Mark Locklear holds a framed portrait of his son, Ethan, a Marine. (Daniel Allott)
IN MAY, as the COVID-19 pandemic entered its third month and most of the country was sheltering in place, I reached out to my contacts one last time. I wanted to get their opinions about President Trump’s performance during the crisis, about Joe Biden, who had become the presumptive Democratic nominee, and about what might happen on election day. I interviewed nearly eighty people from all nine of my counties, this time via phone, email, Facebook Messenger, and text.
It is assumed that Trump’s fate will hinge on the public’s perception of his handling of the pandemic and the path the virus and economy take in the summer and fall of 2020. But the pandemic hadn’t changed many minds among the people I talked to. Each development in the crisis, rather than prompting a reevaluation of the president, had only reinforced whatever view people already held. With few exceptions, Trump’s support was unshakeable; his opposition equally so.
To the Trump critics I communicated with, his performance had further exposed how utterly unfit he is to lead the country. Their responses stressed Trump’s initial reluctance to acknowledge the severity of the crisis, his promise of early testing that never materialized, and the steady stream of errors, attacks, and bizarre statements during his daily press briefings. Their opinions were perhaps best captured by Narren Brown, a progressive college professor, who began his response to my question about Trump’s performance with, “Are you asking me that question in earnest?”
Trump’s supporters assessed the president’s performance much differently. Most offered some variation of “He has done as well as can be expected under the circumstances.” As Geri Mosher of Grant County, West Virginia, put it in a text, “Even though he doesn’t always say things the best way, I believe he cares about this country enough that he does and says what he thinks is best at the time.”
When I called Mike Gooder late one evening, he was still working at the large plant nursery he owns in Cresco, Iowa. Business was booming as people living under stay-at-home orders began planting home gardens. Mike’s friend Ryan Moeller joined Mike, and the three of us chatted on speakerphone. Moeller owns a medium-sized dairy and beef farm that had been hit hard as many of the restaurants and other businesses that typically buy his product remained shuttered. But Moeller did not blame Trump for his dire economic predicament. He believed that the Democrats had paid China to engineer the virus and introduce it into the United States with the hope of torpedoing the economy and Trump’s chances for reelection. Moeller believed the conspiracy would backfire and embolden Trump voters’ support for the president.
“I don’t see any swing against Trump in any way, shape, or form in rural America,” Gooder said.
“I’ve seen a swing towards him,” Moeller added.
Both men believed Trump had one thing working in his favor: his opponent, Joe Biden.
“Who’s going to pull our asses out of this mess?” Moeller asked. “Biden? No! Trump.”
Moeller won’t be voting for Biden, of course, but I found little enthusiasm for Biden even among those who will. They used words such as “conflicted,” “heartsick,” “deeply flawed,” and the “lesser of two evils” to describe Biden and his candidacy. Many listed Biden’s political and personal baggage, and several even said they were holding out hope that Biden would step aside or get pushed aside and that another Democrat would be nominated. And nearly everyone I spoke with raised Biden’s apparent cognitive decline and questioned whether he would be able to execute the office of the presidency. Most were convinced he would lose to Trump. Here are a few of those responses—and keep in mind, none of these people are Trump supporters.
“I don’t see any enthusiasm for Biden here at all. I don’t know a single person who is even bothering to say supportive things about him.”
“A vote for Biden only further emboldens the corruption. … Trump’s policies have hurt people I care about. Though I’m not sure Biden would be any better.”
“Odds are Trump will be reelected because Biden is a profoundly weak opponent.”
“Biden will not have any Chaldean voters because he actually has blood on his hands in destroying Iraq with his disastrous Iraq War vote. … Many Democratic Chaldeans I know are sitting it out or voting Trump. No, I’m not voting for Biden because he destroyed my ancestral lands and helped pave the way for wiping away Christianity from Iraq.”
“I don’t know if Biden has a chance. I would say probably not. I know a lot of the people in Erie liked the fact that Trump came here during the 2016 election, and he also came back after he was president. That direct contact really mattered, and it has stayed with people.”
“Biden … excited, no. His age and mental capacity is questionable. Hope to God he picks a great running mate. There was talk that he may pick out members for his cabinet before the election. That may get people excited. Otherwise it just seems he’s the guy to vote for if you don’t want Trump. That’s it. And then there’s Tara Reade.… Nothing can come easy for the Democrats … lol.”
Note that all of these people live in the crucial Obama-Trump counties and states where the 2020 election will be determined.
