As a cultural anthropologist interested in the role of politics, religion and the upcoming US election, I was glad to have the chance to spend a week with a very warm and hospitable couple in their 70s in a farmhouse in a rural community outside Fargo, North Dakota. I’ll call the man Ted and his wife Pat; their daughter Abbey lives on a ranch 10 minutes away.
For North Americans, a ranch is a farm that raises livestock — in this case, a relatively small holding of around 200 cattle. But this family’s various fields, spread across the local countryside, are also used for crop farming. The ranch also houses half a dozen large grain bins, which contained many bushels of wheat while I was visiting.
To most Americans living on either the west or east coast, North Dakota is vaguely known as somewhere up north in the Wheat Belt, on the border with Canada. Few people have any reason to think about the state, let alone go there. North Dakota is the fourth-least populous state in the US, after Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska. Australia’s five largest cities could swallow the entire state with people to spare.
Like neighbouring states such as South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, North Dakota has long been a safe Republican stronghold. In the past few elections, about two-thirds of North Dakotans voted Republican; the state has been consistently red for the past 14 elections, since 1968. But you’d be wrong to assume the state is full of flag-waving Trump supporters sporting MAGA caps.
Apart from a couple of highway billboards promoting anti-abortion messages, there are few signs of election campaigning at the grassroots level. You’re unlikely to see voting placards in front of people’s farmyards, nor any large-scale rallies in the area. Trump is unlikely to go there to campaign in the next month or two — he doesn’t really need to. Harris also probably won’t visit the state because there would be little point.
Ted works six days a week, taking Saturday as a day of rest and to attend a local church. Ted and one of his grandsons, Nick, work on the farm with the help of a family friend, and occasionally they hire helpers when harvesting is at its peak, mainly Afrikaners or Spanish-speaking migrants. In this part of North Dakota, with the vast majority of the sparsely dispersed population of either German or Scandinavian heritage, you hardly see any Asian or African Americans.
Many people in the farming community regularly go to church and say grace before meals. Ted reads a Bible excerpt to start each day, in preparation for Saturday’s Bible study, but Pat said she was less diligent. I went along to one of the local Seventh Adventist Churches on Saturday with Ted and Pat and their family. The service began with the Bible study session, then a sermon from the pastor, and then a potluck “fellowship lunch”.
A retired healthcare worker led the Bible study, and the discussion was lively, even vigorous. It became clear the study leader was sympathetic to refugees and believed the separation of church and state was crucial to democracy. He was also quite critical of Trump, unlike some other members of the congregation. He believed Trump was not a real Christian and was only using Christianity to attract Christian votes.
Over lunch, I asked the retired healthcare worker if most of his fellow worshippers shared his liberal politics. His wife, a retired nurse from Washington, chimed in that she shared her husband’s views, but, unlike her husband, who was freely airing his politics, she knew the community well enough to “keep her views to herself”. She did say there were a few Democrat voters in their community, but that this part of the world was generally strongly pro-Republican.
Conversation during my visit was mostly about fairly uncontroversial topics: the weather, crop and harvest issues, tractors and other heavy equipment, farming in general, supermarket sales, and everyday life. “Here, there are two things we don’t talk about: religion and politics,” Ted told me. In this small community, comprising around 200 farmhouses, I spotted at least 10 churches in the nearby towns and cities, catering to myriad Christian faiths.
Over our church lunch we talked about the expected low voter turnout for the forthcoming elections. Some people at the table were complaining that having elections on Tuesdays was inconvenient, and many were discouraged from voting because they often had to queue for hours before they could get into the polling booth. Many didn’t see the point of voting, and it seemed there was a general sense of disappointment with how politics operates in the nation. Nearly everyone I spoke to was surprised to learn that Australia has a compulsory voting system.
On the night of the Harris vs Trump debate, I suggested to Ted and Pat that we watch it together. It quickly became apparent that Pat didn’t trust Harris. Ted commented quite a few times that Trump was incorrect with his facts, but he also called out Harris several times. At the end of the debate, Ted said he still hadn’t decided, and lamented the fact that the independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr had suspended his presidential bid.
“It’s a case of choosing the lesser of two evils.”
More than once, Ted said he was surprised Australians were so interested in the US elections. “I feel embarrassed about our country. The best we can manage is to come up with these two clowns.”
“Are you going to vote?” I took a chance to ask, still remembering the “no politics, no religion” remark I had heard earlier. “Oh yes,” said Pat. “If you don’t vote, you don’t have any right to complain.” She then said she just couldn’t bring herself to vote for Harris, so by default vote would most likely go to Trump.
It’s clear they would have preferred the Republicans to be represented by a candidate other than Trump. But ultimately Harris, a West-coast urbanite, didn’t seem to stand a chance with them. Pat freely admitted she watched mostly Fox News. A few times during the debate she interjected against Harris, saying, “That’s true but you’re not telling the whole story, lady.”
When I first arrived, Ted had proudly shown me his two John Deere gun safes he had inherited from his father, which contained a wide range of shiny “collector’s items”, never fired, including more than a dozen rifles and three handguns. This was the week when the shooting in Georgia was in the news. “It’s not about guns. It’s about mental health,” Ted said. He also blamed the father of the teenaged Georgia shooter for giving his son the gun. “My gun safe is always locked, and I always double-check it when there are kids around.”
Perhaps surprisingly, Ted was critical of Trump’s border control policy, saying many illegal immigrants are hard-working people. He didn’t take Trump’s scaremongering seriously, saying the illegals are unlikely to be criminal as they’d “want to lie low”.
“Our economy would collapse without them,” he said.
During my brief stay in this community, I didn’t meet anyone who even vaguely resembles the evangelical preachers, the military enthusiasts, the right-wing patriots, and the fervent conspiracy theorists you see in Louis Theroux’s Weird America.
The morning after the debate, my hosts’ grandson Nick, a young man who works on the farm with his grandpa, drove me to Fargo to catch a flight to Chicago, with a connecting flight to Philadelphia. This would be his first chance to vote in a presidential election as he had only turned 18 three years ago. He didn’t tell me explicitly who he was going to vote for, but his comment echoed that of his grandma: “Since 2016, it’s been mostly about choosing the lesser of two evils”. This time it will be whether to choose Trump or “Chameleon Kamala”.
Few of the people I met in this community were fans of Trump. But many will most likely end up voting Republican despite him. This is because in most regions of the Wheat Belt, distaste for Trump is unlikely to trump long-standing aversion to the Democrats.
Does the US election really come down to picking between the lesser of two evils? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
