It’s hard to believe after the Fox News interviews, the daily barrage of screaming ads and all the history on these two candidates that anyone would be left undecided with less than three weeks until election day.
Yet there they were, surprisingly easy to find, drinking lattes at a strip mall Starbucks, browsing magazines at Barnes & Noble and eating eggs with their spouses at a pancake restaurant. Some were leaning toward former President Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris but were waiting on family meetings or a final round of online research. Others were hoping for inspiration on the drive to the precinct on Nov. 5.
I spent three packed days last week in three industrial states that have proven critical in deciding the presidency during the Trump era — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — on and off the campaign trail with Harris, talking to voters along the way.
Polls show the race a dead heat in the three so-called “blue wall” states, along with the four other battlegrounds, with about 5% of voters undecided. But it’s difficult for broad surveys to capture the complexities and contradictions that run through voters’ minds as they process an unprecedented election that involves a candidate who tried to overturn his 2020 election loss and would be the first president in history with multiple indictments and felony convictions.
I found Democrats battling insomnia and altering travel plans, Republicans who were friendly to a reporter but suspicious of the mainstream media and an overriding sense of disillusionment.
“Both of them are not good,” said Amgad Fram, a 61-year-old engineer from a Detroit suburb called Novi who was meeting for coffee with a friend.
He started the conversation saying he would vote for Trump for the third time because he’s going to “stop the flood of people coming to this country.”
“You know, I shouldn’t be saying that, because I am a foreigner,” said Fram, who moved from Jordan in 1981.
He is angry about a recent break-in at his brother’s mansion by Ecuadorian migrants here illegally, he said. And he pointed to sky-high unemployment in Jordan, which has one of the world’s highest refugee populations, as a cautionary tale.
But the conversation flipped when he began discussing Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric.
“I don’t really like that,” Fram said. “The reason we first immigrated to this country was to be free and to get rid of those dictators.”
He put his current odds of supporting Trump at 60% and said it would depend on a meeting with his large family.
The more committed Republicans I spoke with tended to dismiss those aspects of Trump’s rhetoric, blaming the media for a double standard and accusing prosecutors of pushing a political agenda.
“You kind of dance with the devil you know,” said Yves Francois, a 55-year-old salesman from Hartland, Mich., who was eating a fast-casual Middle Eastern lunch with his friend in Oakland County, just outside of Detroit. “Do I have a problem with that? I don’t know,” he said of the criminal charges and convictions. “The timing of it seems pretty crazy when these are things that could have happened four, five, six, seven years ago and you just now bring them to light.”
He was curious whether I would ask similar questions challenging Harris supporters but said he did not mind and wished we could all have a more civil dialogue. To him, Trump’s statements alarm people and then we “take our eyes off of the stuff that’s really obvious” with the economy and the broken immigration system.
The Harris campaign is spending the closing weeks begging voters to keep their eyes on Trump’s threats to use the military against his political enemies, his attempts to overturn the last election that resulted in the Jan. 6 insurrection and the range of former high-ranking members of his national security staff who have warned that he is a threat to democracy. They are frustrated that Americans are giving his presidency a much higher approval rating in retrospect than they did when he was in office.
“We barely survived,” said Olivia Troye, a former national security official in the Trump administration who praised the actions of her former boss, Vice President Mike Pence, and others who pushed back against Trump.
Troye spoke with me on a vivid fall day in Washington Crossing, Pa., a historic park along the Delaware River, after appearing on stage with Harris and other Republicans who warned about Trump.
“When he starts talking about using the military against people, or law enforcement, I think we should take that very seriously because those discussions were had in the White House where he actually talked about shooting Americans,” Troye continued. “I was there for those. I witnessed that. No president should ever talk about shooting his own people.”
That’s scaring committed Democrats like Claudia Seldon, a retired rehab nurse who was having her Wednesday coffee meet-up with friends in a downtown Detroit cafe earlier in the day.
“I’m worried if he does win, what’s gonna happen and if he doesn’t win, what’s gonna happen,” said Seldon, who plans to leave early this year for her winter home in Nevada to avoid traveling during potential election related turmoil.
Her friends Heather Hamilton and Joan Nagrant were counting absentee ballots in 2020 at the convention center when crowds tried to interrupt the process, a foreshadowing of Jan. 6. They were sequestered but remain nervous about returning for the job this year.
Many voters are seeing Harris’ ads with Troye and others running in battleground states. But some just hear political noise. The fliers that come through the mail slot accumulate but go unread. These voters manage to avoid news about the two candidates racing back and forth through their states on a near weekly basis.
“It’s less about us and more about them,” said Daniel Santos, a 36-year-old water company employee from Racine, Wis., who voted for former President Obama and Trump and has yet to make up his mind this time.
“I will vote,” said Ana Gallo, a 36-year-old warehouse worker who was putting up Halloween decorations in front of her small house in Racine. “I gotta sit down and think about it and read a little bit about what’s going on.”
A U.S. citizen from Mexico, she has been working on her husband’s legal status for more than a decade. That will weigh heavily on her vote, as will the economy. Trump says a lot of “over the top” things but she didn’t think he governed that way when he was in office, she said. She’s still learning about Harris.
Regina Gallacher, a 58-year-old physical therapist from Rochester Hills, Mich., said she is looking for a third party candidate because Trump “really scares me” but and she doesn’t “get warm fuzzies” when she hears Harris talk and found her replacement of President Biden on the ballot “very slimy.”
Her husband, a union Democrat, is voting for Trump for the first time but they don’t talk about it at home because Gallacher, who grows repulsed when Trump appears on television, would rather avoid a heated conversation with her husband, who is unlikely to change his mind. If she has to choose between the two, it will be Harris, she said. But she is unsure.
“We’ll get through it” if Trump wins, she said. “I just won’t be happy about it.”
Just when the divisions seemed bleakest, I ran into Jim Kusters, a retiree and Trump supporter who was sitting for breakfast in Mt. Pleasant, Wis., with his two friends: a Harris voter and a former supporter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who would not say who will now get his vote.
Kusters said his biggest problem was media bias. But it didn’t stop him from talking to a reporter or bantering with his friends. It wasn’t personal for any of them. Between taking shots at the candidates, they told stories about their families.
“We go back and forth all the time,” Kusters said.
Like just about everyone I met, they are ready for the campaign to end.
“Trump is obviously insane, and then Harris, I don’t think she has a plan,” said Clayton Ewing, a 63-year-old retiree from Shelby Township, Mich. who has voted for Trump in prior elections.
Ewing said he may wait until he gets to the polls to make a final decision.
“I just hope, whoever gets in, does a good job,” he said. “We can go four years down the road and get some new characters.”
