What’s the matter with San Marino?
One of the great mysteries in politics has been why wealthy suburbanites have swung to voting Democrat in large numbers over the last few cycles. After all, it was Republicans who supported corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and tougher policing while opposing minimum wage increases, the death tax, and Obamacare.
San Marino is the kind of place that you picture when you picture “Romney voter”; this slice of the ancestrally Republican bastion of Orange County, California is a small, prosperous suburban family community built around its four highly-ranked public schools In 2008, the town went for McCain by ten points, and in 2012, it went for Romney by seventeen. This kind of place was the backbone of the Nixon and Reagan coalitions, who delivered their voters lower taxes and lower crime.
But this isn’t Republican country any more. The voters here seem disillusioned with the promises of a Republican party that they feel no longer represents their interests. San Marino voted for Hillary by thirteen points in 2016, and despite the lockdowns and unpopularity of California’s radical liberal Democrat Governor Newsome, the Republicans slipped further in 2020.
In this, San Marino isn’t unique. Similar swings in Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia have put a radical leftist in the White House. But I have a personal connection to the place, having grown up there during the aughts and teens, and although I left for college just a couple years before the 2016 election. I decided to come back to find out what happened.
Nigel Fergueson IV
It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon as I get in my parents’ Escalade and head over to Starbucks. I had been told that Nextdoor was a bastion of the old suburbs, and so I asked around there for someone who could give me a lay of the land. Nigel Fergueson IV, a local retail investor, took me up on the offer. He greets me outside Starbucks, his grey hair glistening in the direct sun. He’s wearing a black suit, a red tie, and a mask with the American Flag printed on it. “You’ll have to put one on, sadly,” he says, handing me a mask and gesturing at a sign on the door. “No mask, no service”, it reads, a hastily typed note stuck to the window in 50-point Calibri font. I reluctantly put it on, wondering just when my ancestral home had become so comfortable in sacrificing the individual freedoms we championed for so long.
“What changed, Nigel?” I ask, gesturing around. “The shops are the same, the people are the same. Was San Marino always an antifa hellhole and I just didn’t realize it? Perhaps this place isn’t the one I grew up in”.
He seems taken aback. “Now I don’t want you getting the impression that San Marino is San Francisco or something. We’ve still got a lot of folks here that believe in God and Freedom. You can’t boil down someone’s soul to a vote,” he sighs, sipping his latte. “The people are the same but they’ve changed. They don’t see the big picture anymore.” He dabs his mouth slightly with a cloth napkin he has pulled out of his breast pocket and says “I think you’ll have to talk to them yourself. Honestly, I’m at a loss personally as to how to explain this. I think something just… fell apart in 2016. People just aren’t thinking with their brokerage accounts anymore.” We talk some about the schools and how apparently some kids a few years older than me got cancelled for offending an antifa riot in Pasadena.
As soon as I’m outside and I can finally breathe properly, I take a look around at the square — you really would think nothing had changed. Nigel might not have answered all my questions, but he is right about one thing: I need to talk to some Biden voters.
Jim Timothy
Jim, 56, is a registered Republican and small businessman. “By 2020 I was just fed up,” he says, sitting at the pizza place by the high school that we used to sneak out to at lunch. The student special of two slices and a drink was practically what we all grew up on — it’s probably considered politically incorrect to have that order now. Frustrated, Jim continues “I am a small businessman, a realtor, come from a long line of realtors and merchants. The policies Trump implemented ultimately either hurt me or ignored me.” I ask if this is about SALT, the State and Local Tax deduction that Republicans in Congress eliminated with the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017. He says it didn’t help, “You know, you vote for the Republicans to do one thing: lower taxes. And if they aren’t going to do that, then, at a certain point you ask yourself, what’s the point of all of this?”
He’s not very interested in discussing Senate minutiae around the filibuster, or the fact that the Democrat Party isn’t reinstating SALT. “This isn’t about that; it’s an attitude thing. The Republicans don’t want to talk to me. I turn on Fox and what are they talking about? Dominion this, Dr Seuss that. What happened to ‘Restore Our Future’?” he says, referencing the Romney campaign slogan that catapulted the Republican candidate to his smashing victory in the suburbs. I consider pushing him on whether he thinks that election fraud and cancel culture are actually minor issues, but I hesitate — I don’t want to end the conversation too soon and I think he’s made it clear that these aren’t his issues.
How appropriate for this conversation that we’re on Huntington Drive, a behemoth of a main street with three lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 40. Huntington was one of the early proponents of a rail system in the west coast, an amazing achievement of engineering that eventually came to mean something else. If someone said they were taking the train, it meant they didn’t have the freedom to choose the open road.
That is how today’s conservative leaders view suburbanites like Tim — as people whose values and traditions are holding them back from achieving freedom and greatness.
