ludwig made up her mind.

A 6’5” trans woman at a Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Eagles game with her wife, watching herself attacked viciously in a They/Them ad from Trump a dozen times before making up her mind who to vote for. Damn.

Around the time of that Eagles game, I wrote about how They/Them ads were targeting something with far broader electoral resonance than trans issues. According to Trump’s own pollster, the attack ads were about interrupting Kamala’s pivot from the far left stances she took five years ago in the 2020 presidential primary. They intentionally hit a wide range of salient issues: prisoners, quotes from PBS and The New York Times, using Kamala’s own words pandering to a progressive interest group.

Kamala, it turned out, did not have the credibility with voters to pivot. But the second most interesting voter in the 2024 election shows someone who did. From The Boston Globe:

Ben Dyer hasn’t decided how he’ll vote in one of the nation’s most closely watched congressional elections this year, but he knows guns will be on his mind when he casts his ballot. And he’s pretty sure he won’t be the only one.

Dyer, a 47-year-old father of two, was shot five times at Schemengees Bar & Grille in Lewiston last October during the deadliest mass shooting in Maine history. He was rushed to a hospital in a game warden’s pickup truck. He still can’t use his right arm.

In the aftermath of a blood-soaked tragedy in which 18 people were killed, and many more were wounded at two separate crime scenes, Dyer has watched his state enact a battery of new gun control laws. It is against that backdrop that he and other voters in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District will consider the political future of three-term Congressman Jared Golden.

Golden, a Democrat with a history of supporting gun rights in ways that bucked his party's orthodoxy, has shifted his position since the Lewiston shooting. A former Marine who served in two wars overseas, he now supports an assault weapons ban. He's unopposed in Tuesday's Democratic primary in Maine, but the two Republicans vying to run against him in November have both vowed to defend 2nd Amendment rights more vigorously than he has.

The congressman's shifting position worries Dyer, who has voted for him before. A gun owner who describes himself as politically independent, Dyer says stricter gun controls hurt law-abiding gun owners.

Golden has demonstrably stocked up as much independent credibility as any elected official in the country, and prevailed in a district Trump won by 10 points.

But the demographic slicers may struggle to understand how a mass shooting victim change votes in that way, or how the trans athlete in Trump’s They/Them ad sees the issue as nuanced while remaining undecided until just before the election.

People are complicated. Empathy is required. Crosstabs are optional.

986 days for Democrats to internalize that before the next presidential primary.

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