Letters from two Americas: A year on the campaign trail

The road to the White House is lined by millions of fascinating people. During my year on the campaign trail, I met no shortage of them: I met Republicans who backed Harris and Democrats who liked Trump; I met people disillusioned with politics and people unfathomably committed to it; I met Amish and Jews, painters and pastors, ex-athletes and ex-city dwellers. But I didn’t meet anyone else quite like George Lafon.
Lafon is 72, but looks years younger: sharp blue eyes, graying mustache, slender build. That’s the benefit of life on a farm — work hard, eat fresh, enjoy the benefits. He lives on 18 acres in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, a recent move after six decades in California. A daughter and son-in-law made the move, too; One granddaughter stayed out West, but Lafon doesn’t mind. She’s a Latter-day Saint, Lafon told me, and she got married last year at 22. “She’s going to have five or six kids,” he said, grinning. He’s anxious for great-grandchildren. “It’s like, life is great,” he added.
We met at a conference in Phoenix last December. I was there to report; Lafon was there to relish. I found him in the foyer, hanging around while his gray-haired cohort of travel buddies wandered through the aisles of MAGA-themed merchandise. (For $17.76, a water bottle labeled “Woke Tears”; for $20, a T-shirt that read “JESUS WAS ACCUSED OF INSURRECTION TOO”). TurningPoint USA’s AmericaFEST was geared toward college kids, but Lafon and his fellow retirees invited themselves. The speaker list, a who’s-who of the conservative podcast punditry class, drew them in: Charlie Kirk, Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Lindell. “I thought, ‘oh shoot, I should probably go to that,’” Lafon recounted. His friends thought the same.
For retirees, the group is remarkably up-to-date on conservative trends. They practically live online, devouring the latest MAGA memes and right-wing buzzwords. During the pandemic, fed up with California’s mask mandates and vaccine requirements and inspired by freedom-fighters on Facebook, they decided to host a protest. At first, it was just Lafon and a handful of others, standing on a street in Poway, California, with signs and flags. The next week, they did it again. Someone formed a groupchat on Signal and added more members. Before long, they had enough people to hold court every week, spread out across the corners of a busy intersection.
“4 Corners 4 Freedom,” they called the rallies. “Patriots For Freedom,” they called themselves. They protested COVID-19 restrictions and critical race theory in the local schools. Late in 2020, they protested the presidential election, claiming it was stolen from Donald Trump.
As the pandemic wore on, though, Lafon grew restless. He’d lived in Southern California since 1969, back when it was the American dream, when wide roads and sandy beaches lured Jerseyites like Lafon to the other coast. Over 50 years, Lafon raised a family and ran a judo studio. “At the time, everybody in America was moving to California,” he told me. “Sadly, San Diego is becoming like L.A. and San Francisco.” The pandemic, he said, only made that more clear. “It’s become a liberal city.”
In 2022, he began to consider a move. His first choice was was eastern Tennessee, but then a member of his daughter’s church offered another idea: What about rural Virginia?Lafon liked the idea, and when he first stepped foot into the Shenandoah Valley — the rolling green hills, the horse farms, the vineyards — he fell in love. He signed on an 18-acre plot with a handsome home. Within months, his family made the cross-country move.
During that first year, amid the homesteading and harvesting and judo, Lafon managed to become a unicorn among American adult males: he maintained friendships. American men, especially retirees, are more lonely than ever; Lafon, on the other hand, didn’t go a day without talking to his Patriots For Freedom buddies. They would text and call, sending memes and news articles. When they heard an interesting podcast, it went into the chat; when a grandchild hit a milestone, it went into the chat. When someone dropped a mention of AmericaFEST, it was the perfect opportunity for a reunion, and they dove into logistics: the septuagenarian buddies — wearing matching “PATRIOTS FOR FREEDOM” T-shirts — would all meet in San Diego, and from there, they’d pile into two SUVs and roadtrip to Phoenix.
But for all of Lafon’s uniqueness, I’m certain he’s utterly unremarkable in another way: He isn’t close with anyone with different politics than his own. His friend group is politically self-sorted; he fled a blue state to live in relative isolation. It’s the new American normal. Lafon’s America is a politically homogenous America, and that is how he enjoys it.
