I found myself with two hours to kill in Chico, CA in February.
(I had dropped our Senior and her mom at Chico State GradFest 2025, yay.)
Instead of spending my time downtown at Starbucks working on my laptop, I thought I’d drive in a random direction, find a fast food restaurant in a neighborhood, and just absorb what I could see.
I used to do this to take a break when I was door knocking on union campaigns. I had a good formula: park in the shade, get a value drink and item, and just sit.
That was pre-Trump, though.
This spring day, in Chico post-inauguration, was different.
In fact, a small part of what I observed and thought about that day made it’s way into my last blog here: losing the break room.
Since people seemed to want me to expand a bit more of my thoughts from that post, I thought I’d take a moment and share a story to explain.
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I’m going to start with myself, because that’s actually a part of this. I won’t get too personal, but I’ll describe some things so that you can probably imagine me pretty easily.
I’m a tall, middle-aged, white dude.
In the context of Chico, I’m pretty likely to be the parent of a student. (And I proudly am.)
I drive an electric car.
I was wearing new jeans, running shoes, and a button down shirt over a t-shirt with a generic ball cap to cover my bald head.
Like I mentioned, I work on a laptop, wear an Apple Watch, and I keep my laptop in a backpack that I carry with me.
I have pair of prescription sunglasses and a pair of regular prescription glasses. Both are less than a year old. I need both of them.
If it’s not obvious already, from the second I pulled into this McDonald’s to find a bit of shade where I could park my car, I also did not fit in.
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Now, I never personally felt like I fit in all that much when I was door knocking for union campaigns, so this isn’t so much about me expecting to fit in at a random McDonald’s, as it is about me seeing some things with new eyes.
Let me start with what I saw just sitting in my car.
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Everybody driving by, and there were a lot of people driving and walking by, seemed to be driving an older car.
I’m talking 2004 Ford Explorers, 1998 Chevy Astro Vans, 2011 Chevy Impalas, 2006 Dodge Durangos, a 1997 Jeep Cherokee; even a 2002 Saturn SL2 and, I think, a 2003 Saturn Vue made an appearance.
All the cars seemed to be from before or around the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-9, back when I started with the union. Many of them needed repairs.
This could make sense. It was midday, and people parking their car at work would likely have their newer, more recently-purchased cars parked there; while people driving around their neighborhood in the middle of the day would more likely be retired, or out of work, or on a fixed income, basically, keeping an older car alive.
But it was remarkable to me, and it kept playing out for more than an hour.
(What also played out was people routinely rolling an inconveniently-placed stop sign, but that’s a whole other story.)
Another thing I noticed was that very few people, walking or driving, had new clothes of any sort.
It wasn’t just that folks didn’t have new clothes, but also the overall look was pretty consistent. Hoodies, t-shirts, work shorts. You could say it was a John Fetterman look, or somewhat of an Oakland Raider fan look with lots of black and gray.
But the effect was somewhat homogenizing, almost like playing an early Grand Theft Auto game where the game’s designers would recycle the clothes and generic characters over and over again with mild variations.
Also, nobody driving or walking by seemed to be actually going into McDonald’s.
(I’ll get back to that last part. It’s important.)
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Now, I want to say right off the bat that all of these people have their own individual stories that deserve respect and attention, and I was pretty much an interloper into their world.
I did not sit down and talk to anyone, like Studs Terkel, a hero of mine, might have in his day.
But what I do want to share, is that sitting in my car, a few months after Donald Trump won election (an election in which Chico’s Butte County flipped from narrowly supporting Joe Biden to instead supporting Donald Trump over Kamala Harris) I had an instinctual, visceral thought.
No one who I was seeing or witnessing, even in my distant manner, was likely to find “We’re not Going Back” to be a meaningful slogan or piece of communication.
(Ditto to the Harris campaign’s tactic of utilizing a politics of joy.)
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So, let me lay this out directly.
These economically hard hit folks in Chico are important. Unquestionably, some number of them flipped from Biden to Trump, or just sat this one out.
And I don’t think we were listening to these folks, in 2024, or, if we are being honest, for a good long while.
I think we made, to the best of our ability, an attempt to rerun Obama/Biden’s coalition and campaign and tactics, in the year 2024 without situating our communications to focus on what the people whom we needed to come out to vote for us were actually experiencing economically.
Not only did we come up short on the numbers and with our coalition, but we lost four battleground states with Democratic Governors, whose electorate had recently come out in support of our agenda on the state level.
That’s a clarion call to change for the Democratic Party.
We missed something big and important.
In part, we did not relate to huge swaths of the voting populace who have visibly not been included as part of the economic engine of America, an engine that has massively benefitted many of the rest of us. We didn’t hear their anger or their pain. We didn’t communicate to them and invite them into our tent.
Part of this was because our President was visibly, markedly struggling to communicate at all.
But part of this was also because of who we have become.
Increasingly educated and well to do.
And that’s the part we are going to need to address.
In some ways, we ran through Biden’s entire presidency while largely going about our business as usual as Democrats in a changing party and a changing country. And that’s on us.
