Sandi Hodgden (second from right) and the Trumpettes of Volusia County, Florida, in 2017. (Daniel Allott)
SANDI HODGDEN WAS IN HER ELEMENT. Standing below an American flag and an immense “Trump 2020 The Sequel—Make Liberals Cry Again” banner, and beside a life-size cardboard cutout of President Trump, the recently widowed mother of two and grandmother of five was attempting to persuade passersby to sign a gun-rights pledge and register to vote.
“Want to sign our Second Amendment petition?” she asked a group of people walking by.
“Sure,” a man said.
“Don’t need to,” said another, motioning toward the cardboard commander-in-chief. “Not as long as we got that guy in the White House.”
“Are you registered to vote?” Sandi asked another group.
“Not for him!” several yelled back; others just shook their heads.
“Go Trump!” a woman shouted.
Sandi and her team of volunteers were quite adept at convincing people to write down their names and contact information so that the Volusia County Republican Party could inundate them with election-related messages until election day. They were friendly and energetic but not pushy—unless you happen to have had a strong aversion to President Trump, in which case the mere presence of these women might have been enough to trigger an outburst.
“I wouldn’t have anything to do with him if you paid me a million dollars!” a middle-aged woman shouted as she walked by.
“Glad you’re here!” another woman yelled.
The volunteers were decked out in Trump gear. One woman wore Trump-themed shoes and earrings; another, a t-shirt with the Betsy Ross flag that said, “Stand up for Betsy Ross.”
Sandi pressed a “Trump 2020” sticker on an older man’s Marine Corps baseball cap.
“How does it look?” he asked.
“Donald would love it!” Sandi said, beaming.
I was at the Daytona Flea and Farmers Market, a sprawling indoor bazaar with hundreds of booths selling just about anything you’d ever want, and a whole lot more that you wouldn’t. Located a mile or so from Daytona International Speedway and across the street from a shooting range, it drew a mostly white, working-class crowd on a Friday afternoon in February 2020. Many were tourists from the Midwest, though several groups of Canadians walked by, looking a little bewildered.
The volunteers tried to enlist my help.
“No, I can’t,” I said. “I need to stay neutral.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” they said several times before giving up.
As I watched people taking selfies with the cardboard Trump, one of the volunteers explained what had motivated her to volunteer in the president’s reelection effort: “I honestly believe, I really do, that everything he does, he does for you and me, not for himself. You and me.”
Sandi’s booth was not the only Trump-themed station at this market. There was another near the building’s entrance, selling Trump apparel. It attracted a steady stream of customers.
There was a sweater that said, “Hell yeah I voted for Trump—And I will again.” There was camouflage Trump gear, and a Trump 2020 visor with a layer of fake orange hair resting on top.
And there was a curious number of T-shirts depicting Trump as a cartoon strongman—not as in an autocrat who controls his people by threats and force, but as a circus strongman. There was a shirt with an extremely buff-looking, bare-chested Trump, another which depicted Trump as Superman, and another featuring Trump lifting heavy dumbbells.
I overheard one of the booth’s workers complaining that certain items were selling out too quickly.
“That’s because people are buying ten at a time,” her co-worker responded.
“I think he’s going to get elected again,” a woman said to her friend as they scanned the merchandise.
“I just don’t think we’re ready for a Democrat,” her friend said. “At least any of the ones running.”
Back at the Volusia County GOP booth, Sandi told me about her political evolution—perhaps metamorphosis is a better word to describe her transformation. It’s a story I had heard bits and pieces of over the last three years—first when I met Sandi and a group of her friends at a restaurant in 2017, again at a Halloween party she hosted the following year, and then over brunch at her home the year after that.
Sandi Hodgden was born and raised in Wisconsin Rapids, a city of 15,000 people in the geographic center of Wisconsin. Though she grew up in an “unquestionably Democratic” household, Sandi didn’t pay much attention to politics until 2007, when Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ran for president. Sandi had hoped Clinton would become America’s first female president. But after Obama won the Democratic nomination, she was equally excited to vote for America’s first black president.
Obama’s campaign message of hope and change resonated with Sandi, particularly as it applied to foreign affairs. “Everybody was tired of all the wars,” said Sandi, whose late husband, Dave, was a Marine. “Obama was saying, ‘Why do we have to fight all these wars? Why? Why do we have to lose all our loved ones?’”