For the past 15 months, I’ve tried to understand America. Covering a presidential election to this degree was something the Deseret News had never attempted before. We spent well over a year with a near-incessant present on the campaign trail, jaunting from Reno to Atlanta, from Pittsburgh to Des Moines, following the candidates through the Republican primaries and what felt like a trio of general elections. We knew other outlets would keep a close eye on every move the candidates made, and we did, too. But our main goal was to understand what American voters were thinking, feeling and saying. Elections are decided by the voters, we reasoned, not the candidates. We decided to hold a microphone in front of those voters and see if they’d talk.
And talk, they did. I spoke to hundreds of them. I met them in grocery stores and on doorsteps, in churches and at barbershops. I met them at dozens of rallies — for Trump, for Kamala Harris, for Joe Biden, Nikki Haley, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dean Phillips and others. Some were fierce partisans; others, even in swing states days ahead of the election, were undecided. They all had different reasons for thinking the way that they did.
But the more voters I met, the more I realized how little they knew about each other. Haley voters confided to me how little they respected Trump voters. Trump voters told me they couldn’t understand how anyone could support Biden. Biden backers, for a season, expressed disgust for the sliver of Democrats who wanted Harris atop the ticket. Harris voters couldn’t fathom how anyone could even consider voting for Trump.
This is nothing new. Elections seem to bring about the worst impulses in Americans. On Facebook, friends ravage friends. On X, strangers pummel strangers. All seem confident their political persuasion is the correct one, that all who disagree are deceived at best and damned at worst. But even last fall, over a year before our quadrennial descent into political hell, I could see something else. It wasn’t a lack of interest in or tolerance for political rivals; it was a complete separation from them.
Over the summer, a Pew survey gave some validity to my hunch. It pointed at the growth of “ideological silos”: The more liberal or conservative a person is, the survey found, the less likely they are to have friends with differing ideological views. “Liberals and conservatives disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around and even whom they would welcome into their families,” the report read.
The data was not novel. A YouGov poll in 2020 found, compared to 2016, that significantly more U.S. adults — be they Republicans, Democrats or independents — said they do not have friends with different political views. A quarter of Americans now say it’s “stressful” to spend time with people with other political views. Half of Democrats say they’d rather be audited by the IRS than have dinner with Trump; half of Republicans say they’d rather have a colonoscopy than have dinner with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On the campaign trail, I heard much of the same. Folks whispered to me that they’d lost friendships over politics, that they didn’t talk to their “woke” or “MAGA” family members anymore. They’d slice down their social circles to include only those with whom they agreed. What then remained of their friend groups — in their neighborhoods, at work, or online — was complete political homogeneity. It was something of a self-sorting. America, it seems, was full of George Lafons: interesting, educated, kind, and living in their own political bubble. They aren’t just dumbfounded by their political rivals. They don’t know any of them.
The first sign was Iowa. Conventional wisdom holds that Iowa is the breeding ground for presidents. Conventional wisdom, it seems, met its match in the 2024 presidential cycle.
The rite-of-passage in Iowa, it was long believed, was retail-politicking: the on-the-ground, hand-to-hand campaigning, a relic of an America that was community-minded and neighborly. In Iowa, candidates had to spend a week flipping burgers and shaking hands at the Iowa State Fair. They had to fraternize with pastors and kiss babies at churches. They had to curry favor with the state’s political elite. They had to make impromptu stops in gas stations and Pizza Ranches and bars.
A host of Republican hopefuls followed the agenda. Ramaswamy visited each of Iowa’s 99 counties twice over, convincing skeptical evangelicals that he, a Hindu, wasn’t all that different. DeSantis scooped up endorsements from the state’s political elite, like the Republican governor and the evangelical powerbroker. Haley enjoyed a late surge, thanks to a super PAC that knocked hundreds of thousands of doors for her.
