To Understand the 2020 Election You Need to Understand Steve

“I guess I’m not your typical Democratic voter,” Steve says with a laugh and cough. We’re sitting in an old fashioned diner in Scudley, a small town in southern Missouri. Steve is holding court to me as other customers scrolls through their phones or glance idly at Fox News on the small tv.

Truth is, Steve has never voted before. He was old enough in 2016, but was stuck in a hospital on the night of the election. That was the night they amputated his left leg. An accident down at the local beef rendering plant.

Betty the waitress comes over. She knows Steve and anticipates his order.

“Burger and fries?”

“You know it Betty,” Steve laughs.

Betty tops up my coffee. It’s sludgy. This is not a place for coffee snobs. A town of 10,000 with only seven Starbucks, four independent coffee stores and a solitary barista training college.

I’ve been here three days and Steve is the first person I’ve met who gets to the heart of ‘real’ America.

I ask him how he had planned to vote. He doesn’t answer. Steve’s hearing isn’t so good. Not since an incident last year in the town’s oil refinery.

I speak more loudly. “What about the midterms, did you vote in them?”

“No. I was recovering.”

“From what?”

“I lost my arm. Accident working on my pickup”

“How would you have voted?”

“I’d vote for whoever gets me a goddamn job,” he says with a laugh.

Steve has one arm, one leg, two badly mutilated ears and a lot of opinions about the direction this country is moving.

Steve leans his head back and takes a drag of a cigarette through the tube in his neck, a souvenir of the throat cancer that ravaged his body — in particular his throat — in 2017. He looks me dead in the eyes, with his good eye. “Are you here to report the truth?”

I assure him I am. He’s still wary of me, understandable when you consider the assault he suffered in his teens, one that left him without a torso. In Trump’s America there isn’t much sympathy for a man without a torso.

“I’m covered by Obamacare for a little, but not my torso problem. That’s a pre-existing condition.”

That’s why he is considering voting Democrat next year. “The Republicans have stopped caring about people who ain’t got no torsos”.

“What about President Trump?”

“What about him? What does he have in common with me? Rich guy from New Yorke He ain’t worrying about no torso. What does he care about me? He don’t need to worry about his central vascular system. I do. It doesn’t even make sense”.

So who does he like in the Democratic primaries? “I ain’t decided yet. But whoever gets out of New York and comes and talks to real Americans. With real problems”

“Like not having a torso?”

“Exactly”

Who are his ideal candidates?

“Someone from Missouri,” he says with a laugh. “Someone who understands real people. Maybe someone who doesn’t have a torso?”

“Would someone without a torso be more relatable?”

“Definitely. You’re up there in your New York media bubble. You don’t see how many of us don’t have them. Most of my buddies ain’t got one.”

We finish our peach cobbler and I reach for the bill, but Steve is too quick for me. He’s a proud man.

He wheels himself out of the diner using his remaining arm and his trusty paddle. He sniffs the air through his solitary nostril. “Change coming” he declares.

Steve wants change. In a way Steve represents blue collar America. Grizzled, patriotic, otherworldly but definitely believable. He wants change. He wants the Democrats to listen. Will they?

Over the course of the 2020 US presidential election I will be travelling around the United States talking to real Americans about real issues.