Hyla Winters gets a little carried away when she talks about Donald Trump. Not out of enthusiasm, but because this retiree from Nevada is looking for the right word to express all the bad things she thinks of the American president: “Incompetent, inexperienced, unable to take responsibility. “
Trump’s voter, “Lifelong republican “, This former executive of the University of Las Vegas, reached by phone, is one of these conservatives, who, on November 3, will give their voice to a Democrat. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 6% of people who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 are preparing to choose his opponent, Joe Biden, while 2% are in favor of a third candidate. At the same time, 10% of those who remained loyal to a Republican candidate, during the mid-term elections in 2018, will do the same. Defectors exist on the other side, but in smaller proportions: 4% of Hillary Clinton voters are expected to vote for Trump and 1% for another party.
When she thinks back to her vote four years ago, Mme Winters hesitates between regret and anger. “I was already worried about Trump’s inexperience, but I was convinced he would know how to surround himself. I was so wrong ”, she laments, insisting on “Brute behavior” of the American president.
Attached to the conservative and religious values of the Grand Old Party (GOP), this evangelical Protestant had always voted somewhat mechanically for this camp. “Trump forced me to take an interest in politics, and I became a smarter voter. “ In February, she even registered as a Democrat on the electoral roll, to participate in the party’s primary. Since then, she has worked to convince those around her to do the same. ” But, in my neighborhood and my church, the older ones don’t flinch. My husband remains a convinced Trumpist, especially because of his economic policy which has favored people like us, who are financially comfortable. “
” A desaster “
She herself could have revised her positions, if “ Trump had assumed his responsibilities on the Covid-19 “. Because everything does not displease him in the policy of the outgoing president, in particular “The normalization of Arab countries with Israel”, an important file in the evangelical world, or the appointment of more than two hundred conservative judges across the country. But the negative aspects largely outweigh: its positions against migrants or the climate, its fiscal policy, and above all, ” her personality “. She does not rule out returning to the Republican fold, unless she chooses the camp of “Independent”. “Trump has silenced the GOP, I don’t even know if the party will be able to recover from it. “
On the other side of the country, in the suburbs of Detroit (Michigan), Jan Kopera tells the same disappointment. Except that this septuagenarian, “Republican all her life”, already voted Democrat in 2016. “Between two evils, I had chosen the lesser”, explains this contemptuous of ” the welfare state “, embodied, according to her, by the Democratic Party. But “Trump’s personality is a disaster; if we give him four more years his authoritarian tendencies will increase “. In 2016, she believed, like many, that the billionaire was ” a joke “ and didn’t bother to vote in the Republican primaries. “ I felt so bad; I am doing everything so that this does not happen again. “
This practicing Catholic appreciates in her co-religionist, Joe Biden, “Honesty and his interest in the country”. “He will be the president of all Americans, not just Democrats. “ On the other hand, she hates her running mate Kamala Harris, who could replace him in the event of the president’s defection: “I hope Biden can finish his term”, slip the one who, ” in the future “, plans to vote Republican again.
Like Mme Winters, and like those ordinary Republicans who agreed to pose for billboards, installed along the roads of key states by the Republican Voters Against Trump association, Mme Kopera finds it urgent to testify. All join an unprecedented list of former elected officials and senior Republican officials, who called to vote for Joe Biden. The latest defectors to date, about twenty former prosecutors denounced, Tuesday, October 27, the threat that Mr. Trump poses to “The rule of law in the country”. To each his grievances.