What were Trump voters like on the campaign trail?

First, thank you to everyone for all the nice comments after my last message.  To have your support is an incredible blessing and has inspired me to continue with this substack and start answering some of the questions you have had.

I’m working on a more in depth analysis of the campaign that we can all try to learn from (in the Marine Corps we call it an after action), but before that is done, I wanted to answer a question I have been getting from a lot of people who didn’t vote for Trump:

What were Trump voters like on the campaign trail?

Having been in every corner of the state and talked to thousands of people, I can confidently say it’s not the same with everyone.

A decent number said they were actually going to vote for me, and tens of thousands of them did — my opponent received 100,000 fewer votes in Missouri than Trump did. Many told me and my team that they wish they could vote for me, but couldn’t because of what the national Democratic Party meant to them. Here, in their own words, are some examples of what both of these kinds of voters had to say in emails, texts, and conversations on the trail.

While tens of thousands did switch over to vote for me and Donald Trump, many everyday working Missourians believe that Donald Trump will make their lives better and couldn’t bring themselves to support anyone who wasn’t a Republican because of it.

In the final weeks of the campaign I went to polling places all around the state and talked to people while they were waiting in line to vote.  As you would expect, there were a lot of Trump voters out there.  Here are a couple of examples of how they felt that I experienced over and over again.

The first guy I’ll give an example of was a 60 or so year old white man. He told me that he had been working his whole life since he was a kid, that his business fixing appliances collapsed during COVID, that he couldn’t afford groceries anymore, and that he wouldn’t survive without Social Security in a few years.  I believe that every single one of those things about his life was true.

He blamed Biden for destroying his business during COVID and for making groceries unaffordable and believed that Donald Trump was the only one who could fix the economy and save Social Security.  And he just couldn’t vote for me because he couldn’t be sure I would support Trump’s efforts to Make America Great Again. 

On the Saturday before the election I was at an early voting place at a mall in St. Louis County.  The line to vote wrapped almost entirely around the mall.  As I said hello to people I saw two latino men around 30 years old quietly standing in line and not looking at me.  I went up to say hi and they politely said hi back.

I told them who I was and that I wanted to meet people and ask for their consideration or see if they had any questions.

The older of the two, in pretty heavily accented English, said that he knew who I was, that he was sure I was a nice guy and that he liked me more than Hawley, but that there was no way he could vote for me.  I asked him if there was anything I could do to change his mind.

He said he was sorry, but that he worked for a living and that Democrats had ruined the economy.  That Trump was a businessman and therefore was the only one who could fix it, and that he just couldn’t vote for me because I was a Democrat and Trump was a Republican.  This wasn’t the first time I had had a conversation like this with a latino immigrant.

The takeaway from these, thousands more encounters along the campaign trail, and more of our campaign’s research is that many working people believe that they have found a political home — and it is not with the Democratic Party. It’s not clear that it’s with the Republican Party necessarily either, but more with Trump’s party — we’ll see if that impact sticks in future elections without Trump on the ballot. 

An interesting thing that Trump has done in Missouri is that he brings out hundreds of thousands of  infrequent Republican voters in the state who don’t necessarily vote otherwise — particularly in these last two presidential elections.  Time will tell if this impact will continue without Trump.

With the new makeup of the Senate and the House, it seems like the most likely big result of the next four years is a massive tax cut for big corporations and the richest Americans.  I hope I’m wrong and that everyday people’s lives improve.

I’ll work on getting out a more in depth analysis soon, but until then, post your questions in the comments or shoot me an email and I’ll see what else I can answer.

Lucas