The military vs. the stand-up comic

January 19, 2017 With the inauguration of Donald Trump tomorrow, the news feeds are full of one question—how did he do it? Democrats are baffled by the low turnout numbers after the high numbers of Obama voters. Republicans seem almost equally confused by their win. My husband Howard and I were chatting about this. He was reading an article from the New Yorker about how Trump benefited from stand-up comedy, using some of their techniques in his speeches and also benefiting from the comics who have mocked him. Since we have a kid who’s a stand-up, we thought we’d run the idea past him but haven’t gotten it done yet. Then, I thought I had it all figured out when we tripped into the idea that so many of our rural Missouri Trump-voting neighbors are veterans. We know that military service makes deep impressions on the kids. More than anything else—maybe excepting religion—the experience of being separated from family at a young age, thrown in with a bunch of other similar folks, taught to take care of each other, kept separate from society for a couple of years changes folks, especially in the area of responding to authority and forgetting how to think for themselves. So I googled the voting map and the military recruits map and put them side-by-side. Well, it didn’t help at all. Florida, Georgia and Maine were the major contributors to the military world, and all of them voted for Trump. But North Dakota and Utah have the smallest number of recruits per 1,000 and they went for Trump also. OK. No pattern there. Maybe it’s the stand-up comic effect after all. http://ijr.com/2015/02/251918-data-shows-highest-numbers-united-states-military-come/