What I learned on my post-election trip to Trump Country

George Martin was searching for the word that best captured the vibe shift that has taken place between American voters and Donald Trump over the last couple of years. But first, as we shot pool at the Eastern Palace Club in Hazel Park, Mich., a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Martin wanted to explain why so many Black men had voted against America’s first Black female presidential nominee.

First, there was abortion, an issue that Kamala Harris made a centerpiece of her campaign but that didn’t resonate much with Black men like Martin. More important, though, was Harriss’s record as a prosecutor in California.

“One of the biggest knocks on Kamala was that she was AG during a time when Black men were prosecuted for all sorts of things,” Martin said. “And whenever she was questioned, she sort of minimized it or made it seem like it didn’t happen. That was an enormous deal for me. During that time as Black men, we were looked at as 'super predators.'”

I first met Martin in 2017 and have interviewed him several times since. A former Obama voter, Martin backed Trump in 2016. He voted for the libertarian presidential candidate in 2020 but returned to Trump last year.

I asked Martin whether he knows many other Trump voters. “A majority of my friends are liberals,” said Martin, who lives in Detroit’s Bagley neighborhood and plays in a rock band. Even so, Martin suspects that a few of them voted for Trump. Trump won about 20 percent of Black voters in 2020, the highest share of any Republican in a quarter century.

“Was it easier to tell people you were voting for Trump this time?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Martin said. “It was a lot easier to come out of the closet to say, ‘This ain’t working.’ Minorities in general, in 2016, you could get kicked out of your family for saying you like Donald Trump. But now, you might get looked at funny, but in the back of people’s minds, they kind of understand how it happened.”

“A lot of us were politically weary,” he continued. “We’d been screaming at each other for so long. We were going at each other’s throats for a few years. I mean, now more people are thinking that [Trump’s second term] isn’t the end of the world. We’ve had four years of a Trump presidency, and we came out just fine.”

Finally, Martin found the word he’d been searching for. “Overall, I think the only way to say it is there’s been a real softening [toward Trump].”

I spent much of 2017-2019 reporting from nine swing counties for my book, “On the Road in Trump’s America.” Immersing myself in communities across the country, I learned a great deal about what motivated people’s votes both for and against Trump.

Following Trump’s 2024 victory, I was curious how people’s views might have changed over the last five tumultuous years. So, in January, I traveled through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, spending time in former Obama strongholds that had flipped to Trump. I interviewed many of the same people I had talked to at length during Trump’s first term and in the run-up to the 2020 election.

My first stop was Erie, a working-class city in the Northwest corner of Pennsylvania that has been battered by manufacturing job loss. I met up with Jim Wertz in a downtown food hall, just off Perry Square. Wertz chaired Erie County’s Democratic Party in 2020 before running unsuccessfully for the state Senate last year.

Trump won Erie County by nearly 2,000 votes — a few hundred votes more than Joe Biden’s even slimmer 1,400-vote victory in the county in 2020.

Wertz felt Democrats had lost many potential voters in the fast-moving events of last summer. “Midsummer, I was knocking on a lot of Republican doors,” he said. “These are people that we’d ID’d as persuadable for whatever reason. And the older Republicans, the folks that were Biden in 2020 and GOP down-ticket, they were saying they’d vote straight Dem because they were upset about the national conversation. I wonder how many of them had been battered by GOP messaging and turned [to Trump].”

I asked Wertz whether the problem had less to do with messaging than with policy.

“I don’t think Democrats have a policy problem,” he said. “I think they have a problem talking about their policies. I think that’s been true for a long time.”

“But what about the criticism of Democratic policies as too 'woke' or too lenient on illegal immigration and crime?” I asked.

“I think if your messaging is sound, you can humanize a lot of that wokeness and make people understand why that policy needs to be in place,” he said. “It comes down to human rights.”

Many Democrats I spoke with insisted that the party’s policy positions are broadly popular and that they only needed to do a better job of packaging them and mobilizing their voters.

“Democrats across the board from the top down spent time trying to convert a lot of voters and that’s just not good campaigning,” Wertz said. “You’ve got to turn your people out.”

When I interviewed Wertz in 2020, he seemed baffled by religious voters’ continuing support for Trump. “I’ve thought a lot about it,” he said when I asked him about it again in January. “I don’t know that I’ve gotten closer to an answer. It still baffles me. But I’m not as hung up on it as I was.”

I brought up abortion as an issue that motivates evangelical voters and where a chasm exists between the parties’ positions.

