How Turned Off Are Voters? Check Out Tommy’s Diner.
COLUMBUS, Ohio — So here we are, nearing the end of 2016’s he-said, she-said race to the bottom. Through it all, through his ugly caricatures of Mexicans and Muslims, through her pretzel contortions to explain her emails, through the Russian hacking and the 3 a.m. Twitter rants and the rest, this was always going to be a “hold your nose and vote” election.
But at Tommy’s Diner, a colorful Columbus institution in a working-class neighborhood once known as The Bottoms, “hold your nose and vote” is giving way, for some people, to “hold your nose and don’t vote.”
The distaste for the presidential election is obvious almost anywhere you look here in the capital of a swing state where in July 2015 Gov. John Kasich of Ohio (remember him?) became the 16th of 17 Republicans who hoped to succeed President Obama. Aaron Burnside, 23, a first-year law student at Ohio State University, was at the student union that day, listening with optimism as Mr. Kasich declared that “the sun is rising” in America — words that now seem so quaint.
Never for a minute did Mr. Burnside, who described himself as a “right-of-center, fiscally conservative, socially liberal” Republican, imagine himself not casting a ballot on Election Day. But on Thursday, with early voting underway here and Mr. Trump and President Obama in town, Mr. Burnside had no idea whether he would vote for president.'>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/us/ohio-voters-trump-clinton.html?
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