In the end, none of it mattered. Trump parachuted into the Iowa State Fair for an hour, delivered a speech, and bolted back to Florida. He failed to land endorsements from some of the same pastors who backed him in 2016 and 2020. He held rallies once a week at most. It wasn’t until the week of the caucuses that he made any attempt at retail politicking — delivering a stack of gas station pizzas to firefighters.
A year ago this week, when the other Republicans gathered for a Thanksgiving event hosted by the state’s top evangelical group, Trump skipped out. Haley, DeSantis and Ramaswamy took veiled jabs at him — noting that the “tone at the top matters,” and saying the president should uphold the “national character” — but never mentioned him by name.
The strategy, it seemed, was to ignore Trump. When Trump skipped out on the debates, his challengers barely made mention of it. The market assumption was that voters would eventually tire of him, thanks to some combination of his legal challenges and his 2020 loss. When I watched one of those Trump-less debates with Jon Huntsman Jr., the 2012 Republican presidential candidate and ex-ambassador to China and Russia, he shrugged. “Tonight, it’s going to be, who will be left standing?” he told me. “Because whoever’s left standing could likely be Trump’s running mate, before he moves off to prison, or wherever he goes.”
The strategy didn’t work — but retail politicking didn’t work, either. Trump stuck atop the polls, even as he barely campaigned. Haley and DeSantis swarmed the state, even as temperatures dropped well below freezing and snow blanketed the streets. Ramaswamy texted and called voters personally: a roundtable in Council Bluffs, one Ramaswamy supporter bragged that Vivek had dialed her cellphone just that morning.
No one was expecting to get a call from Trump, though. At his sporadic rallies around the state, hordes of eager supporters flocked for a chance to just be in the same room. After a rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, last November, Trump lingered to sign autographs for attendees in the front row. Joel Tenney — TurningPoint USA’s Iowa faith chair, who’d attended a dozen Trump events — turned to me, dumbfounded. “I’ve never seen him do that, with all the rallies and all the events we’ve been to,” Tenney told me.
The caucus system was built to reward the candidates who engaged the community most. But Iowa was changing, too. The national press panned it as an evangelical hotbed; in reality, Iowa’s religious makeup is much like the rest of America’s. Across the state, the share of religious “nones” is spiking, and weekly church attendance lags neighboring states. “Iowa is not some throwback to when America was very religious,” wrote Ryan Burge. “Just the opposite — it reflects the overall movement away from religion in places where it used to dominate.”
The state’s community makeup is decaying, too. Civic groups, like rotary clubs, are seeing their members die off. Rural communities — which make up a majority of the state — are seeing populations shrink. The caucus system, in theory, should serve to supplant this decline. “This is what caucuses were intended to be: Builders not only of a political party but of community,” one longtime Iowa journalist wrote. But the caucuses can only go so far in rebuilding something that is already in decline.
When I trudged through knee-high snow with volunteers for Americans For Prosperity-Action, the Koch brothers’ super PAC that endorsed Haley, I saw it firsthand. The canvassers spent far more time explaining what the caucus was or where it was held than why they should support Haley. One middle-aged woman, peering through her front door, opened just a crack, sighed when the volunteer asked if she knew who her neighbors would be supporting. “To be honest,” she said, “I don’t know my neighbors.”
To be an 18-year-old Republican on an Ivy League campus is to be a pariah. But Luke Aloe doesn’t feel that way. “If you Google what’s the most conservative Ivy, Dartmouth is always the answer that comes up,” Aloe told me — though the bar, he quickly noted, was “on the floor.” We were sitting on a bench in Dartmouth’s student center, days away from the New Hampshire primary, though there was no sign of it. Campus was quiet — no protests, no canvassing, no political signage.
Students here weren’t uninformed or disengaged, he explained to me. They just engage in other ways. Some, like Aloe, enjoy spending time outdoors and are involved in conservation efforts. (Aloe is a member of the club skiing team.) Others are wrapped up in student clubs or Greek life. “There are other ways of getting involved with the community,” he said, “and like politics isn’t always at the forefront.”