He said he was surprised that abortion hadn’t helped Democrats more. Taking his cue from Harris, Wertz railed against the Trump-appointed Supreme Court majority’s decision ending the federal guarantee of a right to abortion. But the issue never really caught on (perhaps in part because the number of annual abortions has actually increased since the court’s decision).

An election-eve poll found that only about one-in-10 voters considered it their top issue, and no doubt many of those were pro-life voters.

“The post-Roe wave has subsided,” Wertz said. “I got an earful from some older Catholic women during the campaign. ‘You’re talking too much about abortion!’ they said. I said, ‘I know, but the polling still says this is the issue.’” Wertz thinks he should have talked more about the minimum wage instead.

The next day, I had lunch with Dale and Darlene Thompson, a retired couple I had interviewed several times during Trump’s first term. Dale, a former union worker at a tool manufacturer in Erie, and Darlene, a former health care administrator, had recently decamped to rural Ohio.

As Democrats in a deeply conservative place, Darlene said “there’s a big part of your life that you don’t share with people.” That said, the Thompsons placed a large Harris-Walz banner in front of their home a few weeks before the election.

The Thompsons’ proximity to Trump voters hadn’t given them much insight into what motivated their votes.

“Before the election, I asked my sister-in-law, ‘What is prompting you to vote for [Trump]?’” said Darlene. “She answered, ‘Well, they tried to kill him.’”

“I said, ‘I meant policy-wise.’”

“She said, ‘Don’t you know that we’re going to be safer and we’re going to be richer?’”

Darlene saw Harris’s election loss coming from a mile away, but Dale still seemed to be processing it. He was also having trouble reconciling the loathsome politics of some of the Trump voters he knows with the fact that, as he put it, some of them “are such kind, wonderful people who would crawl through a mile of broken glass if you needed help.”

“I’m truly afraid for our country,” Dale said. Still, he hoped that the end of Trump’s term would mark “the ancient white man’s hands getting pried from the levers of power for the last time.”

“That’s exactly what you said the last time we spoke (in 2020),” I said.

“I did,” he said. “It’s the best way I can think of to say it when more blacks and Hispanics are entering school than whites.”

“A lot of them voted for Trump,” I said. “How do you account for that?”

“I don’t know is the honest answer,” he said. “I wish I did. I wish I did.”

Two days later, I found myself at L&R Embroidery in New Baltimore, Mich., on the northern shores of Lake Saint Clair. New Baltimore is in Macomb County, a former Obama stronghold that swung decisively to Trump in 2016 and hasn’t looked back.

Its owners, Laurie and Rob Rasch, sold MAGA hats and other Trump memorabilia, and Laurie told me business was good across the state. But I noticed that, amid all the Detroit-themed sports items, there were only a couple of Trump hats left.

“There are just so many of them out there now, and you can get them for $4 or $5 bucks from China,” Laurie said. “During the election, there was [somebody] on every corner selling them.”

I asked whether, during the campaign, anyone had ever come in asking for Biden or Harris merch. “Every once in a while, someone will ask me where my Biden hats are — or where are my Kamilla hats," she said, deliberately mispronouncing the former veep's name. "I’d just laugh.”

Laurie said that although she and Rob were avid Trump supporters, they would have gladly made the hats if there had been sufficient demand. There just wasn’t.

I perused the remaining hats. Laurie was all out of the red “Elect that MF’er again!” hats I had seen on my last visit in 2019. Only an outdated “Trump 2020 vision” hat and a classic red "Make America Great Again" cap remained. I bought the latter and decided to conduct an experiment.

I drove to Madison, Wisconsin, the next day. Wisconsin is a swing state, but Madison is a deeply progressive college town. Harris beat Trump by more than 50 points in Dane county, which contains Madison. It’s so liberal that, when I lived in Madison in the 1990s, people would sometimes refer to it as “The people’s republic of Madison.”

When I arrived, I put the red MAGA hat on and wore it all afternoon. Nobody seemed to mind. The two young women working at my hotel reception desk noticed the hat but treated me with the cordiality Wisconsinites are known for.

I roamed across the University of Wisconsin campus, down State Street and around the state capitol. I got lots of stares and double takes and a few bemused looks, but almost no hostility. Two college-aged guys walked by and one coughed loudly and shouted “shit!” after seeing my hat. But the predominant emotional response seemed to be not indignation but indifference.

I found that to be strange on a campus with such a long and proud history of progressive political activity and protest. Granted, most of the college students hadn’t returned to campus yet, but there were still plenty of people about.