Sandi supports universal healthcare, at least notionally, so she appreciated that Obama promised to reform America’s ailing health care system. But, in a story I found to be very common among people who voted for Barack Obama and subsequently for Donald Trump, Sandi was deeply disappointed by the way Obamacare was designed and implemented. She was bothered by Obamacare’s new regulations—particularly the individual mandate, which required people to obtain insurance or pay a fine—and the resultant higher insurance premiums.
She was also disappointed that Obama failed to usher in a post-racial America. “It became the total opposite,” she said of the contentious racial climate in America while Obama was president. “I couldn’t keep up. My own grandkids were accusing me of racism because of a word they felt didn’t fall into this political correctness.”
By the end of Obama’s second term, Sandi felt that Obama “didn’t have America’s best interests at heart” and that the country was “being brought to her knees with Obama’s agenda.… I voted for him with a clear heart and mind—twice in fact. But it was a hard final years until we could vote a new president in.”
“I just wanted America back,” she said. “We need to speak English and say ‘Merry Christmas.’”
Donald Trump immediately caught Sandi’s attention when he began running for president, talking about putting America first.
“I knew I had to wake up and help fight for this man,” she said. “I was praying I wasn’t too late to help make American great again.”
Adding to Trump’s appeal was his pledge to revitalize American manufacturing. Sandi lived with the memory of losing her job of twenty-three years at Lullabye Furniture, which suddenly closed its factory in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, in 1991 after nearly 100 years of business, laying off about seventy-five workers.1
“I loved my job there and couldn’t believe this happened,” she once wrote to me. “Our livelihoods were destroyed in a day. What the hell?”
Sandi, who had moved to Florida in 2013, started to think about what she could do to assist Trump’s nascent campaign. First she registered as a Republican, as did her husband, daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. “We all flipped,” she said.
Sandi and a couple of other middle-aged women—self-dubbed “the Trumpettes”—canvassed tens of thousands of homes across Volusia County, Florida, in the lead up to the 2016 election.
When I first met Sandi in 2017, she had already committed to voting for Trump again in 2020. “We don’t love him for his mouth,” she explained. “We love him for what he’s capable of doing.”
In the 2018 midterm elections, Sandi volunteered for the campaign of Ron DeSantis, her local US representative who was running for governor of Florida. She didn’t feel particularly drawn to DeSantis but was happy to help him because she knew Trump supported his candidacy. Politics took a back seat after the midterms. Sandi focused her attention on caring for her husband, Dave, who had been diagnosed with late-stage dementia. After Dave’s death, Sandi jumped back into her political activism, in part to divert her attention and energy away from the pain of losing her husband. Sandi took on a paid role, organizing for the Volusia County Republican Party.
Sandi Hodgden (second from right) and the Trumpettes of Volusia County, Florida, in 2017. (Daniel Allott)
After Sandi and I had been chatting at the flea market for about twenty minutes, I noticed a line starting to form for pictures with the cardboard commander-in-chief.
A young man walked by.
“Do you want a picture with the president?” Sandi asked.
“Believe it or not, I already have one,” he answered.
“Do you want to wear a Trump sticker?” she asked another guy.
“Okay,” he said coyly. “But I don’t want to get shot.”
“You won’t,” Sandi assured him. “Volusia County is red!”
Volusia County is red, but it was blue not long ago. Barack Obama won Volusia County, which encompasses Daytona Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast and the eastern edge of the 1–4 corridor, by five points in 2008 before Mitt Romney won it by one point in 2012. On the strength of increased Republican turnout, Trump won Volusia County by thirteen points in 2016.2, 3
Trump’s success among the Midwestern transplants like Sandi who populate much of the area helped him win Florida and its twenty-nine electoral votes by just 1.2 percentage points. Trump’s victory there foreshadowed victories later on election night in Midwestern states such as Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin.4
Unlike in the preceding chapters, the questions I address in this chapter aren’t specific to Volusia County, but rather to the phenomenon that Sandi Hodgden’s political evolution highlights.
Millions of Americans voted for Barack Obama in either 2008 or 2012, or both, and then for Donald Trump in 2016. These voters were crucial to Trump’s narrow victory, according to pre- and post-election surveys and voter file data.
The Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), a large survey of more than 64,000 adults, estimated that 6.7 million Obama voters subsequently voted for Trump. Another study found that 9.2 million Americans who voted for Obama in 2012 backed Trump in 2016.5 Unsurprisingly, Obama-Trump voters are more conservative than other Obama voters. According to the CCES, a majority opposed a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and nearly three-quarters supported repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The CCES also found that nearly two-thirds of Obama-Trump voters identified as either Republicans or independents.6
The CCES further estimated that Democrats won back about one-fifth of Obama-Trump voters in the 2018 midterm elections, which would amount to a net swing of roughly 1.5 million votes.7 But there is strong evidence that these voters will return to Trump in 2020. The CCES found that most Trump voters who voted Democratic in 2018 at least somewhat approved of Trump’s performance as president. And a November 2019 poll by The New York Times Upshot and Siena College found that nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for Trump in 2016 but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 planned to return to Trump in 2020.8
Throughout Trump’s presidency, the media have seemed eager—at times overly eager—to find Obama-Trump voters who regret their vote for Trump and planned to vote another way in 2020. A 2019 New York Times story featured life-long Erie County, Pennsylvania, resident Mark Graham, an Obama-Trump voter who said he wouldn’t be voting for Trump again in 2020.9 “If Mr. Trump gets into another four years, where he’s a lame duck, it’s going to be like adding gasoline to the fire,” Graham told the Times. Graham’s testimonial was so compelling that a progressive political action committee featured his story in an ad that aired across the Erie TV market.
“I don’t think Donald Trump cares about the American individual’s health care,” Graham says in the ad. “He only cares about himself. He doesn’t understand life around here.”
“I was a Trump voter,” Graham says as the ad closes. “But we can’t get fooled again.”
But it was the Times’s readers and Erie residents who saw the ad who were getting fooled. A local news outlet contacted the Erie County Elections Office and discovered that Graham was not a disgruntled Trump voter. In fact, he hadn’t voted at all in 2016.10
George Martin of Detroit, Michigan, in 2019. (Daniel Allott)
I tracked sixteen Obama-Trump voters during my three years on the road. Many of their stories have been featured throughout this book. As of May 2020, all but one of these voters said they were committed to voting for Trump again in 2020.
In the rest of this chapter, I will put their stories in greater context and draw some conclusions about why these voters are sticking with Trump, and what they might do after Trump leaves office.
The Obama-Trump voters I followed fall roughly into two groups, although there is quite a bit of overlap between them. One I call the Policy-Over-Personality (POPs) Trump voters, and the second I call Left-Behind Democrats (LBDs).
The POPs are true independents who acknowledge Trump’s flaws but continue to support him, based largely on their agreement with Trump’s policy positions, particularly on the economy, as well as their belief that Trump has largely succeeded in enacting his agenda. These voters are more likely to say that they are open to voting for a Democrat for president once Trump leaves office.
Whenever I asked George Martin, a young, black former sailor living in Detroit, to assess Trump’s performance, he would run down a list of the president’s accomplishments. He credited Trump with reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs, “pull(ing) us out of these endless wars,” reining in illegal immigration, and for his stewardship of the economy. “No matter where you stand on Trump,” he told me in 2019, “he’s gotten a lot done.”
“And that’s my thing,” he continued, “If I want something done, then it’s probably going to get done if I vote for (Trump). It’s a different kind of politics. It’s not about bipartisanship. It’s about fulfilling promises. The Democrats will say whatever it is you want to hear and deliver next to nothing.”
Martin continued in the same vein when we met in March 2020. “The hard thing about Donald Trump is—and I don’t even like saying this, but I’m trying to think—what hasn’t he done that he said he was going to do?” he asked while he waited for his band to be called onstage at open-mic night at the New Dodge Lounge in Hamtramck. “Because he has done just about everything that he said he was going to do, and I really tried to think about it from both sides—that’s a big deal to me—but I really couldn’t think of anything.”
I had heard something similar from Cyrus Mazarei when I met him at his sister Michelle’s home in Orange County, California, early in 2018. “I like him because he’s a doer,” Cyrus said, echoing the word many farmers used to describe Trump. Cyrus said then that the only way he wouldn’t vote for Trump again would be if he “doesn’t keep his promises.”
On my final visit two years later, Cyrus said, “(Trump) has exceeded my expectations for his presidency.” Cyrus was also sure Trump would win the votes of most of his fellow Iranian-Americans.
