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Harrisonburg, Virginia, a beautiful little town nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, is waking up to welcome students to James Madison University next week.
“They come from New York and New Jersey and register to vote here,” Marla, the manager of the Texas Inn diner, told me. She wasn’t angry; it’s a normal part of life in these communities.
US Vice President Kamala Harris attends an infrastructure event on high speed internet at the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building at the White House in Washington, USA, on June 3, 2021. (Reuters/Evelyn Hochstein)
Marla is a Donald Trump supporter, a white woman in her late 50s. She was the first person in Harrisonburg to whom I asked the pressing question of the day: “Do you know who Kamala Harris is?”
“I have no idea,” she told me.
That was the answer I got from everyone I spoke to, and it was an answer I got from people across the political spectrum that was expressed in such vivid colors in Harrisonburg.
Soon, the Texas Diner in Harrisonburg, Virginia, will be filled with out-of-state college students who are registered to vote in Virginia.
Rick is here for the photographer’s convention, a Democrat from rural Virginia, another older white voter.
“I would like to see Ms. Harris be interviewed and make her position clearer,” he told me.
I asked him if he would still vote for her if she continued to take a hardline stance against the press.
“Yeah,” he said. “So, let’s look at other options.”
Earlier in the day, I’d spoken with Jim, who’d traveled from New York to drop off his second-grader at school, and he had the opposite reaction.
“I’m a Republican,” he told me, “so I can’t vote for this far-left Democratic candidate. But I’m also a New Yorker.” [and] I’m not crazy about Trump, but what other options do we have?
Increasingly, this election is feeling like, “What choices do I have in 2024?”
Larry, a local in his 40s, had almost given up after listening to another talented local play guitar in the hotel lobby.
The Shenandoah Valley’s college towns are dotted with churches and meeting places where people are wondering who Kamala Harris really is. (David Marcus/Fox News Digital)
“It doesn’t matter who the president is,” he said with a note of resignation to an increasingly common political despair. “Until we have term limits on Congress, it doesn’t matter. They’re just going to do what’s best for them.”
But some voters aren’t swayed by either party or candidate and are still making up their minds. Among them is Derrick, a black man in his early 30s who is in town for the leadership conference and wants to see what Harris has to say.
“She has no policies,” he said. “All I hear is women’s rights and abortion. I want to know if she’s just going to go back to Biden.”
That’s what many are eager to find out, but will enough people want Harris to actually define herself? That remains to be seen.
American voters are becoming increasingly dissatisfied. As one person put it, “The politicians just talk and don’t listen to us at all.”
The Democrats I speak to here, as elsewhere in this beautiful America of highways and small towns, are even more excited by Harris’ candidacy. That’s obvious, that’s real, that’s unquestionable, but there’s something else, a kind of nervous vagueness.
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“Maybe the less she has to do the better,” another member of the leadership council confided to me, and I could hear in his voice that he knew what he was saying was less than ideal.
In a little over a week, as wide-eyed freshmen gather in their dorms at James Madison University and Marla serves them Cheesy Westerns with homemade Texas relish, the Democratic National Convention will begin, and the real Kamala Harris will surely show up. If there is one.
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But for now, in this charming city of church spires and college yards, voters wait to see whether Trump can maintain discipline, whether Harris can make her point, or whether some new event will throw another curveball into this strange election.
People are lost in thought, but they’re living their lives, and politics don’t always reach the hearts of the people. Maybe that’s what Kamala Harris and her campaign are hoping for. And it might work.
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