Unfair to Middling
How I Came To Jump off the GOPrecipice Without a Net I grew up as a preacher's kid in a Baptist household. It was a conservative enough home life, but somehow I ended up in a conservative bubble in an otherwise liberal state. Oregon had its last Republican governor, Vic Atiyeh, through most of my years of school. Jimmy Carter was a pretty unpopular president, and then Ronald Reagan swept into office in a landslide that only grew bigger for his second term. I grew fairly comfortable in the idea that people around me thought the same way I did—or at least, similarly. In middle school, the mock election we did in social studies had one outlier (that I recall) who supported Mondale over Reagan for the 1984 election, and there really wasn't a lot of discussion around that. In my junior year of high school, I remember writing a persuasive paper for my English class that was about a political issue. The teacher commented on it in a way that made me realize that she and I stood on oppo