New York Times
By Ashley Parker and Maggie Haberman
March 1, 2016
Donald
J. Trump won the vote of a 59-year-old cabdriver in the Boston suburbs
who said he lost his trucking business after immigrants began delivering
cargo
for less.
In
Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the country’s wealthiest, he won the
backing of a newly separated mother and a longtime Democrat who spoke of
the possibility
of another terrorist attack, saying, “I don’t think we feel safe right
now.”
And
Mark Harris, a 48-year-old owner of an antiques shop in Canton, Ga.,
said he did not much care for Mr. Trump’s ego and worried that his
impolitic speech
could derail American diplomacy.
But Mr. Harris voted for Mr. Trump, too.
“He’s
not afraid to get in the trenches and fight for you,” Mr. Harris said.
“He’s going to be a bully, and he’s going to tell them what he thinks,
and he’s
going to push to get it done. He don’t care who he makes mad in the
process.”
They
delivered him victories in conservative Southern strongholds like
Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, as well as Northern states like
Massachusetts, where
centrist Republicans hold sway. And though he lost to Senator Ted Cruz
in Mr. Cruz’s home state, Texas, Mr. Trump prevailed in Virginia,
fending off Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
Early
exit polls confirmed his broad support; in Virginia, for example, he
was winning not only among lower-income voters, his usual base, but also
in other
categories including veterans and self-described conservatives and
white evangelicals. In Texas, those calling themselves political
moderates, the kinds of voters some rivals are counting on, were
favoring Mr. Trump as well.
In
interviews, Mr. Trump’s supporters did not appear defined by a common
ideology. But they had a unifying motivation — a deep-rooted, pervasive
sense of anxiety
about the state of the country, and an anger and frustration at those
they felt were encroaching on their way of life.
Asked
what they liked in Mr. Trump, his voters described attributes that his
opponents have tried to paint as failings. His fierce and sometimes
offensive
comments on Mexican and Muslim immigrants, and on waterboarding and
killing family members of Islamic State fighters, demonstrate, his
voters said, a refreshing willingness to disregard political
correctness.
“He’s
saying how the people really feel,” said Janet Aguilar, 59, clad in a
Red Sox jacket, who voted for Mr. Trump in Everett, Mass. “We’re all
afraid to
say it.”
Where
others see a twice-divorced ladies’ man now married to a much younger
model, his fans saw the head of a successful family whose children, as
Albert Banda,
the cabdriver from Somerville, Mass., put it, are “respectable and
decent members of society” who “aren’t running around like Paris Hilton
and dragging their bodies through the mud.”
Mr.
Trump’s huge ego? Not necessarily a problem. “He doesn’t just want to
be a president. He wants to be the greatest president,” said Elizabeth
Burns, the
Virginia mother, who said she campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2008.
“That works in our favor because he doesn’t want to fail. He sees
himself as too big to fail.”
Those
supporting him did not always agree with everything he said, or the way
he said it, and they were not even convinced that he would be able to
follow
through on all of his big, brash promises. But they were willing to
give him their conditional support, drawn to him by his tough talk and
bravado, as well as their own disappointment and even fatalism about the
politicians they were used to seeing on the
menu.
“This
isn’t about whether he’s going to do a better job or not,” said Ken
Magno, 69, leaving his polling place in Everett, Mass., Tuesday morning,
wearing
a red Donald Trump winter hat. “More or less, it’s the statement:
Listen, we’re sick and tired of what you people do. And we’re going to
put somebody in there — now that it’s our choice, we’re going to put
somebody in there that basically you don’t like.”
Some
of the voters supporting Mr. Trump openly expressed skepticism, and
even discomfort, with some of his assurances, as well as with his talk.
Mr. Harris,
for instance, said that broken promises would transform the real estate
magnate into an ordinary politician.
And
John Rupert, 75, a retired mechanical engineer from Mahtomedi, Minn.,
said he was torn on Mr. Trump’s promise to deport the 11 million
immigrants in the
country illegally. “Oh man, that’s a hard one,” he said. “We have laws,
and somehow you have to enforce them. I don’t know.”
But
Mr. Rupert — a longtime Democrat who supported Jesse Ventura, the
former professional wrestler, for governor — added that he had gradually
come to accept
Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants.
“At
first I felt bad about the Muslim thing, but boy, you go ask Angela
Merkel how she feels now with all the trouble they had with Muslim
refugees from Syria
in Berlin, so he’s not far off,” he said, referring to Germany’s
chancellor. “It’s not a prejudice. It’s more of a racial profiling, and
quite honestly, I’d be in favor of it.”
Mr. Trump, he added, “just seems to say things that I feel right about.”
One
of the least likely Trump voters may have been Fadumo Yusuf, 34, a
Muslim woman and Ethiopian immigrant who lives in Minneapolis. When she
showed up at
a pro-Trump rally on Sunday, she was practically mobbed by supporters
who thanked her, and a Trump sticker made its way onto her hijab.
His
comments about banning Muslims from entering the country, she said,
were “hurtful,” and she also worried about his policies toward
immigrants fleeing Central
and South America.
But
Ms. Yusuf, who earned an accounting degree in 2010 from a community
college and has applied for more than 20 accounting jobs without any
offers, said she
felt “cheated.” She relies on her mother for help with necessities like
diapers and car insurance, and thinks Mr. Trump will help small
business owners by lowering taxes and allowing them to hire more
employees.
“We
came here to sacrifice and to a get visa. We are not terrorists,” she
said. “I believe he has a heart, so I will overlook that.”
Another
Trump supporter, Pam Fisher, 52, a retired flight attendant from Edina,
Minn., said she was flying on Sept. 11, 2001, and was deeply shaken by
the
attacks that day. She said she felt comforted by Mr. Trump’s hard line
on national security and immigration, and sounded much like Mr. Trump as
she explained why she liked him.
“You’re
letting refugees in, after what we’ve been through with 9/11? Are you
kidding me? No! No, no, no,” she said. Using an acronym for the Islamic
State,
she added: “Now we have a bunch of people being killed, we’ve got ISIS
cutting people’s heads off.”
Ms.
Fisher said she was taken with Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, even more
than the candidate himself. “She’s got it, and it’s putting class back
in this country,”
Ms. Fisher said. “She walks off the airplane, and it’s like the
Kennedys again, only the Republican side. I think they’re a stunning
family.”
Ms.
Fisher said she had voted Republican in the past, but had never been
involved in campaigning. Yet with Mr. Trump, that’s just what she found
herself doing,
standing at the entrance of his recent rally in the suburbs of
Minneapolis.
Handing
out Trump stickers to the crowd, Ms. Fisher found herself tearing up as
she talked about being unexpectedly drawn to this “huge movement” for
the former
reality television star. “It’s so out of my character to do something
like this,” she said. “I just needed to rise up, and it’s a great
feeling.”
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