“Why are you so sure?” I asked.
“He’s kept his promises,” Cyrus said. “It’s that simple.”
Pramit Patel is an American of Indian descent who owns a Best Western hotel in Robeson County, North Carolina. Patel offered nuanced appraisals of Trump’s performance whenever I talked to him.
He favored the travel ban that the Trump administration placed on immigrants from lawless countries known to be hotbeds of terrorism in 2017 but felt that more countries should have been included. Patel supported Trump’s tax reform law but also expressed concern about Trump’s erratic foreign policy. “He has us close to a nuclear war,” Patel texted in 2017. “Not sure if this is what we want.” But by January 2020, Patel had decided that the bad of Trump’s personality was outweighed by the good of Trump’s policies. “I think besides the tweets, stupid feuds, name calling, and bad speeches, he has done a great job,” he told me. (H)e is doing a lot of the things I thought Obama would do. I will vote for him again.”
As I noted above, I call the second group of Obama-Trump voters the Left-Behind Democrats (LBDs). This group is made up of disgruntled former Obama voters who feel the Democratic Party has swung too far to the left, especially on cultural issues such as abortion, guns, immigration, and race.
The LBDs include Joe Wacha from Howard County, Iowa, who voted for Trump because he felt the Democrats were “no longer the party they were thirty years ago.” By the fall of 2019, Wacha believed Trump had “accomplished a lot in the last three years” and that “he could have accomplished more if (the Democrats had) worked with him” instead of trying to impeach and remove him from office.
“No, I have nothing good to say about the Democratic Party right now,” Wacha said. “I’m still a Trump supporter—nothing’s changed there.”
Catherine Bolder of Macomb County, Michigan, said that one of the reasons she went from Obama to Trump was the Democrats’ lurch to the left, identifying their embrace of late-term abortion and identity politics as two examples.
And Orange County, California, resident Benjamin Yu, a military veteran and Chinese immigrant, appreciated Trump’s commitment to free enterprise, traditional patriotism, and enforcement of America’s immigration laws.
There was Noel Filla of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, whose priorities were illegal immigration and health care. She liked that Trump was a businessman with a “backbone that can’t be bent” and that he paid attention to people like her. “I definitely feel like he made the rural people feel that they were being listened to and that they were important,” she said.
Then there was Jim McCuen, a Volusia County, Florida, resident in his sixties whom I spoke with at length on several occasions. McCuen started his life not as a Democrat but as a “hardcore socialist.” Now he describes himself as “libertarian leaning” conservative who believes abortion is “an unparalleled evil.” McCuen voted for Obama in 2008 because Republican nominee John McCain seemed to have no clue how to respond when the economy crashed. McCuen is half-Mexican and still has family in Mexico. But he said he was “very happy” with Trump’s actions on immigration. He agreed with Trump that many illegal immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, and thought it was crucial that Trump follow through on building a wall on America’s southern border.
In late 2018, McCuen railed against outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan and the inability of Republicans in Congress to work with Trump to get the wall built. “I don’t understand why the wall has not been built,” he said. “I think immigration should stop.… Just turn it off.” By early 2020, McCuen said he was committed to voting for Trump again in 2020.
Jim McCuen of Volusia County, FL, in 2018. (Daniel Allott)
The question is, with Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee, how many of these former Obama voters can Democrats hope to win back? My reporting suggests that the answer is very few. None of the sixteen Obama-Trump voters I followed expressed much goodwill toward Biden. And some were quite harsh in their assessments.
“No,” Patel texted about whether he’d consider voting for Biden. “I think Trump has his number.”
“I would never vote for Biden,” Lois Morales wrote in May 2020. “He is just a puppet for the evil people.” McCuen said he could not “imagine voting for Biden unless he were running against Pol Pot.”
Biden’s problem isn’t just that his party has moved too far left for many former Obama voters. It’s also that Biden himself has moved leftward along with his party. The media have paid a lot of attention to how the Republican Party is changing under President Trump, and before him under the banner of the Tea Party. But big changes have been happening in the Democratic Party too. Joe Wacha lamented that the modern Democratic Party does not resemble the one he knew thirty years ago. But it really doesn’t resemble the Democratic Party of ten or twelve years ago, either.
