Millions of people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 or 2012, or both, and then for Donald Trump in 2016. Disproportionately located in swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida, these voters were crucial to Trump’s narrow victory.
I followed 16 Obama-Trump voters during three years of reporting across the country for my book, On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation. I sat down with most of them for extended interviews on multiple occasions. As of October 2020, all but two had committed to voting for Trump again in 2020.
There are two main reasons why most of these voters are sticking with Trump. First, they feel Trump has largely kept his campaign promises.
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.”
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.”
I had heard something similar from Cyrus Mazarei of Orange County, California, early in 2018. “I like him because he’s a doer,” Cyrus said, echoing the word many farmers I met used to describe Trump. Mazarei 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.”
The second reason most of the Obama-Trump voters I followed are sticking with Trump is their belief that the Democratic Party has moved too far to the left, especially on cultural issues such as abortion, guns, immigration, and race.
Catherine Bolder of Macomb County, Michigan, said that one of the reasons she will vote for Trump is the Democrats’ lurch to the left, identifying their embrace of late-term abortion and racial identity politics as two examples.
In 2017, Joe Wacha of Howard County, Iowa, told me he voted for Trump because he felt the Democrats were “no longer the party they were 30 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.
There was Noel Filla of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, whose priorities were illegal immigration and healthcare. 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 60s. McCuen is half-Mexican and still has family in Mexico. He describes being “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. By 2020, McCuen had committed to voting for Trump again.
A couple of the Obama-Trump voters I spoke with retained some goodwill toward Obama. But most had grown embittered as Obama’s presidency unfolded, their feelings ranging from mild disappointment to outright contempt.
By the end of Obama’s second term, Sandi Hodgden 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 just wanted America back,” she said. “We need to speak English and say, ‘Merry Christmas.’”
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.”
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.
Later, 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.” Sandi now has a paid position for the Volusia County Republican Party and is working to reelect Trump.
The question is, with Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, as the Democratic nominee, how many Obama-Trump voters can Democrats hope to win back? My reporting suggests that the answer is very few. Just one of the 16 Obama-Trump voters I followed had committed to voting for Biden.
During the presidential primary race, Biden was seen as the viable “moderate” and “centrist” candidate, 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 healthcare plan calls for a more aggressive version of the public option than Obamacare had; he’s embraced the Green New Deal and free college.
“I would never vote for Biden,” Orange County, California, resident Lois Morales wrote in 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.”
Daniel Allott is an opinion editor at the Hill newspaper and the author of On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation, (Republic Book Publishers) from which this piece is excerpted.