I walked into Anthropologie, a “boho-chic” clothing store on State Street. A poster with a long inspirational quote by Kamala Harris was plastered on the entrance window. The store was packed with shoppers. Many noticed the hat, but none seemed to mind as I browsed the feminist greeting cards and calendars. When I left, I got a cheery “Have a good day” from the woman at the counter.

At Fairtrade Coffee House on State Street, a man in a house dress glanced at my hat and then matter-of-factly explained coffee options before serving me a latte. I had similar reactions at the Willy Street food co-op and the local Whole Foods.

“What gives?” I thought. During Trump’s first term, you’d occasionally hear stories of people getting kicked out of restaurants or even physically assaulted for wearing MAGA hats. But I didn’t experience any of that — not even in the people’s republic.

Then it occurred to me that maybe George Martin was right. Maybe there had been a softening toward Trump. At the very least, it seemed that for many Democrats, clenched teeth and a raised fist had been replaced with an eye-roll and a shrug of the shoulders.

Having completed my experiment, I ditched the hat and drove to Trempealeau County, a farming community along the Mississippi River on Wisconsin’s western border with Minnesota.

I visited Paul Jereczek, a dairy and crop farmer. Paul is a Democrat who said he was surprised by the 2024 election results but not as devastated by Trump’s win as he had been in 2016.

“On election night the first time around, when my kids went to bed, it was, ‘What kind of future are we going to have?’ And this time, some of that faded away. …We got through four years of him, even with the chaos at the end.”

“The only solace is there’s nobody else who can do what Trump does,” he continued. “So, whatever we’re going through will be short lived. It’s not the end of the world.”

Trump has promised to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. That includes half of the 850,000 crop workers who the Department of Agriculture estimates are here illegally. In the first two weeks of his presidency, Trump has already signed several executive orders to that end and sent several plane-loads of illegal immigrants back to Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil and Colombia, among others.

“If he actually goes through with it, it would be a problem,” Paul said of the deportations. “But he would tick off too many people. …Those big, huge dairies are all based on immigrant labor. And they would collapse. The Ag sector alone, all the chicken plants, all the beef plants, everything, the backbone of all that work is immigrant labor. And there just isn’t enough white people to fill those jobs.”

Immigrants have flocked to Trempealeau County in recent decades. In neighboring Arcadia, the Hispanic population has grown from less 1 percent to nearly half over the last 25 years, according to Census Bureau data. Most of them work at Ashley Furniture, America’s largest furniture manufacturer, or Gold’n Plump, a chicken processor, both based in Arcadia.

Hispanics make up more than 80 percent of elementary school students here. The local priest once told me Spanish baptisms outnumber English baptisms by a ratio of six-to-one.

At a time when many rural towns are disappearing, Arcadia’s immigrants are not only a welcome presence but also a necessary one. They’re keeping the place alive.

“When I was in highs school here [in the 1990s], there was one Mexican kid in my class,” Paul said. “And now my son who’s in middle school, he’s definitely a minority. Easily.”

“How do you feel about that?” I asked.

“That’s the way it is,” Paul said. “Trump is talking about deporting all these people. But walk Arcadia, what would Arcadia be without them? And Arcadia can’t be the only town like that. There’s a reason why they’re here.”

I got a different take when I spoke to Henry Filla the following day in Osseo, 40 miles north of Dodge. Filla, is a dairy, crop and buffalo farmer, and an avid Trump supporter.

Filla told me he wasn’t worried about Trump’s tariffs affecting his farm. “We’ve had ‘em before,” he said, explaining that he “came out better” after receiving his share of the massive government payments made to farmers to stem the financial losses from tariffs during Trump’s first term.

Filla said he didn’t think any deportations would affect the local economy.

“I don’t know of any illegals here, in this particular area,” he said. “There are a few famers who have some. I think the focus of this deportation will be to start out with the criminals. And that’s a big pile, I guess. Three or four thousand of them.”

Filla’s distinction between legal and illegal immigrants is one that progressives often ignore. But it’s a difference that the immigrants themselves understand is crucial to the debate.

The next day, I walked down Main Street in Arcadia, which is lined with Latino businesses with names like "La Tapatia Tienda y Taqueria, "MM San Juan" and "Don Juan Mexican Restaurant." The Latinos I spoke with didn’t seem concerned with the prospect of deportations. As a young woman from Guatemala named Carla told me in Spanish at Guerrero Street Food, “If you’re working and have your papers, you’re fine.”