A few people had changed their minds about how they intended to vote. When I interviewed Melarie Wheat, a Mormon woman living in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February, she had said she would be willing to vote for any Democrat except Biden or Bernie Sanders. “Old, white men—I’m really done with,” Wheat had said at the time. But in May she emailed to say that she had in fact voted for Biden in the Utah Democratic primary after her first two choices dropped out and endorsed him. Now Wheat said she would vote for Biden in the general election, although she qualified her support with paragraphs detailing her misgivings about Biden in light of former staffer Tara Reade’s allegation that he had sexually assaulted her in 1993.
Jasmine Flores, the young Bernie-supporting activist in Erie, told me in March that she would grudgingly vote for Biden in the general election. Two months later, she seemed to have changed her mind. “As a Hispanic woman I do not owe my vote to any party,” she said. “You earn it, and Biden has not earned my vote as the Democratic nominee, and he has a lot of work to do on the issues to earn my vote.”
Flores felt Trump would win the election “hands down” in part because many people she knows believe Trump has taken care of them during the pandemic. “I see a lot of individuals who are not into politics or informed about politics believing (Trump) just gave them $1,200 in stimulus money,” she wrote. “They talk about him like he saved us and is generally doing good while in office.”
Several Evan McMullin voters I had kept in touch with revealed that they now planned to vote for Trump. A Mormon former CIA officer, McMullin ran for president in 2016 as a conservative alternative to Trump, winning more than 700,000 votes nationwide. One of those voters was Trent Mason, who had told me at Ricki Leigh’s guitar shop in Erie that he was resigned to voting for Biden.
“I guess I’m ridin’ with Biden,” he had said in March. But in a text exchange in May, Trent said he had changed his mind: “In all honesty, I think (Trump) deserves a shot at rebuilding the economy,” he wrote. “I want to see if his policies can rebuild the economy.… I am just like the majority of the country. We hate Trump but would like to see this economy rebound fast!”
Trent also listed Biden’s deficiencies as a candidate: the Tara Reade “nightmare”; “his son making $ in Ukraine”; and Trent’s belief that Biden is “close to dementia.” “Yeah, I’ll vote for Trump,” he concluded. “I loathe him, but we have to build this economy.”
Trent wasn’t alone in believing that Trump would be better at reviving the economy. A poll from early May, when 30 million Americans were out of work, found that 45 percent believed Trump was better suited to create jobs, while only 32 percent said it was Biden.1
***
It is the defining irony of the Trump presidency: A president who lies with more frequency and compulsion than perhaps any other president in history has also been arguably the most honest recent president when it comes to delivering on his campaign promises. If Trump wins reelection, it will be because he set a clear agenda and then either achieved or tried to achieve most of it. If Trump loses, however, it will be because his defects of character—his impulsiveness, his inattention to detail, his petty cruelty, and most prominently his routine dishonesty—have turned off many exhausted voters who might otherwise support him. In fact, as I’m writing this, I have just received a text message from Pramit Patel, an Indian-American Obama-Trump voter from Robeson County, North Carolina. The last time we corresponded, in early May, he had told me he was committed to voting for Trump again. But in early June, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police and President Trump’s inability to unify or console the nation, Patel texted again. “I don’t think I am going to vote this year,” he wrote. “Neither candidate possesses the leadership qualities required to be the president of the USA.”
The tension between Trump’s policies and personality has been a dominant theme throughout this book. It is something Mark Locklear thinks about nearly every day.
Locklear is the Lumbee Native American from Robeson County, North Carolina, whose story I told in Chapter 6. Until Patel texted me, Mark was the only Obama-Trump voter I followed who had not committed to voting for Trump in 2020. Whenever I interviewed Mark, he would describe his feelings for Trump as being like a pendulum swinging from positivity to negativity with every Trump utterance and action. The last time I met up with Mark was in February 2020 at his home office in Prospect, where my journey had started three years earlier. Mark said that he was “not happy with Trump’s Twitter account, his bullying,” and his “constant lying.” It was making Mark question whether he could vote for him. “I just don’t know whether I can believe anything he’s telling me,” Mark said. “I don’t know whether he’s being honest with me, and that’s not a comfortable place to be.”
“I don’t trust him with my son’s life,” Mark said of his son Ethan, a young Marine.
I don’t trust him with any of our young men’s lives. I don’t. And I don’t like feeling that way. What I see in him right now is that he will do whatever it takes, and sacrifice who he may have to, to come out on top. He’s going to have to do some things between now and election day to pull me back across the line.
