Is One Spotsylvania Resident in the Vanguard of a Party-jumping Trend?

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

Are there any undecided voters to be had for the General Election coming up in less than a month? On the campaign trail, the strategy is oftentimes more focused on turning out the base than uncovering new voters.

But Forrest Miller sees a slightly different story. From his seat in Spotsylvania, there are votes to be had. As a Republican who is making the switch this election and voting for Kamala Harris, he believes he has a story to tell and it will resonate with other Republican voters.

The question is, are there enough of these votes to carry Harris to the White House?

An ‘Awakening’

On January 6, 2021, Miller was at his duty station with U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he watched the effort to overturn the 2020 election play out on television.

That moment, says Miller, was an “awakening.”

A lifelong Republican, he had voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and Donald Trump in 2020. What played out on television on January 6, however, left him without words. More important, it set him on a journey of self-discovery that left him seeing “years of unchecked lies and disinformation from Republican leadership all led by and endorsed by Donald Trump.”

Asked why he had not reached this conclusion earlier, Miller pointed to the level of trust Americans implicitly place in their leaders.

“Most Americans,” he said, “don’t feel they need to be that involved [in politics] because you trust your elected officials to take care of the country. You shouldn’t have to worry about them riling up a crowd to do what we saw” on January 6.

Trump’s urging people to the Capitol, however, destroyed that sense of trust. Miller goes on to say that the event was so startling, we still struggle to find words for it.

To make his point, he uses the “roommate” analogy.

“If your roommate steals 20 bucks from you,” he said, “we have a word for that. ‘Despicable,’ etc. But what if your roommate stole 20 bucks, then also took your identity and ran up your credit cards and ruined you and your family for years to come. We don’t really have words to capture the depths of that violation of trust.”

‘I’m a Republican Canvasing for the Democrats’

Even Miller struggled to fully grasp what had happened on January 6. But over the two years following that day, as he read more, he began to understand. And it was the work of people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, among others, that helped bring the significance of that day home to him.

And that led him to want to become more involved this time around.

“I engaged in social media to an extent,” Miller said. But he soon realized that “that’s not where change happens.”

From there, he reached out to Jeff Kent, chair of the Spotsylvania Democratic Committee as to how he could help. Kent put him on the fast-track to canvassing.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery he has made in his early ventures in door-knocking is the number of people who have yet to fully decide how they’re going to vote.

Of the people that I have spoken with, Miller tells the Advance, “Undecided voters are probably 15%-20% of those” he encounters.

He does have a compelling narrative when he arrives at a door.

“I’m here as a Republican canvasing for the Democrats,” he tells potential voters, whom he describes as struggling with what to do.

Turning on party allegiances, after all, is hard to do. And few people know that better than Miller.

A Larger Trend?

Miller’s experience may not be a unicorn. A story in Wednesday morning’s The Bulwark reports:

If the election were held today, Donald Trump would win just 45 percent of those who backed [Nikki] Haley in the GOP primary while 36 percent said they’d back Harris, the new poll shows, according to the survey of 781 registered Republicans and independents conducted by the new Democratic-leaning polling outfit Blueprint. The poll did not include Democrats or Democrat-leaning Independents who supported Haley.

Trump’s level of support from Haley voters in the poll represents a significant drop in support for Trump, who won those same voters against Joe Biden by 59-28 percent. That 22 percentage point change in preference (from plus 31 percent for Trump in 2020 to plus 9 percent in this survey) could represent a swing of millions of votes.

Miller is one of those disaffected Haley voters.

Should a significant enough number of Republican voters be shaping up to vote against Trump, it wouldn’t be the first time voters turned against their party.

In an email to the Advance, Stephen Farnsworth of the University of Mary Washington said that voters jumped parties “in 2016, where there were a number of Obama 2012 voters who did not vote for Hillary Clinton. This was particularly an issue in the swing states of the industrial Midwest (PA, WI, MI).”

He also pointed to the Bush-Gore election in 2000 and the Reagan Democrats of the 1980s.

Still Conservative, Searching for Party

Though Miller has found some peace in voting with the Democrats this year, he is troubled by a feeling of political placelessness.

“I’m grounded in conservative principles,” Miller tells the Advance. “Limited government, free markets, limited social programs, people need to work for what they get.”

But Trump’s usurpation of the party has left him feeling as if “I don’t have a party.”

“Trump has led the party away from those values,” Miller said. “I have one foot in the Democratic Party. Liz Cheney is one of the staunchest conservatives I knew. She’s up there with VP Harris. That’s where I’m at.”

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