My final stop was Howard County, Iowa, which in 2016 became the only county in America to vote for Trump by more than 20 points after having voted for Barack Obama by more than 20 points in 2012. (This time, Trump won by 32 points.)

I have visited Howard County many times since 2016. Whenever I visit, I wonder how Obama managed to perform so well in this rural, ag-heavy place, where 99 percent of residents are white and a similar share own guns. Many were thrilled to vote for America’s first Black president, I learned, but later felt betrayed by Obama when he didn’t deliver on his promises, driving them into the arms of Trump.

I met up with Chris Chilson at a bar in downtown Cresco, just up the block from the city’s only traffic light. Chris has voted for Trump three times and still flies a Trump flag outside his home in nearby Lime Springs.

Chris is a Navy veteran who responded strongly when I brought up the name of Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News anchor and national guardsman who was in the middle of a difficult confirmation fight as Trump’s pick to be defense secretary.

“Pete Hegseth’s a friend of mine,” Chris announced. “He grew up in Forest Lake, Minnesota. And he was my cousin’s best friend. And they still are best friends. …After I got out of the Navy, I got involved with Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, which Pete was part of. And I got to know him over the years.”

Hegseth’s confirmation was in jeopardy at the time due in part to allegations of sexual abuse and excessive drinking on the job. Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst (R), a decorated veteran who has spoken out against sexual abuse in the military, was considered a key swing vote in Hegseth’s confirmation.

Chris wrote Ernst a letter stating that he had been with Hegseth on several occasions and never seen him act inappropriately. What struck Chris most was how the media seemed to manipulate Hegseth’s biography, focusing only on the negative aspects.

“He’s the first person I’ve personally known who’s been involved in a high-profile position,” Chris said of Hegseth. “And when they started talking about all this stuff on the news, I thought, ‘This isn’t the guy I know.’ They’re just making up a profile … they could do it for anyone. Everybody has got bad parts, but if that’s all you focus on then you’re going to make him out to be the worst person in the world. And I thought, how many other people are they doing this to?”

The following day, Ernst announced that she would vote in favor of Hegseth, who went on to be confirmed by a historically slim margin.

Later, I spoke with Laura Hubka, former chair of the Howard County Democratic Party. Like other Democrats I spoke with, she lamented that her party had gone “all in on abortion” and other cultural issues.

“Democrats ran a lot on identity politics, which in an area like this, we don’t care if people are gay. We aren’t prejudiced. But we’d rather not focus on that, we’d rather focus on bringing prices down.”

“Eight years ago, I was ready to go, ready to fight. I was very nervous. Thought the world would explode. We’d have four years of terror. A lot of bad things did happen, but there were checks in place. Those checks are still in place.”

Hubka has become disillusioned by politics. “Maybe’s [Trump is] right and I’m wrong,” she said. “My voice meant nothing and it’s sad to admit that.” After devoting much of the last 10 years to political organizing, Hubka is checked out, exhausted. “I’m tired,” she said. “Someone else can take up the fight.”

Later, I sat down with Joe Kaletka, who has chaired the county Democrats for the last year. At 24 years old, he can barely remember a time before Trump dominated the political scene.

Kaletka believes people have become desensitized to Trump. “Yes, what he’s doing is outrageous, but we are not in uncharted territory like last time,” he said. “We know what he’s doing. We know he’s going to get away with it. And the feeling is, what can you do?”

Trump has “hollowed out the rural Democratic Party,” said Kaletka. His focus looking ahead is not on winning the county back, but on simply identifying Democrats and convincing them to show up to meetings. The county has turned into such a Trump stronghold, he said, that “people are afraid to step up and be seen as a Democrat.”

“We need more people, because … when I walk into a meeting, when my regulars are busy, and the meeting ends up being just me, and I sit there for 10 minutes hoping somebody will show up, I try not to talk to myself.”

Hubka’s one fear is that Trump will try to remain in office beyond two terms. Others I spoke with sensed that Trump has so disrupted the political system that we won’t really know where we are until he leaves office. “Once he’s off the ballot in 2028, that’s going to give an indication of where we are at as Democrats,” said Kaletka.

George Martin had told me something similar when I was with him in metro Detroit. When I asked him whether the Republicans can keep improving with Black voters post-Trump, he was skeptical.

“The Republican Party has such a long way to go with Black voters,” he said. “All bets are off after Trump leaves. Once neither party has Trump as the scapegoat or the crutch, we’ll see where we’re at.”

Daniel Allott is The Hill’s chief opinion editor and author of “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation.”

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