Courtesy of Emma and John Runion - Emma and John Runion, who retired to Valrico, Fla., in 2008, were strong supporters of Mitt Romney.
VALRICO, Fla. — The first thing Emma Runion did when she woke up Wednesday was to go out into the yard and pull up the signs. Sunrise was still two hours away, the Spanish moss hanging silvery in the darkness, as Runion brought them inside the garage. The yard looked empty. Wiped clean. It had to be done.
“For my own psyche,” said Runion, a 58-year-old Republican and tea party activist. “If I drive home with the signs in the yard, it’s rubbing salt in the wound.”
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The wound was wide open Wednesday morning, the dawn of Four More Years. Although Runion campaigned tirelessly for Mitt Romney, walking a precinct every Saturday as a volunteer with the Hillsborough County Republican Party, her drive came from a larger mandate, shared by many of her fellow volunteers: ABO, or Anyone But Obama.
Four More Years is a long time — enough to dampen the spirit. But the opposite was true for Emma Runion. “The battle is lost, the war is not,” she said. “And it begins today.”
The day after the election, as Republican strategists diced the demographics of their loss — Hispanics and young people went with President Obama — the push was already on to make the GOP more inclusive and reflective of the country. The party needed to gather up more of the middle. In other words, it needed to tame the tea partyers who had moved the party to the right.
It was precisely this mentality that energized Emma Runion and her husband, John, to dig in even harder.
After gathering her signs Wednesday morning, Emma went to her computer. First she scanned it for spyware. “Hackers were very busy last night,” she said. Her second order of business was dropping Fox News as her home page, annoyed with the network for pitching in the towel so early and calling Obama the winner. Her new home page: the Blaze, the Glenn Beck-run news site.
About 6:30 a.m., the Runions kept their habit of going to the gym. Emma wore a hot-pink top. John, 65, a retired licensed electrician and union man, wore a T-shirt with an American flag on it. They rode to the gym in John’s brown Ford truck. At the gym, Emma made no apologies for trying to persuade her fellow gymgoers to vote Republican. “I worked on Dan for six months,” she said of the man on the elliptical trainer next to her. She used the Internet to look up their voter registrations.
A hulking man at a weight machine saw Emma and shook his head. “I can’t understand where this country’s going,” he said.
“Keep your chin up,” she said.
Back home — they retired to Valrico, east of Tampa, in 2008 — Emma put on her apron and sprayed a skillet with Pam for scrambled eggs. John looked at the newspaper for the Cryptoquote puzzles he likes. Emma pulled open her pantry. “We are not preppers,” she said, revealing a normal food closet instead of one preparing for anarchy. Canned pears. Canned pumpkin. Sugar. Peanut butter. Dog treats. There was no survival food, but they were planning on stocking up on guns and ammo.
“We’ll probably get a long gun and a short gun,” Emma said. “We’ve already got our concealed carry permits; we just need to be fingerprinted.” That last step was the one that made her hesitant. “Once you are registered, they know who you are. Most firearms now are chipped” for tracking.
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