Voting in Pennsylvania With My Trump-Loving Father

Less than a week before the election, I decided to make one final attempt to open a dialogue with my father. I say “open a dialogue” because, well, we don’t talk about politics, and we haven’t for years. He’s a two-time Trump voter. I knew my chances of changing his mind were slim—but saying something felt better than saying nothing at all. And by saying something I mean I sent a text. To my dad. Who lives in the same city and who I see at least every other week. I copied and pasted a message that sat in my Notes app for a few days, putting into words the feelings that had formed a pit in my stomach for months.

I already knew this wouldn’t work, but my approach was different from what I’d taken in the past. Before, I’ve called out injustices like  homelessness rates, the rise in gun violence, and police brutality. Once, when I dared to use the term “white privilege” in the wake of the George Floyd protests, he scoffed and said he’d never had any privilege a day in his life.

That’s a life where he always had a place to live, and held a job working for the city as a firefighter that secured him a pension. While his salary may have only just kept us securely in the middle-class bracket, it was enough to allow my mom to stay home from the time my sister was born, in 1989, until I was in first grade, in 1999. Even when she returned to work, it was only part time.

We were well taken care of. There was food on the table every night. We went on vacations every year. There were always presents under the Christmas tree. Growing up, I likely wouldn’t have used the word privilege to describe our life, either, but looking back now, I know how rare that kind of stability is.

When I left for college, I was quickly surrounded by kids who really knew what privilege was: designer clothes and disposable incomes that were not reflected in my own life. The stratified social classes were more apparent to me, from the deeply red, working-class area of Northeast Philadelphia. Still, my perspective of the haves and the have nots grew more complex, and I found my politics sharpening in contrast to the capital-R Republican values my dad held so near.

But our biggest political divide came from a life experience I thought my dad and I had shared. I was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer at 10 months old. It’s a miracle I’m even alive today—my entire existence is a preexisting condition. It was the Affordable Care Act that enshrined my right to health care, regardless of prior health status. Yet my dad complained about Obamacare. It came down to the financial burden he felt he would bear due to the interference of the government. There was the familiar refrain of our political difference after all.

When I moved to New York at 23 to attend journalism school, my dad was proud of me. That same year, Donald Trump began his first run for the White House, and I could see the devotion bloom in my father’s eyes—not to me, but to the future president. He’d been a Fox News devotee for years at this point, but there was a palpable shift in his demeanor watching this failed businessman ascend to power. When Corey Lewandowski attacked a reporter at a Trump rally, I asked my dad “What would you do if that was me?” His response was a silent complicity that hung in the air for the next four years.

From that point on, it was clear that we would never find easy conversation when it came to politics, which meant very little could be discussed beyond our family dog or the occasional TV show recommendation. When he’s asked about my job, my new career that I’ve built over years now, I’ve felt stilted in how to respond. He has loudly decried the “fake news mainstream media,” without clarifying what he makes of his daughter being a part of it. My response to “how’s work” has often dwindled to a simple “fine,” without much elaboration. My entire professional life has been in direct opposition to the radical ideology he’s adopted at a quickening rate since Trump first descended that escalator. I can’t talk about it without hitting a nerve, stoking whatever was the latest conspiracy theory he adopted through Fox News osmosis.

Which brings me back to my final appeal, perhaps the only explicitly political conversation I’ve initiated with my dad for the better part of 10 years now. I laid it out plainly: I didn’t want to argue, and I really wasn’t even trying to sway his politics wholesale. I just wanted him to consider, as the father of daughters, how the GOP’s increasingly draconian stance on abortion care (and IVF, and birth control, and motherhood, and simply just … existing as a woman) would directly and drastically affect my life.

Many women don’t realize how these limitations to health care can affect them until they are in the middle of a pregnancy gone wrong. That’s not the case for me. My cancer was hereditary, meaning there’s a nonzero chance I will pass it on to any future children. Getting pregnant without IVF is possible but risky. Not to mention the inherent risk of just being pregnant in America to begin with, but for me, it’s almost certainly going to be more complicated.

I thought this might make him pause. I’ve always viewed my cancer as belonging to my parents more than myself—I have lived an otherwise healthy life, and I don’t even really remember being sick. The shadow of that period hangs over them, the couple who had to make lifesaving decisions for their baby. It didn’t feel like a far reach to open the door to those feelings when asking him to consider my health and safety when voting this year, an elaborately crafted version of the question: Would you consider voting for the policies that will make this part of my life possible? 

His response was quick, curt, and struck through with confused Republican talking points that have been blanketing our swing-state media and the Trump campaign at large. You see, he is voting for my future kids and me—in the form of a “secure border, less taxes … free speech, schools that teach reading, writing, math, and history.” This, he promises, will “give you and your children law and order.”

The self-assured confidence in his reply reminded me of why I’d imposed a moratorium on these conversations. There is no reasoning with him, no common ground left to be found. That’s what happens when you live in different realities. No matter who wins on Tuesday, the distance between what’s true in his world and mine seems destined to only grow.