At most other Ivies in the fall of 2023, geopolitics was the main thing. Protests over the Israel-Hamas war erupted at elite universities on both coasts. Harvard faculty were allying with students in demanding the university sever ties with Israel. Yale students staged walkouts; Cornell students staged “die-ins.” On the campaign trail, Haley — Trump’s lone remaining challenger — dealt with college-aged protesters during so many of her campaign stops that she began opening her rallies with a disclaimer. “To my protester friends: please be respectful,” she’d say. “We want to talk about the fact that we have a country to save.”
The issue was personal to Aloe. “On my mom’s side, I’m half-Palestinian, half-Jewish,” he said said. “I think, at a lot of these schools, students who didn’t even know the issue was really a thing until a few months ago, suddenly became really into it.”
At Dartmouth, though, there were few protests and no disruptions to campus life. Days after the Oct. 7 attack, Dartmouth president Sian Beilock arranged a pair of campus-wide forums, in which faculty from the Jewish and Middle Eastern studies programs shared perspectives on the war and the history of the region. The conversations were respectful and driven by research, and hundreds of students attended. A pro-Israel vigil was held on campus. Jewish students felt comfortable wearing the star of David. Beilock remained openly committed to the ideals of free speech and tolerance, leaning into the “Dartmouth Dialogues” initiative.
Per Aloe’s assessment, the campus reached that point because of the mutual respect students already shared, long before Hamas terrorists launched their attack. “I mean, we’re a fairly small school,” he said. “Tolerance towards political diversity is a community value here, which is really nice.”
In the midst of Ivy League chaos, Dartmouth was something of a testing ground for tolerance, conservative students told me. A flourishing “Dartmouth Conservatives” held frequent, popular discussions on philosophical and political topics. An American Conservation Coalition chapter was formed to “engage conservative students on environmental policy,” Isaiah Menning, the chapter’s founder, said. The average Dartmouth student is left-of-center, Aloe reasoned, but “if somebody finds out you’re conservative, instead of you being canceled, students here are genuinely curious as to why.” Most students are open about their political ideology, but it often isn’t the defining aspect of their personality, added Alexander Barrow, another conservative student. “Everybody knows each other,” he said.
As the New Hampshire primary approached, Dartmouth played its quiet role. A “Students for Haley” group popped up. Dean Phillips, the long shot Democratic candidate, made an appearance at the student-led, nonpartisan Dartmouth Political Union, as did Marianne Williamson, Doug Burgum and Chris Christie. When candidates strolled into town, they had to adopt the Dartmouth way — tolerance and respect for political opponents. “I have a great deal of animus towards Donald Trump,” Phillips admitted during a rally at the Hanover Inn Dartmouth on Jan. 18. “I’m going to invite his supporters.” They’re “not all bad people,” he said. “Most of them are good, hardworking people that are furious at this country for ignoring them, for being unheard, being unappreciated.”
By the end it was Phillips and Haley, the Democrat and the Republican, the lone challengers standing. Haley seemed to have a legitimate shot at catching Trump; Phillips never had a prayer with Biden. They were both dealt the impossible task of challenging the party’s front-runner without alienating their followers. The balancing act, ironically, made them do some of the best campaigning of the entire cycle.
Phillips was a talented speaker, and he seemed to recognize that no single politician controlled such a large segment of the electorate as Trump. Phillips showed at least some interest in understanding why those voters feel the way they do. His followers felt the same. “I see my neighbors struggling, and I see them voting for Trump, and I get it,” Nic Antal, a Phillips supporter, told me in Hanover. Their main issue, Antal believed, is the cost of health care. (Phillips ran on a universal health care plan.)
Phillips’ campaign flamed out shortly after New Hampshire. Haley, however, was feigning optimism. She was gambling on the more moderate electorate in New Hampshire and friendly voters in her home state, South Carolina. By luck or by grit, she’d outlasted DeSantis and Ramaswamy and Christie and the rest, amassing a growing war chest each time Trump trained his attacks on her.
When Trump announced Haley’s followers would be “barred permanently” from MAGA, Haley’s campaign punched the slogan on T-shirts and raked in millions. Haley returned the favor by attempting to court Trump’s supporters. She doesn’t “judge” Trump voters, she told the Deseret News editorial board during a visit to Salt Lake City in February: “I think that’s the problem with politics. You’re not supposed to judge the people you want to serve.”
