Looking at the polls, you might expect to walk into a meeting at the Miralea “active lifestyle community” in Louisville – marketer-speak for pricey housing for senior citizens who don’t need daily medical care – and find a group of Mitch McConnell supporters.
You would be wrong.
On Sunday, a hastily assembled meeting of the Miralea Grannies For Grimes – a loosely organized group of senior women (and the occasional man) supporting Alison Lundergan Grimes in the hotly contested Kentucky senate race – gathered to explain why.
Judy Munro-Leighton, who doesn’t live at the facility, explained: “We started Grannies for Grimes, Johanna [Camenisch] and I, met at her house after I was at an event where Alison mentioned her own granny, and that’s what really got us going.”
“And then we got a call from Dot [Hagen at Miralea], and she said that [they] had Grannies for Grimes here, so we combined efforts.”
Hagen – who now coordinates events with her neighbors and occasionally volunteers to phonebank for the Grimes campaign – was introduced to Munro-Leighton and invited her, Camenisch and Kris Philipp to come speak to the assembled Democrats of Miralea.
Mary Barton explained that knowing there were other women out there supporting Grimes made a world of difference: “Judy came over and talked with us and so inspired us. We had had our group of Democrats together, but first time we felt like there was something we can do, and it just got really good and really positive for us.”
Like many of the Miralea “grannies” – which Munro-Leighton said includes “grannies and gramps and uncles and aunts” – Barton has been active in politics much of her life. “I remember working for [George] McGovern and my Republican brother-in-law pulling off my McGovern sticker from my car, which I’ve never forgiven him for,” she said, to much familiar laughter.
Her neighbor, Diane Shott, was never a fan of McConnell’s:
I remember when we first moved here to Kentucky about 40 years ago we were at a big party, a New Year’s party, and there was Mitch McConnell and I snuck up and said, “How about working for some alternative to tobacco, maybe even raspberries.” [He said] “No forget it, tobacco is our thing in Kentucky”. Now it’s the same thing with coal and global warming.
But the grannies weren’t content to talk among themselves or just volunteer to help the Grimes campaign – though several have worked Grimes’s phonebanks or are involved in hosting volunteers. Instead, they decided to take their message to the people more directly, through guerrilla protests (though Munro-Leighton said: “We call them flashmobs”.)
Borrowing some tactics more reminiscent of the Occupy movement than campaign-organized rallies, the Miralea grannies coordinate – often via emails that Hagen prints up and distributes under her neighbors’ doors – and then show up on sidewalks and strip malls carrying handwritten posterboard signs and banners painted on dollar-store bedsheets, chanting to the beat of Philipp’s plastic bucket drum:
Thirty years in office, it’s time to make a switch. Kentucky needs the things you blocked! No one likes you Mitch. No one likes you, Mitch!
Philipp, who isn’t a Miralea resident, is a long-time liberal activist and her “drum” bears stickers from protests against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and in favor of impeaching former president George W Bush. “It’s all the things that Mitch voted against,” she explained, pointing to the stickers.
One of their more popular chants is “Listen to your granny, she say vote for Grimes.” Munro-Leighton bragged, “Those chants, we hope they are in people’s heads. Some people say they can’t shake it.”
They also have a variation on the Occupy standard “Hey, hey!” chant: “Hey hey, ho ho, Mitch McConnell has got to go.”
Camenisch explained how popular that one is with the younger set:
My sister came in from Albuquerque and is staying through the election. And she taught my great-grandson to say “Hey hey, ho ho, Mitch McConnell has got to go.” So we’re coming out of the daycare, and I don’t how those people feel at the preschool, but they know how he feels, because he comes out saying “Hey hey” and I say, “Ho ho” and he says, “Mitch McConnell has got to go.”
McConnell’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act (and the Kentucky exchange, Kynect, which McConnell has somewhat implausibly promised would remain open even if he successfully repealed the ACA) is a bone of contention with the Grannies. Hagen, the Miralea in-house organizer, explained, to affirmation from her neighbors:
I shudder to think that something is going to happen to the health care that we have. I keep looking at that, and I keep thinking, if they go back to the cherry-picking that they did before, we’re gonna have the same number of people who are not going to get coverage because they came in, shall we say, with a history of diseases or any kind of thing like that. And I know that all of us here remember when people had babies and they were born with defects, they were not covered. And I know you’ve known people like that. We cannot go back to that kind of thinking again.
Barton added: “And Mitch McConnell has said, early on, that his goal was to get rid of Obama. Now his goal is to get rid of Obamacare” – but Hagen corrected her: “Affordable Care Act.”
Many of the Grannies expressed dismay at McConnell’s negativity both on the campaign trails and in Congress. Fay Jeffries said, “I’ve been concerned in particular because everything with Mitch McConnell has been so negative, all of his campaigns have featured the negatives and this time it still does.”
Jenny Akins, a registered Republican supporting Grimes, said she’s crossing party lines because she’s tired of all the partisanship. “Mitch McConnell is elected and we have a Republican Senate and Congress, I don’t think it’s good for the country,” she explained. “It hasn’t been, with the partisanship that’s gone on so far.”
Henry Mangeot, one of the “grampies” of the group, felt that McConnell’s partisanship crossed a line. “His flat-out statement that he was going to ruin this administration ... It could’ve ruined the country.”
Despite the serious issues at stake in the election, many of the Grannies take refuge in a little sly humor. Joy Peterson, the resident cut-up, told the group:
This morning, we were at the table with our peer, who is a Republican, I keep telling him, “Wait ‘til 10 November when the election happens and then we’ll talk.”
(The election is, of course, 4 November.)
Dot Hagen confirmed, “She’s been telling all the McConnell people ‘Be sure and vote November the 10th’!”
All joking aside, many of the Grannies feel like there is a lot riding on Tuesday’s election, and not just because McConnell will serve until 2020 if re-elected. As Barton said, “If we’re going to have a true democracy and work for people who have needs, instead of rich people who managed to get whatever they want, we just have to have a Democratic person representing us, and Alison can do that.”
