Back when I lived in the coastal blue states (California and New York), a common line everyone said to each other was, “Wow, the Electoral College is so broken! It’s always these handful of swing states that decide every election!”

Begin circle-jerk. Does everyone agree? Phew! What a relief! Agreeability = Safety.

Yes! The Electoral College is broken! I see life the same way you do!

If I were French, I’d have made that lip-fluttering sound they do—pffft. Aight, enough small talk—where them shots at!

And then I moved to North Carolina.

It hasn’t been easy settling here. I had a bunch of behavioral patterns from big-town living that have been put to the test. Back in New York, I could have an argument with someone, act shittily, and then bop around to a different social scene—never to see them again. Here, if I have a challenge with someone this evening, I see them the next morning at Whole Foods. Community living is a trip.

Earlier this year, I went through a wave of ostracization—people talking behind my back, convincing others not to invite me to gatherings, and friends lacking the courage to continue being associated with me—for being openly supportive of Trump in the 2024 elections. I’ve made many relational mistakes during my time here, but time and again, I’ve made myself available to process and make amends. All of that got pushed aside in favor of a single label: “He is a Trump supporter.”

And oh Lord, did I resist that label. I have a visceral reaction to that sentence structure itself—

“____ is _____.”

It kills the aliveness of who a human is and reduces them to their past actions. Even before I fully steeped into the grace of God through being washed in the blood of Christ, I resisted that linguistic form because of my grounding in the works of the Buddha. Nothing confuses me more than seeing someone who claims to follow the Buddha resort to seeing humans by their identities. Woke Buddhism is a trip.

I have never identified as a “Trump supporter.” I simply believed that, in 2024, Trump was by far the better choice because the Democrats had become so entrenched in the establishment. It was quite ridiculous—still is. Kamala Harris, in particular, still lies about Biden’s mental health capacity to this day. She hasn’t managed to buy her sovereignty out from whoever in the establishment she feels beholden to. I genuinely pray for her soul to receive the freedom this country offers, because freedom really is part of America’s ethos. Her dishonesty and lack of depth (quite evident in her interviews) made her a very poor choice.

People of low integrity are, to me, also people of low intelligence—not the kind measured by grades, but by self-awareness. Integrity requires the ability to track your actions, see where you’re inconsistent, and live in alignment with your values. Trump, for all his flaws, is more consistent in how he shows up. Trump is consistently alive. You can’t predict him. And aliveness cannot be predicted. If you hang out with people where you can predict every next thing they’ll say, I pray that your soul also receives freedom and aliveness—the kind of lively creativity that surprises you, because God’s will for your life will surprise you.

If you look at any conversation, you can tell: some people are entirely predictable. You could literally build a small language model—not even one of the modern large ones—to generate their speech. You don’t need GPT-5 to simulate Kamala Harris. Her responses are templated. I’m sure some people would argue that Trump rambles or talks nonsense, and sure, it’s not polished. But Kamala Harris is polished predictability. Trump is rambling aliveness. Even if you hate him, I think you’d agree—he’s unpredictable. Harris is an establishment stooge.

So I never considered myself a “Trump supporter,” even in the depths of all that labeling. That’s part of the agony in the conversations I’ve had with people who supported Harris wholeheartedly. There seem to be two groups of them: the ones who sigh and say, “Well, I guess we have to vote for Harris,” and the ones who seem genuinely excited about her. It’s the latter group I really struggle to understand.

There’s a difference between supporting Harris because you hate Trump and supporting Harris because you love Harris. I’m talking about the latter group here. And around those folks, I’d be careful.

With many of them—even the ones who only leaned toward Harris—I ran into the same pattern.

Their first instinct in a conversation was to assign an identity label.

Their whole way of speaking was identity-based. The moment they encountered a new idea or a person with a different view, their mind jumped straight to, “What label can I attach to you?” Then they’d start speaking about how that label matched or clashed with their own.

And having spoken with people who grew up in deep red states, I’ve learned that their parents did the same thing—just with different labels. It’s the same flavor of trauma being passed down. “Oh, you’re liberal, so you’re pro-choice, we’re not talking to you anymore.” And now the other side does it too.

So people kept trying to fix me into a label. “You’re a Trump supporter.” Over and over again. I’d say, “No, I support Trump for now—because I think he’s the better choice this election. Convince me otherwise.” But they never did. All I got was, “As a Trump supporter, how do you justify this? How do you justify that?” coupled with judgments about my personality. No comparative conversation about how the two candidates stacked up. Nothing intelligent, really.

It was quite sad. These weren’t real conversations. It was like people couldn’t speak outside of identity labels.

I’m not just a brown Indian immigrant. Yes, that’s part of me, but I am more than that. And I want people to talk to me as me—not as some demographic box.

That’s part of why I’m so grateful to live in a swing state.

Before moving here, I used to parrot the common left-leaning line that “the Electoral College is broken.”

I heard that endlessly in New York and California—smugly parroted with self-certainty.

People there are chronically anxious. They want to connect but are caught in a constant hum of anxiety, filling it with noisy chatter—these conditioned lines they repeat to each other.

People would say, “It’s not fair that swing states decide elections.” But that line never went deeper than one layer of reasoning. It assumes that pure popular democracy is automatically better (it is not), without asking why the system was built as it was, or what its strengths and weaknesses are.

Elon Musk often uses the idea of “non-playable characters” to describe this. It’s like they’re running on script. There’s no playfulness left. They’re entirely predictable. You can’t play with them, because play comes from unpredictable aliveness, not conditioned deadness. And for a while, I was deep in NPC world.

Now I see things differently. Swing states are rewarded for maintaining an environment of independence. They resist conditioned polarization. Life here is more alive. There are more playable characters—people who surprise you, who think for themselves, who don’t reduce everything to identity. And that makes life richer.

It’s wild to sit with that now, because I used to find states like North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Arizona boring. Back then, I was a “deep blue” guy who believed every red voter was a racist. But really, I just didn’t have safety in my body. I wanted to live in a place that felt safe and predictable—like being handed a pacifier in a padded room. But I would’ve still been a whiny baby in that safe zone, because I hadn’t cultivated a sense of safety within.

When I started to reveal my political views, especially my support for Trump, I held space for the father projections of liberal Asheville—for people’s unprocessed anger toward their conservative dads. It wasn’t easy, but it was growthful. It helped me practice grace—for myself and for others. And once you have access to grace, it’s for everyone. The air feels thick with it now, almost tangible. That wasn’t always the case. Before Christ’s crucifixion, grace wasn’t as accessible. It took far more effort to overcome our ungraceful instincts. Look at the Buddha—look at how much effort it took.

Now, grace is in the air we breathe.

So when people say the Electoral College is broken, I see it differently. The swing states are rewarded for their independence. And as much as I wanted to run away during my season of ostracization this year, I find myself now deeply grateful to live in one.

(I might still move out, but Ohio is at the top of my list. Back when I lived in NYC, I never thought a line like that would come out of my mouth.)