In the process, she couldn’t decide how much she would judge Trump. Chaos follows Trump, she repeated, “rightly or wrongly” — though she never said whether she believed it was right or wrong. (Ironically, Phillips used the same phrase when describing Biden’s low approval ratings.)
Most of her supporters were more certain. “It feels like my party has been hijacked,” Eddie Linsey, a lifelong Republican, told me at a Haley rally in Charlotte. Her band of followers was a motley mix of disillusioned Republicans, independents and some Democrats who switched their party affiliations to vote in closed primaries. “I’m somewhat to the right of Attila the Hun,” one law-and-order Haley supporter told me in Raleigh; another, a single mother in Charleston, South Carolina, told me she’d never voted for a Republican in her life.
But even among the conservative faithful, those lifelong Republicans who’d supported Trump once or twice before defecting to Haley, there was a clear divide between them and others in their party. Soumi Eachempati, a surgeon from Florida, told me he wore a Haley button around Charleston. It turned into something of a social experiment: strangers started approaching him, on the sidewalk or in restaurants, and would make comments. “Haley supporters would come up and say how they voted for her or knew her,” he said. Trump supporters, however, would say something rude. “One-hundred percent of the Haley folks were nice,” he said. “One-hundred percent of the Trump folks were mean.”
At a rally in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, days before that state’s primary, things reached a boiling point. A man who identified as the town’s mayor arrived at her rally, furious, demanding he speak to someone from her campaign. He’d been informed that individuals in Trump gear were being removed from the event. “What happened to free speech?” he told me. Meanwhile, a man in a MAGA hat walked the perimeter, yelling, “I’ve seen more energy at an old folks’ home!”
Turnout was low; rain that morning may have discouraged some would-be attendees. The man, who said his name was Rick Buxton from “Bikers For Trump,” stood near the back of the rally, shouting periodic insults. Some attendees seemed visibly uncomfortable, but no one confronted him.
Finally, a gray-haired man approached. “I like your shirt,” he said, pointing to Buxton’s Christian tee. “Thanks for being here.” Buxton seemed taken aback. “You know, we have the same goal,” the man continued. “We just have different ways of getting there.”
Buxton nodded his head. “There’s too much hate,” he said. The two men stood, side by side, as Haley finished telling a story about removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol. “We didn’t have protests, we had prayer,” Haley said, to applause.
Buxton clapped, too. “Yeah, we need more of that,” he said.
Haley dropped out, Phillips dropped out, and nothing seemed to change. The country was steamrolling toward an election rematch that few wanted and fewer were excited about. Then two events set the election on its head: the June 27 presidential debate, and the July 13 attempted assassination. The former sent Democrats spiraling. The latter left Republicans convinced that Trump was graced by God.
In Atlanta, at the debate where Biden’s campaign flamed out, his surrogates knew it was over before he did. No Democrat stayed in the post-debate spin room for more than 15 minutes. In a single-file line, led by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, they shuffled in, offered brief defenses of the president, and filed out.
Biden spent the next two weeks attempting to salvage his campaign, swinging through battleground states and sitting for short interviews. In Wisconsin, ahead of what allies dubbed a “make-or-break” weekend, he slugged through a pair of rallies, imperfectly but proficiently. His supporters, unwilling to acknowledge the criticisms, gave rave reviews. “He really fired the people up,” a local labor union leader in Madison, Wisconsin told me after Biden’s speech there. “He’s lively and spirited,” another attendee said.
But the Democratic infighting continued. Top lawmakers knew Biden couldn’t win, and quietly urged him to step aside. Harris took a more visible role, and young Democrats began envisioning her atop the ticket. Then Butler happened, and the Republican National Convention — already a scheduled distraction from the Biden drama — turned attention from a snakebitten president to one Republicans claimed was protected by the divine.
The assassination attempt against Trump deeply affected Spencer Cox. The Utah governor had long been a Trump critic, the rare Republican governor who professed to be both unapologetically conservative and unfailingly skeptical of all things MAGA. He wasn’t a “never-Trumper,” he claimed — that group often “turns into the very thing that they’re pushing against,” he told Politico — but he never openly backed Trump, either. In both 2016 and 2020, he voted for someone else.