And I think this says more about us Democrats, than it says about these voters.
To do that, let me share a bit more about my visit to McDonald’s.
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Eventually, I got out of my electric car, took off my dress shirt, and went into the McDonald’s in jeans and a t-shirt.
After putting on my regular eyeglasses, I ordered my soda and cheeseburger at the new touch screen kiosk, and scanned my contactless card to pay without speaking to anyone. It was maybe my second time using one of these order screens, and it showed, as I fumbled with the table topper number before I figured it out.
I plunked down my backpack into a booth, drank my soda, checked my phone, ate my burger when a friendly worker brought it out to me, and, aside from the family enjoying the playroom, observed that everyone else sitting there was basically eating and looking at their phone, as well.
City workers and a construction crew came and went. A groundskeeper from a lawn service pulled up to maintain the parking lot and grassy areas.
One guy seemed like a retiree. Another guy was young and on a break. To be honest, all the people inside the McDonald’s looked better off economically than the folks outside.
And, at the very end, I did have one brief conversation.
After I visited the washroom, a young McDonald’s worker mopping the floor pointed at my shoes and asked me if they were comfortable.
I was wearing new Hoka Men’s Bondi 9’s. ($170.)
“They are comfortable.” I said. “It’s like wearing a bag of marshmallows on each of your feet.”
“Oh, wow.” he replied.
He was wearing black Skecher’s Men’s Food Service Shoes from Payless. ($35)
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There’s so much that makes me angry here, but let me start with something simple.
McDonald’s for the longest time has been a place for everybody in the community.
You likely knew the kids and adults working there.
Old people liked the coffee and the pancakes. Young people liked the fries and the sodas. And anybody who was hungry could grab an Egg McMuffin or a Burger and get about their day.
McDonald’s was affordable, and we would pretty much all go there, and see other people in our community before and during the work day.
That last little piece was just as important as the other stuff.
It was a common space, a community break room.
What I saw in Chico was a whole bunch of people who had been basically priced out of McDonald’s and left behind.
Nobody wants to drive a car that needs repairs, or wear clothes that are worn out.
And everybody likes McDonald’s once in awhile.
But not everybody fits into the model of grabbing their contactless payment card, navigating the McDonald’s touch screen, and scrolling their phone in a booth while they wait for their meal.
And here’s another thing that is increasingly true.
Not everyone has the money for it anymore.
In Trump’s economy, per the Wall Street Journal,
McDonald’s regulars are reducing their fast-food trips, fueling concerns about an economic malaise fanning across American consumers.
The burger giant posted a 3% drop in revenue in the first quarter. Same-store sales in the U.S. dropped 3.6% from the prior year, the steepest decline since 2020.
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Now, instead of listening to the voters, Democrats have basically been chasing zeroes at the end of checks.
We’ve raised crazy amounts of dollars, and made inroads in highly educated, reliable voters.
We’ve placed our hopes in those voters.
Outsized hopes, at that.
On top of that, our candidates, even our most visibly proletarian, are often quite well to do...and 100% look that fact.
But all of that is just where we find ourselves.
It doesn’t negate the compelling urgency of turning our our focus away from the wealthiest and towards meaningfully engaging those who make up the majority of the electorate.
As I honed in on in my last story, folks driving old cars in need of repairs, folks who have a lack of money for essentials like new clothes and simple things like McDonald’s, are going to have an analysis of our society that reflects those inputs.
Just because they didn’t share them directly with you or me, doesn’t mean that they don’t have cogent thoughts about their situation.
(And, perhaps, on another level, they already have shared their thoughts, and we weren’t listening?)
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Not so long ago, as I mentioned in my previous diary, I worked as an office temp and an entry level worker in various capacities.
I know what it’s like to use cash envelopes because you have to. I know what it’s like to skip out on a restaurant meal that would make the kids happy. Like many people, I know what it’s like to redeem some soda cans to cover the purchase a box of Lunchables for a kid’s school lunch the next week.
But I have always had my education, my writing and reading skills, and, probably, the socialization and undeniable privilege that came with the above, to help me move forward economically and personally.
My life has had set backs, but they were temporary.
I feel like our political party has missed out on the fact that tens of millions of people feel like they’ve had permanent setbacks with no way up or out or around them.
And that’s a crime.
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Here’s the thing. If you are one of the lucky few, like me, driving an electric car, swiping your payment card so that food swiftly appears at your booth, celebrating putting your kids through college, taking advantage of your expansive vision plan, easing your aging feet with running shoes with names that no one seems to agree on how to pronounce, all of the above is being done on your behalf and at your request.
You are 100% a part of the system that is creating these outputs. You are the beneficiary of all this technology. It’s all for you.
On top of that, everything about your great good fortune screams out loud to the rest of our society— how you look and walk and talk— in the exact same way that other people’s economic pain screams from theirs.
And I think, that’s something else about communication that we Democrats absolutely fail to see.
We are often screaming our good fortune to the world as if that isn’t a form of communication, too.
But it is.
And it is noticed.
Just like my Hoka Bondi 9s at the Chico McDonald’s.