Michael Dean
I meet Michael at city hall at one of the socially distanced town hall events the city is having. He’s wearing a mask and stays far away from me: “Nothing personal, you can’t be too careful,” he says. We sit down in chairs several yards apart. I tell him about my project and ask who he supported in the 2020 election. He responds, “Biden, wholeheartedly.” When I ask why, his reasons are surprising to me. Rather than what I’d expect from a “wholehearted” Biden supporter — long rants full of fake news about Trump being racist or sexist, accusations that trump created the so-called virus, or anything like that — he simply responds “He didn’t speak to my values. I think the GOP fundamentally doesn’t understand people like me so they don’t want to speak to people like me. If the Republicans were just a party of fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, I’d consider voting for them. But that’s not what they are at all.”
I push him a bit, asking him if he’s a member of the Antifa Organization. He laughs, “No, not at all. Do I look like a Black Bloc member? [Black Bloc is another name for the Antifa Organization, it’s name derives from the Black Lives Matter organization]” He’s right that he doesn’t seem like the type to be murdering police officers or disrespecting the flag.
I found this exchange fascinating. In many ways, Michael, a strident Biden supporter, was very different from what I had expected. It made me think about the millions of others just like him who jumped ship from the Republican Party in recent years in the suburbs, and how they too might not all be that different. Perhaps a Republican party that truly believed in Reaganomics could win these voters back.
Correction: an earlier version of this article did not indicate clearly enough that Representative Michael Dean (D-CA) is a member of the Democrat Party.
Giles O’Ryan
I meet Giles, 62, at his place of work: his backyard, right in front of his tools shed. The sun is beaming through the leaves, and Giles is sitting at his backyard table in the shade on a large MacBook. He gestures to sit at a chair he has set up several feet away. “6 feet away or 6 feet under” he says, referring to a propaganda poster from early in the pandemic. Giles is a software developer who’s been in the business a long time, having started out working on punchcards back in the early 80s. He works for a branch office of a major tech company in Playa Vista and commuted in his Camry every day until the lockdown started. Since then, he’s been working from home.
“It’s not the worst,” he says. “My son moved in with his partner so we’ve had a lot more space recently; I honestly prefer it to the office.” When I bring up the 2020 election, his brow furrows. He says he voted for the Republicans in every election until 2016. “What changed?” I ask. He goes on a long-winded monologue about a bunch of reasons, from the overemphasis on culture war issues, especially gay marriage, to Trump’s alleged mishandling of the “pandemic”. But one thing sticks out to me: his opinion on Section 230.
When he mentions section 230, my ears perk up: this is something that’s probably very important to him, as a software developer. When I ask him about why he disagrees with attempts to abolish it, his voice goes up several notes in enthusiasm. “It’s just dumb! Why would you try to destroy the internet to please one man?” he gestures, his frustration as visible as the “Biden 2020” sign on his front yard.
When I ask him why he disagrees with the notion that free speech would be a more important issue, he responds with a disgusted look and says, “somehow, I don’t think these lawyers and politicians who think Google is to blame for news alerts on their iPhones are the people who should be regulating free speech on the internet, whatever the hell that even means.” It is an attitude that underscores his stridency in opposition to the free speech protections that the Republicans want to impose on the industry he has been working in for over 30 years. In short, what happens here means more to him than any bureaucrat or activist living 1,800 miles from his home in California.
It was already clear to me that abandoning basic libertarian principles of government nonintervention in the corporate world, no matter how well-intentioned, has had negative consequences on the Republican Party in places like this, but I didn’t realize how much of an effect this had on people like Giles. In becoming a more muscular party, the Republicans have left behind places like San Marino, where people just want to be left alone to buy and sell in peace.
A Way Back
There’s people out there who will tell you the Republicans have no way back in the suburbs. “The Republican party is a rural and exurban party now and we need to accept that fact.” Based on my conversations with folks in San Marino, I think this is defeatism of the highest order. The folks here aren’t Molotov cocktail throwing Antifa Liberals, they’re good and decent people who feel left behind by a Republican Party that no longer represents them and their interests. There’s a clear path back out of the wilderness in places like this, but as the residents of San Marino say, in order for the GOP to return to electoral relevance here, the culture war has got to be replaced by the bread-and-butter issues of tax cuts and jobs.
Note: this is a work of fiction. All conversations are fake and all people mentioned in this are fictional, including Kevin Gutenberg. This article is inspired by all articles we’ve read talking to Trump voters up to and following the 2016 election, but we specifically drew inspiration from passages in this article, this article, and this article. This article was primarily written by Kavi Gupta (@notkavi) with editing and rewriting help from Lakshya Jain (@lxeagle17).
