The Ohio hog voter, explained

Here's what makes the hog voter dangerous to the bipartisan political cartel.

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There was a time, not that long ago, when The Rooster was a largely unknown publication operated by a raging alcoholic. Despite my flaws and relentless dedication to self-destruction, I had cobbled together a small cadre of loyal readers, even if some were following along for a front-row seat to my inevitable downfall.

I don’t miss slowly killing myself with Tito’s Handmade Vodka and the pain I visited upon the people who care about me most. But there are times that I miss when I could just throw out random terms like “Ohio hog voters,” and the audience would just go with it even if they didn’t understand what, exactly, I was talking about at the time.

Hog voters became a trope. I most recently used it in a headline of a dispatch celebrating the passage of Issue 1 and Issue 2 in last week’s election:

The header photo probably alarms most ordinary people. But to my demented sewer mind, it’s the perfect encapsulation of how I envision an Ohio hog voter headed to the polls.

But a reader reached out to me this week and asked exactly what I meant by Ohio hog voter. And then my good friend @Morv6969 — his legal government name, by the way — asked a similar question in response to my gloating about the Holy Rollers overplaying their hand immediately after realizing their 50-year project of throwing Roe vs. Wade in the trash:

It’s a fair question! And honestly, I won’t lie. Originally I meant it as a pejorative. The types of Republican voters living in dying towns (like Marion, the City of Kings, from which I hail) and thinking that a New York City con artist like President Business Deals would somehow improve their lives by building a continuous 2,000-mile wall along America’s Southern Border.

I always gave those Trump voters this much: At least they knew they were supposed to be angry despite a lot of them having been duped by capitalism’s greatest trick in directing that righteous down the socioeconomic ladder.

Those hog voters also quit taking their marching orders from the political careerists whose sociopathic candidates had led America into its current mess. Any of the other Republican contenders would have enacted 98% of the Trump Agenda and all its horrors, and they would have done it without being one of the funniest men alive like Trump.

The persona of the hog voter can be distilled into this clip in which Ted Cruz, a Yale-educated shitheel Texas Senator, tries to use Ivy League debate club tactics on a pack of feral Trump voters:

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why Cruz ended up phone-banking like a 20-year-old campaign volunteer for a game show host who called his wife ugly and insinuated his father played a decisive role in executing John F. Kennedy:

I once told a Republican political operative that it’s a shame Trump didn’t just get into podcasting instead of becoming president. He had to become president for me to realize he was one of the funniest men alive.

“Oh, his stream-of-conscious riffs happen at his rallies,” they said. And it’s true. Trump had tapped into the hog spirit in a way that Ron DeSantis never could, which is why I declared the Florida Governor’s presidential ambitions dead on arrival in August 2022 after hearing him speak outside Youngstown.

But it’s important to clarify that the hog voter mentality is bipartisan. The defining characteristic is understanding that the strength of the hog comes not just from the individual but from the pack, as exemplified in this famous viral tweet:

The only people who thought that guy was insane for asking how to kill 30-50 feral hogs without a semi-automatic rifle have never seen feral hogs in action.

From helibeacon.com:

Wild hogs also threaten agriculture business through devastating field crops, causing property damage, and upsetting normal farming techniques. Texas’ boar population is responsible for an estimated 500 million to 1 billion dollars worth of annual crop damage caused by the hogs living in and feeding on field crops. Large 400 pound adult hogs have been know to damage property and equipment while moving from ranch to ranch. Lastly, enormous amounts of time, money, and effort are spent rectifying problems brought about by hordes of pigs inhabiting properties.

The hog damage must be done to the current political structure in this scenario. Voters of all stripes should stop taking orders from bipartisan insider cabals who are groomed through every rung of the political ladder for the obsequiousness to the status quo. It’s the Ivy League-educated freaks who took the post-World War II wealth boom and ushered it into the hands of a smaller and smaller cabal of oligarchs.

A Democrat voter in Columbus rejecting Mayor Suburbs is a hog voter in the same way as a rural voter refusing to support the Harvard-educated Ron DeSantis. A hog voter can be an independent suburban wine mom who voted for Mike DeWine but rejected his gaslighting about Issue 1 being “too extreme for Ohio.”

People like me who obsessively follow politics and try to build a coherent and consistent political ideology are the weird ones. The average American is too overworked and underpaid and too busy raising their families to want to spend their free time obsessively following the latest string of power-hungry jackals trying to earn their next political promotion.

But the average politician doesn’t feel shame for playing a role in creating that environment. In their minds, that system was already in place before they came to power and they are just one cog in the trundling machine of capitalism. If you don’t care, that’s not their problem!

That’s why most politicians look down their noses with contempt at the hog voter. “Fifty percent of them don’t even bother to vote!” they say, knowing that means they can commit whatever crimes because a third of partisan voters will still back them over the other party and half the country won’t bother to care.

Perhaps you look down your nose at the average hog voter, too. It’s somewhat easy to do when journalists find a single voter in a sea of millions sure to enrage everyone who obsessively follows politics:

But hog voters play an outsized role in our political process. It’s a lesson the Republican Party learned last week and helps explain why Republicans worked so hard over the last decade to gerrymander the State Legislature like they have.

But despite their best machinations, the August Special Election failed and Issue 1 and Issue 2 passed with a coalition of suburbanites and rural Republicans who refused to take their marching orders from the high-ranking government officials they installed one year ago.

Governor Grandpa Sleepy Tea could not motivate them because, despite his landslide election over an unknown former Democratic mayor of Dayton last year, he’s still a sleepy old man who only got into politics because he was a bored rich kid born into generational wealth.

He doesn’t have a hog mentality, and he wouldn’t have had the story political career he had if he were born into the current political climate.

That’s because Ohio isn’t a Republican state. It’s a hog state. It’s a blessing and a curse.

Democrats should recognize that and do their best to enforce popular agenda items like a $15 minimum wage and guaranteed paid sick leave through the constitutional ballot initiative. It’s the ultimate check hog voters have on the State Legislature, and it’s the only weapon the Ohio Democrats have left outside their urban enclaves.

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