Her campaign pitch was moving, even high-minded. If Vice President Kamala Harris were elected to the White House, she would safeguard the ideals of a good nation. Voters had a choice, she said: democracy, constitutional rights and bedrock freedoms — or Donald J. Trump’s “chaos and division.”
On Tuesday, the nation replied. The answer from more than half of voters seemed to dismiss warnings that Mr. Trump was a threat to principles on which the country had been founded. Abstract truths mattered less, voters said, than tangible issues, like the ability to pay rent or concerns over border crossings. In a time of widespread distrust in institutions, Ms. Harris’s call to protect the nation’s norms rang hollow for many Americans.
In more than 200 interviews across the country in the four days preceding the election, voters, especially in swing states, spoke not of endangered democracy or institutions but of diminished prospects. Their words echoed repeated pre-election polling that showed that majorities of Americans believed the nation was headed in the wrong direction, even as the pandemic had ebbed, the rate of inflation was falling and crime and unemployment rates had remained historically low.
“Electric, water, groceries, my dues for where I live,” said Mary Chastain, 74, a retiree on a fixed income who voted for Mr. Trump on Tuesday in Waleska, Ga., a city of roughly 1,000 people in a rural stretch north of Atlanta. “Everything has gone up.”
“Something has to change,” said Idelle Halona, 51, of Phoenix, standing in line to vote for Mr. Trump on Tuesday. In the past two years, she said, her rent had nearly doubled and mounting mortgage rates had priced her out of homeownership. “I have wealthy friends, and I have friends who are living paycheck to paycheck. Everybody’s hurting. Everybody.”
“We never had it as good as when he was president,” said Harry Rakestraw, 84, a retired factory worker, who cast his ballot for Mr. Trump in Antrim County, Mich. “I’m not better off today than I was then.”
Mr. Trump’s campaign appealed to the struggling rural areas and the working class voters who in 2016 delivered him the White House. His rhetoric reached out to red states that have become redder as the nation has sorted and polarized according to affluence and education; it also appealed to male breadwinners who have felt left behind by shifting cultural norms and technological advances.
At rallies, Mr. Trump, 78, excited nostalgia for the heady early years of his tenure, highlighting the 2017 tax cut and his conservative Supreme Court appointments. He vowed to lower taxes still further for nearly every audience he spoke to, from waiters — “no taxes on tips” — to billionaires.
His economic promises were often overshadowed by his attacks. He derided scientists and medical experts, while playing down the nearly 350,000 American deaths from Covid-19 that occurred during his last year in office. He lashed out in vulgar and sometimes violent terms at Democrats, immigrants and women. His ads conjured fear of unchecked borders, rampant crime and transgender adolescents. He falsely maintained that he had not lost the 2020 election — a claim that triggered a riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by his supporters. He vowed payback.
And many voters expressed reservations in interviews about Mr. Trump’s character, felony convictions, fondness for autocrats and fitness for office. But many also used phrases like “the lesser of two evils” to describe him.
In Bucks County, Pa., Marina Raimondo, 41, an aesthetician and mother of two who had immigrated to the United States as a child from Ukraine, said she was “not super gung-ho” for Mr. Trump or the propaganda he repeated about migrants.
“They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs — what is that?” she wondered. She said she had even briefly considered sitting out the election. But she had voted for the former president over Ms. Harris because he seemed to be “stronger,” she said.
“Let’s just say I’ve held my nose and voted a couple of times,” said Tad Fogel, 80, a retiree and unaffiliated voter in Hendersonville, N.C., who said he voted for Mr. Trump because he agreed with his positions on illegal immigration and the economy.
Ms. Harris, 60, had offered to “turn the page” on the Trump era. Black and South Asian, the child of immigrants who had risen as a prosecutor in California, she promised a “new generation” of leadership and a more positive, truthful and even joyful politics of inclusion. Hard-line Trump backers, it was understood, were probably never going to shift their support. But she extended herself to moderate and Republican voters who viewed Mr. Trump as a divisive incompetent and his camp as dangerous extremists more interested in power and wealth than the common good of the nation. “We are not going back,” she repeatedly vowed.
In interviews, those voters did not seem moved by her promise of good government and “hard work.” In Arizona, in fact, Lele Pierce, 27, a student at the for-profit Grand Canyon University, said she voted for Mr. Trump because he was a “business guy” who showed that “anyone could technically run for the presidency.”
In Lewiston, Maine, Ridwan Mohamed, 19, a home-care aide who often works 80-hour weeks, said he voted for Mr. Trump because Mr. Trump said that he would eliminate federal taxes on overtime pay.
In Austin, Texas, Khalid Marshall, 42, an animal protection officer who described himself as a Republican-leaning independent, said on Monday that he would vote for Mr. Trump because “he still acts like a guy, which is kind of what got him in trouble, maybe,” and because he is “better for the population of men.”
Ms. Harris had come late to the campaign, parachuting in when Mr. Biden bowed out after his debilitating performance during the first presidential debate. With only a few months to fully introduce herself nationally to voters, she sought to emphasize Mr. Trump’s norm-breaking candidacy, but also introduce economic proposals on housing, child care and inflation. She talked about helping small businesses.
But that agenda could not contend with an unpopular administration.
A key stumbling block was the inflation that had spiked during the Biden administration, as factory shutdowns from Covid-19 hit global supply chains and the president pumped federal pandemic aid into the economy to protect middle- and working-class employment.
Yet another was the all-too-tangible reality of need at home, as natural disasters pummeled state after state, raising the question of whether Americans could still afford idealism elsewhere.
“I moved from North Carolina,” Jacob Dettloff, a 31-year-old salesman, said just after casting a ballot for Mr. Trump in Antrim County, Mich., his new home. “The hurricane damage up there, especially in the Appalachian region, where they’re really poor, it seems like they’re not getting enough help.”
“All I ever hear is ‘We still need more help,’” he said, comparing the significant assistance Ukraine is receiving from the United States with the federal response to Hurricane Helene’s victims.
“I’m not saying don’t help out your fellow man, especially other countries, but God dang it, they’re our brothers,” he said. “We should help those guys first, I think.”
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