When I talked to Mark by phone in May, I asked him how he thought Trump was handling the pandemic. “Not at all impressed or satisfied, Dan, I can tell you that,” Mark began, again identifying Trump’s dishonesty as the source of his dissatisfaction. Mark mentioned Trump’s statement in early March that “anybody” who wanted could get tested for the virus. Mark’s wife became sick around that time and was unable to obtain a test. “That hit me personally,” Mark said.
Mark Locklear holds a framed portrait of his son, Ethan, a Marine. (Daniel Allott)
Mark was driving his truck as we spoke on the phone. He passed a couple of homes that were flying Trump 2020 flags. “Never seen that!” Mark remarked as he drove past the home of someone he didn’t know was a Trump supporter.
“I do believe he is going to be reelected,” Mark said. “His base is strong. I just don’t see where Biden can gain ground…. I’d say the pendulum is in the middle. I am giving Trump from now until election day—whether I mean anything to him or not—to convince me that I can trust him. Because right now, I just don’t trust what he is telling me.”
Despite the unprecedented nature of Trump’s presidency, I believe there is recent precedent for how the 2020 election may unfold.
Not long ago, a deeply polarizing president ran for reelection. The opposing party, buoyed by a historic midterm wave election, was confident that they could triumph by zeroing in on what they saw as the incumbent’s glaring failures. After flirting with a series of extreme candidates, they settled on the establishment favorite, the safe bet, the candidate nobody seemed very excited about but the one everybody agreed had the best shot at defeating the incumbent. The year was 2012, and the safe bet candidate was Mitt Romney. Romney lost to Barack Obama, who managed to reassemble the coalition that had swept him to victory four years earlier. Obama even increased turnout among his core supporters, who proved to be difference-makers in crucial states.
As I mentioned in Chapter 2, Republicans were surprised that 1.7 million additional black voters turned out for Barack Obama in 2012. But they should not have been. Obama had spent four years fortifying the bond of trust and goodwill with his core constituency. There was no way they would allow him to lose and become a one-term president.
I believe Democrats will be similarly surprised by the turnout Trump receives from his base of white rural, working-class, and religious voters. Many did not vote in the 2018 midterm elections. But they will be back in full force in 2020 because the bond of trust and goodwill that they have with Trump is stronger than ever. They believe this president, despite his flaws, has delivered for them and still has their backs.
The 2020 primaries may have provided a preview of the type of turnout we can expect from Trump voters in November. As the media focused on the Democratic primary race, Trump was piling up unprecedented victories. In the early primary states, Trump surpassed the vote totals that both Barack Obama and George W. Bush had received in their successful reelection bids. In New Hampshire, for instance, Trump received 129,696 votes, more than doubling Obama and Bush’s reelection year totals, despite facing only token opposition. Clearly, enthusiasm for Trump still existed; perhaps it had even increased.
As I traveled the country, rural residents would sometimes tell me that they believed there were still many “hidden” and “quiet” Trump voters out there—people who hadn’t voted in 2016 but planned to vote for Trump in 2020, or people who didn’t identify as Trump supporters but would still vote for him. These voters—who disproportionately reside in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—tend not to talk to reporters or pollsters or broadcast their support for Trump in any way.
Jon Schultz has had many conversations with these hidden voters. Schultz is a carpenter and high school cross-country couch in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. A Democrat, Schultz does not support Donald Trump, but he has many friends who do. When I met up with Schultz in the fall of 2019, he was convinced that Trump’s hidden support was strong in western Wisconsin. National Democrats still don’t understand rural America, he said, but Trump seems to. “There are still a lot of Trump supporters here who haven’t voted for him yet,” was the way he put it to me.
I heard something similar from Henry and Noel Filla, the Wisconsin farmers I featured in Chapter 2. They said they knew a lot of quiet Trump voters in their community. “It’s kind of like, they’ll vote for him but they won’t admit it,” Henry told me about some of his neighbors.
“Yeah there’s a lot of that,” Noel said.
We were at the (county) fair the other day, and there was a Republican booth. And the people working there (said) they’ll reach out to guys who come by who’ll be really quiet because there are other people around. And then when the other people walk away, these guys will speak up and say, “Yeah, I’m a Trump supporter.”
“Why would they be quiet about it?” I asked.
“Well, I think it’s because people are nervous a little bit because (Trump) does some, you know, erratic things,” Henry said. “And because of some of the things he says—it’s like, they’re ashamed almost. So they don’t really want to admit it to people. But in their heart, they feel he’s right.”