Shannon Elliott and Kristin Caparra live in the same suburban Philadelphia county. Both are a mix of anxious and excited this Election Day. Both see their country at a defining crossroads.
The common ground ends there.
“I’m worried about a Trump presidency,’’ said Elliott, a mother of two teenagers and owner of a gift shop in Swarthmore. “I don’t want to go back there.”
Caparra worries, too.
“When I think about Kamala Harris, I think what annoys me most is her duality, where she says her values haven’t changed,” said Caparra, a civil engineer from Drexel Hill who also teaches figure skating. “That’s almost like a signal to the extreme left that I am still very much a progressive. And a progressive, in my mind, is a name for, you know, the Democratic Socialist Party. So, she’s playing to the left-most fringe.”
Swarthmore and Drexel Hill are just six miles apart in Delaware County. Yet Elliott and Caparra are on opposite sides of America’s cavernous political divide. Former President Donald Trump is its lightning rod.
Elliott: “I see how he treats people and bullies people, and these are things I tell my teenage kids not to do. Why would I want to see my president doing that.”
Caparra: “I wish they could, quite honestly, get over some of Trump’s bad behavior and look at the broader sense of what he means. … He loves this country and my version of this country a little more dearly than the other side, to be honest.”
Elliott and Caparra are two of the nearly 90 voters we have spent time with over the past 15 months as we visited 10 states for our All Over the Map project. The goal was to track the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of voters who live in key battleground states or are part of critical voting blocs. Or both.
We learned so much and owe so much to the Americans who invited us into their homes and workplaces and communities. What we learned most is that the voters are way ahead of the politicians.
From our first trip to our last, they brought to life the issues that would most animate the campaign. The cost of living. Border security and immigration. Abortion rights and broader questions about reproductive rights and respect for women. Anxiety about technology, globalization and the coarseness of our political debate.
Concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and stamina came up frequently and well before those conversations became common in Washington. We quickly and then constantly were reminded that Trump’s support is more diverse and more complicated than most of his critics understand.
If the former president wins, Caparra’s “my version of this country” comment could be instructive.
Diehard Trump supporters see him as their voice, and they echo his often harsh language about immigrants as well as his lies about stolen and rigged elections and the prosecutions against him.
Holding their noses and voting Trump
But we also met many Trump critics who in the end will be Trump voters because they say Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats pose a greater threat than Trump’s toxic behavior.
Shanen Ebersole fits there.
She is a cattle farmer in southwest Iowa who supported former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in the Iowa caucuses. She was hopeful at the beginning that Republicans would move on from Trump and the behavior she said filled her liberal friends with fear.
But Trump coasted to the nomination and will get Ebersole’s vote on Tuesday because she sees Harris as an activist liberal.
“She is willing to push her agendas on those of us who live a totally different life,” Ebersole said.
Economic concerns dominate
If Trump wins, voters like Joseph Knowles and Brian McMutuary will be part of his comeback math too.
Knowles is a Black union autoworker in Michigan who has never voted Republican for president. But he believes Biden-Harris clean energy policies are hurting the automobile industry and that Democrats are too cozy with cultural elites and too soft on illegal immigration.
“We’ve voted the same way – with Democrats – all our lives and nothing is changing,” Knowles said. “So let’s try something different.”
McMutuary is also Black and also was a lifelong Democrat until he voted for Trump in 2020. He disagrees with Trump on abortion and immigration but sees him as a stronger leader on the world stage and remembers prices as lower when Trump was president.
“When I go to the grocery store, I get what I need, not so much what I want or what the kids want,” said McMutuary, who manages a fast-food restaurant in the Milwaukee suburbs. “We have a budget, you know. It is tight.”
The issue terrain certainly favors the party out of presidential power this year. Biden’s approval rating is under water and voters are pessimistic about the state of the economy and the direction of the country.
Tamara Varga, a Republican and one-time Libertarian who lives in Tucson, Arizona, said she believes Trump will grow his support among Latino voters this time.
“The border and the economy,” she said. “People are having a hard time putting food on their table and gas in their cars, and it’s really affecting them. So I think that they now think about their vote and how it will affect their household.”
The importance of female voters this year
That the election looks so close speaks volumes about Trump and a brand that many voters think is toxic and too unpresidential.
“To me, I think it’s very important to remember a president is a role model. It is very important,” said Suresh Sharma, a Georgia independent who voted for Trump in 2016 then Biden in 2020. “Can I tell my daughter and son, ‘Hey, be like this person’? … So in my view, I think the Republican Party should have done a better job of picking somebody who really reflects American values.”
If Harris wins, women will be the foundation of her coalition.
Black women are vital in all of the battlegrounds.
Atlanta entrepreneur Lakeysha Hallmon said the switch from Biden to Harris changed everything.
“There’s a sense of joy, a sense of excitement,” Hallmon said. “I think there has been a groundswell of support. … It doesn’t feel so doomsday anymore. It actually feels hopeful when there’s excitement.”
Shannon Elliott, the small businesswoman in suburban Philadelphia, is another piece of the Harris math. If the vice president loses some ground with Black and Latino men, higher support among suburban women is a way to make it up.
“You know we get called ‘woke,’” Elliott said of liberal Swarthmore. “What’s wrong with woke? Why are you asleep? Why are you not awake and seeing that people are going to get hurt and that his behavior just brings negative behavior to the surface and that could be dangerous, very dangerous.”
Republicans looking to save their party
And if Harris wins, it will be because a decent share of Republicans who tried to stop Trump from winning the nomination are prepared to vote for Harris in an effort to stop him from winning the White House.
“My hope is he loses, and he just fades into the annals of history and we move on,” said Michael Pesce, a Haley turned Harris voter from Bucks County in the Philadelphia suburbs.
A Harris win would also likely highlight the strength of the Democratic turnout operation.
“We’ve done all we could,” said Angela Lang, executive director of Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, a progressive group on Milwaukee’s north side.
The 2020 experience looms large over the final days of this year’s campaign.
Many Trump voters echo their candidate in saying the only way for Harris to win is through fraud.
“I don’t think she has a chance to win in a fair fight,” said Chris Mudd, who runs a solar energy company in Cedar Falls, Iowa. “I just don’t believe it is possible. I really don’t. … Many like me would think the same thing: If Kamala Harris gets 81 million votes, something really went haywire.”
Trump critics, on the other hand, are bracing for a repeat of 2020 if he loses again.
“He’s never going to concede that he loses anything,’” said Pesce, the Pennsylvania Haley supporter who is voting for Harris.
Attorney Joan London is another Haley voter turned Harris voter. Like Pesce, she’s a Reagan Republican who believes Trump must lose again to create an opening to return the GOP to its conservative roots.
London believes the legal challenges could drag on for weeks. But she is ready for the campaigning to end.
“I’m so sick of the political ads,” she said. “I wish they would go back to the prescription drug commercials.”