Above all else, though, Cox was clear-eyed about the two Americas, and bullish about bridging the divide. He heaped incessant praise on the public scholars, like Arthur Brooks, Jonathan Haidt and Yuval Levin, who write about healing divisions. As chair of the National Governors Association, Cox launched the “Disagree Better” initiative to decrease political polarization. What he was trying to fix was exactly what he felt Trump was exacerbating. “We are confusing conservatism with anger and hate and polarization,” he once said.
But after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Cox had a change of heart. I first got word of it on Thursday of the Republican National Convention, hours before Trump would take the stage and formally accept the party nomination. A source texted me a screenshot of a two-page letter signed by Cox and addressed to Trump. “I believe in our better angels, Mr. President, and I believe you are capable of being that kind of leader for this troubled nation,” Cox wrote. “It is a huge burden to be placed on any person, but I want you to know that I pledge my support and I know that millions of others will rally to that kind of leadership.”
The letter was hand-delivered by Donald Trump Jr. to his father earlier in the week. Trump read it and was pleased, multiple people aware of the circumstances said. Many of Cox’s colleagues in Utah weren’t. “The number of ‘WTF’ texts I’ve gotten from folks in Utah (and outside who have followed Cox) is astonishing,” one Utah political operative told me, minutes after Cox’s announcement.
Cox believed the assassination was an inflection point in the race, and an opportunity to unite the country. “Your life was spared,” Cox wrote. “Now, because of that miracle, you have the opportunity to do something that no other person on earth can do right now: unify and save our country.”
Before, Trump had made little effort at unifying, even among the disparate branches of the Republican Party. After Haley dropped out, Trump made no overture to the millions of voters who supported her in the primaries. Biden, for his part, was making little effort, either — he never asked Christie, Mitt Romney or the other never-Trump Republicans for help, per Politico’s Jonathan Martin.
But for the first 20 minutes of Trump’s acceptance speech at the RNC, Trump seemed a change man. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America,” he declared.
The speech soon went off the rails, though, and as Trump went through the subsequent weeks, he blasted any suggestion he would temper his act. “They say something happened to me when I got shot, I became nice,” Trump said two weeks later. “When you’re dealing with these people — they’re very dangerous people — when you’re dealing with them you can’t be too nice, you really can’t be. So, if you don’t mind, I’m not going to be nice, is that OK?”
Cox made tepid attempts to temper his endorsement. “I didn’t say I support everything he does,” Cox told The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. “I’m not even telling you that you need to vote for him.” Although, in his July press conference, Cox responded affirmatively when a reporter clarified if his letter was an endorsement of Trump.
In the subsequent months, Cox mostly focused on his own reelection. He made two public appearances with Trump — at a fundraiser in Salt Lake City, and at a Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. The latter became a controversy when both Cox and Trump used it in campaign fundraising or advertising, a violation of the cemetery’s policies. Cox attended Trump’s October rally in Coachella, California, but as a guest, not a speaker. When the campaign unveiled its “Latter-day Saints for Trump” coalition, co-chairs included three members of Utah’s congressional delegation, the Utah attorney general, three members of the Utah legislature — and no Cox.
Publicly, Cox declined to comment further on his endorsement. (His office and campaign declined multiple interview requests.) Privately, he suggested to friends that the letter was too optimistic, and that the Arlington gaffe had put a damper on his foray into the MAGA orbit, two of Cox’s acquaintances said. Trump’s allies in Utah cheered his conversion. “The MAGAtization looks to be complete,” former GOP chair Carson Jorgensen texted me after Cox introduced Trump at the September fundraiser. But Cox himself seemed tired by it all.
He wasn’t alone. In the race’s closing weeks, the discourse took an ugly turn. A speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally made racist and crude jokes. Biden called Trump’s supporters “garbage.” Trump called Harris voters “horrible.” Even some of Trump’s most fervent supporters seemed exhausted.
