Stacy Murray and Kate Dillman talk regularly while their labradoodles play in the yard in Bay Village, a suburb on Cleveland’s west side, but politics …
Stacy Murray and Kate Dillman talk regularly while their labradoodles play in the yard in Bay Village, a suburb on Cleveland’s west side, but politics is largely off the table as the presidential election nears. “We’re polar opposites politically,” said Murray, a 51-year-old substitute teacher who plans to vote for Republican President Donald Trump. “We just don’t talk about it.” Dillman,61, who works in a greenhouse, said she will vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat. “We talk about things with our friends who have similar views, but we have a lot of people who will support the administration that is in power right now and so then we don’t talk about it very much because everyone gets mad,” Dillman said. As Trump and Biden hit the stretch run to the general election, their campaigns are jockeying in the suburban battlegrounds thought to be one of the keys to winning Ohio. Democrats have made inroads in more-affluent suburbs, but Trump fared well in blue-collar communities in 2016. Dispatch reporters fanned out to suburbs across Ohio in the days after party conventions wrapped up to take the temperature of Trump and Biden supporters as part of a monthly series on Ohio’s suburban battlegrounds. As Murray and Dillman show, though, voters in the typically more-affluent bedroom communities don’t fit into a neat box. Like other white-collar suburbs, Bay Village flipped from red to blue in 2016. “I did not vote for the current occupant of the White House for lots of reasons. It wouldn’t really have mattered who the Democratic nominee is, that would be my selection in this particular election because of all the destruction,” Dillman said. Married with two grown children, Dillman said she prefers Biden’s policies and believes he’s the more experienced and honorable candidate. Trump has simply been ineffective, she said. He hasn’t taken the coronavirus seriously, rejects science, hasn’t addressed racial concerns, has not protected the environment, is inexperienced in foreign affairs, and can’t be trusted. “And as a woman, I don’t enjoy hearing about the things that he says about women and to them. Even if you like his policies, as a female, I think you would think twice about voting for him,” Dillman said. Murray doesn’t share Dillman’s concerns about Trump and said she never really considered the Democratic nominee. “I’m happy the last four years. Everyone said he was going to turn back the clocks of time and gay people wouldn’t be married anymore, and no one would get an abortion, and there would be no food stamps and people would be dying in the streets and none of that’s happened,” Murray said. As the wife of a retired Navy officer and mother of a son attending the United States Naval Academy, Murray also feels Trump will be less likely to cut military funding. She said she’s satisfied with Trump’s response to the coronavirus and racial concerns, and she rejects criticism that the president is racist.