Around the time of Barack Obama’s election as president, the Democratic Party began to embrace positions that only a couple of years earlier had been regarded as extreme, even among Democrats. Once-fringe positions on immigration, health care, abortion, race, sexual identity, and climate change suddenly became not only mainstream but almost mandatory for any candidate running for high office within the Democratic Party.
Previously acceptable positions—opposition to same-sex marriage, any restrictions on abortion, and support for at least modest enforcement of immigration law, for example—were now verboten for any Democrat aspiring to lead the party.
Consider immigration. In 2012, the share of white Democrats who supported increasing the number of legal immigrants was 16 percent; six years later, the share was 57 percent.11 By the time of the 2020 presidential primaries, open borders and no deportations had become a required Democratic position for all the party’s presidential candidates. When ten Democratic candidates were asked during a presidential debate in June 2019 to raise their hands if their health care proposals would cover illegal immigrants, all ten quickly raised their hands.12 It wasn’t just that Democrats more and more began to embrace extreme policies. It seemed that the cultural and linguistic paradigm through which Democrats framed politics had shifted.
A writer searched the Lexis/Nexis database (which archives text from media sources) and found that the number of articles mentioning words and ideas such as “diversity,” “inclusion,” “unconscious bias,” “white privilege,” “discrimination,” and “social justice” began to skyrocket starting around 2010 and 2011.13 And, according to the Pew Research Center, the share of Democratic or Democratic-leaning registered voters who described their political views as “liberal” or “very liberal” increased from 33 percent in 2008 to 47 percent in 2019.14 Interestingly, the Pew survey found that almost all of that increase had occurred among whites.
It is white liberals, not minorities, who have dragged the Democratic Party to the left. To take just one example, according to Pew, 80 percent of white liberals felt that racial discrimination was the main reason many black people couldn’t get ahead. Only 60 percent of blacks felt that way. And black liberals were nearly twice as likely as white liberals to say that blacks who couldn’t get ahead were mostly responsible for their own condition.15
Democrats’ lurch to the left continued throughout the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, as candidates proposed and embraced many progressive policies that had not even been on the table just four years earlier. Those included:
As the 2020 presidential campaign unfolded, even former President Barack Obama was warning the party against moving too far left. “Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality,” Obama said. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.”16 No doubt many of his former voters who subsequently voted for Trump nodded their heads in agreement with that statement.
You wouldn’t expect this based on most media coverage of American politics, but an October 2019 poll found that significantly more registered voters think the Democratic Party has moved too far left (47 percent) than believe the Republican Party has moved too far to the right (37 percent).17
Joe Biden was seen as the viable “moderate” and “centrist” candidate in the presidential primary race, the one with the best shot at winning independents, former Republicans, and disaffected Trump voters, including those who once voted for a presidential ticket on which Biden’s name appeared. But Biden is no longer the moderate he once was. He has moved leftward along with his party, taking several positions to the left of Obama. To name just a few, Biden’s health care plan calls for a more aggressive version of the public option than Obamacare had; he’s embraced the Green New Deal, and free college.18, 19, 20
He has pledged to name former Rep. Beto O’Rourke “to take care of the gun problem” in America.21 O’Rourke had previously made news for vowing to confiscate legally purchased assault rifles. Biden also changed his long-held support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of federal funds for most abortions, aligning himself with his party’s opposition to any restrictions on the procedure.22
In April, after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race and Biden became the nominee-in-waiting, Biden didn’t pivot to the center, as nominees typically do. Instead, he moved further left. As a Politico story put it, “The day after his last opponent dropped out of the presidential race, Joe Biden took the rarest of turns for a Democratic nominee: to the Left.”23 Biden announced that as president he would lower the Medicare eligibility age from sixty-five to sixty and forgive all student debt for most students.
Biden also seems to be emulating the worst tendencies of his former boss. Many of the Obama-Trump voters I met felt strongly that Obama had apologized too much for America and wasn’t a strong enough advocate for the country. Biden has been doing the same thing. In 2019, Biden delivered a speech in Munich on the anniversary of the D-Day invasion in which he called the United States “an embarrassment,” specifically citing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.24 This was a dramatic departure from the American tradition of politics stopping at the water’s edge. The rule had always been that American politicians would refrain from launching partisan attacks upon each other while speaking on foreign soil to foreign audiences. It’s also hard to imagine that this will play very well with the Heartland voters Biden will need to win.