At Trump’s final rally in Nevada, five days before Election Day, several told me they were ready for the election to be over. “There’s a lot of tension right now,” Brian Holland, a middle-aged man from Las Vegas, told me. He’d lost friends and alienated family members over his politics. Allan Talley, a 37-year-old real estate agent, told me the same. “I’ve lost friends, for sure,” he said. “It’s kind of sad.”
The result? A group of people who live in social environments siloed off from those they disagree with. Their political ideology was not just their preferred one, but the only reasonable one. Another attendee, named Ariel, told me she didn’t “see how anyone could vote for Harris”; when I asked if she knew anyone that supports Harris, she shook her head. “I don’t really even have anybody within my friend group or family, or even professional groups, that are strong left-wing,” she said. Voting for Trump, she believed, was “the most common sense, logical vote. If anyone took the time to slow down and do any research, it’s just clear.”
It wasn’t just Trump’s supporters who were exhausted. Kamala Harris’ nascent campaign, once fueled by joy and optimism, took a markedly more doomsday-ish approach in the final weeks. Trump and Vance could no longer be dismissed as “weird”; now, they were “fascist.” Labeling Trump as a threat to democracy, a hallmark of the Biden campaign, was adopted by Harris in the closing month. If Trump wins, she warned, he would pose a “danger to the well-being and security of the United States of America.”
Harris made efforts to reach across the aisle — campaigning with Liz Cheney, promising to appoint a Republican to her cabinet. But many of her supporters seemed baffled why anyone would ever be on that other side. Emotions were raw in the final days: Marcella Vanrenselaar, an attendee at Harris’ closing argument speech on the National Mall, wiped away tears as she considered a second Trump administration. “We cannot allow — we cannot allow to be oppressed as Americans,” she said. “We cannot allow to be oppressed. And I cannot — I can’t see myself living in a world where Donald Trump is the president. I just can’t.”
Others seemed numb. Dave McHenry, a 64-year-old Army veteran from Missouri, recited for me a list of the friends he’d lost since he left the Republican Party. “The last friend I lost was four weeks ago,” he told me, with jarring nonchalance. “I’ve known this guy since 1983. We were very tight. He was my first supervisor at UPS. All those years.” He began talking more slowly. “When I had hard times, he was there for me. And I hope he believed I was there for him. When he went through a divorce … .” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “It’s painful, really painful, to talk about right now,” he said.
The tipping point, McHenry said, was a conversation over politics on social media. “He went on, started saying crazy things,” he said. McHenry tried to call him, and the friend wouldn’t answer. “I think he was trying to provoke me to defriend him,” McHenry said. Two weeks later, the friend called back. McHenry didn’t answer. “I’m like, I’m not gonna talk to him until after the election. … Right is right. Wrong is wrong. When you’re fighting for your country, people make great sacrifices.”
McHenry figures he can iron it out later. But he also knows that can take time. McHenry voted for Trump twice before deciding he was unfit for office; in 2016, when he told his liberal daughter he’d be backing Trump, “she threatened me,” he recalled. “She said, ‘you’ll never see your grandkids again.’” McHenry voted for Trump again in 2020. Now, as a member of “Republican Voters Against Trump,” he’s reconnected with his grandchildren.
I heard similar stories over and over from voters. Republicans who’d left their party and voiced support for Harris seemed to be the hardest hit. When Sarah Longwell’s Republican Accountability PAC launched a “Republican Voters Against Trump” bus tour across the swing states, it felt as much a support group as it did a campaign. They commiserated about losing friends; they grieved for family members who they didn’t talk to anymore.
“We don’t have a relationship with my husband’s parents anymore,” Ursula Schneider, a 52-year-old artist from Tucson, told me. She voted for Trump in 2016, but later decided to leave the Republican Party. That caused a rift within her conservative religious community, and she and her husband were eventually “kicked out of our church,” she said. “That set us on this whole move to explore basically everything that we thought about everything,” Schneider said.
Many of her one-time friends were no longer in her life. “I’ve tried a lot to have conversations with people that I’ve known for many years, and honestly, most of them won’t have it,” Schneider said. “It’s really sad.” She shook her head. “My story is not unique.”