There were three things almost all of the Obama-Trump voters I followed had in common. First, they had all grown embittered as Obama’s presidency unfolded, their feelings ranging from mild disappointment to outright contempt. Many felt they’d been duped by Obama, who preached bipartisanship and racial reconciliation but, they believed, governed as a liberal and deepened the racial divide. As Carla Johnson put it, “I bought into the hope and change, which is terrible because he didn’t do any of that.” Two-time Obama voter Benjamin Yu said that by the end of Obama’s presidency, the country seemed to be on a path toward socialism, which he found frightening as an immigrant from communist China—so frightening that he subsequently ran for local office as a Republican.
Jim McCuen said he felt “homicidal” after the bailout of Goldman Sachs during the financial crisis, prompting him to vote for Mitt Romney in 2012; Lois Morales said she “hated” Obama’s reliance on constitutionally dubious executive orders, even if she liked some of their outcomes; and George Martin lamented that Obama turned out to be “just a politician—just like every other president we’ve had.” Pramit Patel abandoned Obama in 2012 because Obama’s appointees to the National Labor Relations Board made decisions on labor practices and collective bargaining that were harmful to his hotel business. And Cyrus Mazarei felt “buyer’s remorse” for his vote for Obama, who he said proved to be a weak commander-in-chief. Cyrus was particularly upset that the Obama administration had abandoned pro-democracy protestors during Iran’s short-lived Green Revolution in 2009.
Second, like most Trump voters, Obama-Trump voters deeply resented the idea that race was a factor in their vote for Trump. None of them believe Trump is a racist; in fact, many were quick to blame Obama for the acrimonious racial climate in America. Interestingly, of the sixteen Obama-Trump voters I followed, seven were non-white and two of the whites were married to racial minorities.
Third, most if not all of these sixteen voters felt that the news media are almost comically biased against Trump. Robeson County’s Mark Locklear said he began watching more Fox News early in Trump’s term because of CNN’s slanted coverage of the president. “I say, ‘Back off; give the man a chance,’” he told me in 2017.
When Joe Wacha pulled me aside at a Christmas party in Cresco, Iowa, in 2017, he told me how tired he was of the media’s constant attacks against Trump, prompting him to embrace the president even more strongly. McCuen told me in 2018 that he thought Trump was performing pretty well, but that it was impossible to know because the media was so biased against him. “How do we know?” he asked, shaking his head. “They’re going to attack him no matter what he does.… I don’t have any good words for the mainstream media.”
***
The last time I saw Sandi Hodgden—that is, until her promised visit to Washington, DC, for Trump’s second inaugural—was for breakfast at First Watch in Daytona in February 2020. I never quite knew in which group of Obama-Trump voters to place Sandi. She was like most of the Left-Behind Democrats in that she retained no good will for Obama and felt that the Democratic Party had moved too far left on some issues. Then again, she seemed more like a Policy-over-Personality Trump voter when she said things like, “We don’t love him for his mouth. We love him for what he’s capable of doing.”
She also always maintained that she held some liberal views. “I still have some conservative ways, I still have some liberal ways,” Sandi once told me. “I still have an open mindedness.” Even so, it was difficult for me to imagine her ever voting for a member of a party whose identity is almost entirely consumed by its hatred for and resistance to Trump. Sandi’s idea of a fun afternoon is to gather a group of people together to wave Trump campaign signs at passing traffic. But she always emphasized that her loyalty was not to the Republican Party but to Trump. This is something Sandi shared with many other Obama-Trump voters I met.
When Catherine Bolder told me she was committed to voting for Trump in 2020, she added, “I don’t know what I’ll do after that.”
Dave Neubauer was “born a Democrat” and seemed never to have considered changing his voter registration.
Whenever I met with Joe Wacha, he would insist that he was about to change his voter registration from Democratic to Republican, but he never actually did. And although Wacha said he had “nothing good to say” about the current Democratic Party, he would not commit to not voting Democratic in the future. “The thing is, it depends where both parties go,” he said at our last meeting. “It’s changing so fast that it’s hard to say.”
At First Watch, I asked Sandi again whether she would consider voting for a Democrat for president after Trump leaves office. “I could,” she said. “If I find a Democrat who I believe in, like I do with Trump, then I will vote for him and go fight for him.”