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One day last month I stepped out of my car in Riegelsville, Pa., and onto a sidewalk in front of the town’s post office, where residents come to pick up their mail and often spend a few minutes talking with neighbors. The first person I encountered was a young man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a pizzeria around the corner. He looked my way and said: “Hi! How are you doing today?”
Riegelsville is, first of all, tiny: a hamlet on the western bank of the Delaware River with roughly 800 inhabitants, many of whom live in three-bedroom houses set on small lots. It has one stoplight, a sit-down restaurant, three churches, an American Legion post, a general store and that pizzeria.
The problem of social isolation in America does not seem to apply here. People know one another and talk across backyards. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out the town’s electricity for about a week in 2012, residents gathered at the firehouse, which was powered by a generator, and cooked their meals communally. “It’s a Hallmark town,” the mayor, Viana Boenzli, told me. “We don’t even have a police department. We call the state police if there’s a problem, but there almost never is.”
In the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump won 276 votes in Riegelsville to Joe Biden’s 274. Those are not enough votes to have made a big impact on who won Pennsylvania — nor are Riegelsville’s votes likely to swing who will win the state this November. But Bucks is the only one of Philadelphia’s four collar counties that has not swung strongly to the Democrats. It is, therefore, a nearly dead-even town, in a closely divided county, in the biggest and most important of the electorally deadlocked battleground states.
I have been interviewing voters in Pennsylvania for The Times since 2008 — and often in Bucks County, where I grew up. I find it a useful lens out into America through a place that has a reputation for civilized, or even genteel, politics.
In Riegelsville, I was curious to know if the two-vote margin in 2020 was a signal that the town’s residents might be open-minded as they consider the candidates running this year — or if they are cleaved into two tribes like much of the rest of the nation. Would the fact that they live in proximity and actually mix with one another make any difference?
Over the course of five days, in two visits, I talked with 60 voters. All of them were white, reflecting the nearly all-white town. Riegelsville is, however, economically diverse: Among those I talked to were small-business owners, teachers, an architect, a retired stone mason and a couple of retirees from a now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Easton, Pa.
Of the voters I met, not a single one — zero, just to be clear — planned to switch sides from how they voted in 2020. The voters for Mr. Biden were with Kamala Harris, and the voters for Mr. Trump still with him.
The more time I spent reporting, the more I realized I was not really writing about the numbers — or even the candidates. This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society.
A question of character
Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.
“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”
“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.
Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”
I asked Tracy Russell, 58, if she had thoughts about the election. “Do I think about much else?” she replied. Ms. Russell, a writer for the stage and screen, also planned to vote for Ms. Harris. The issues most important to her, she said, were reproductive rights, the environment, fairness for disenfranchised communities and “having a president who can help turn things around in terms of our brotherhood to each other, and sisterhood.”
I had lunch one afternoon with Mayor Boenzli and her husband, Erich, at the Riegelsville Inn. Mr. Boenzli is a naturalized citizen from Switzerland and a private pilot. Ms. Boenzli is a former school nurse and the author of a lifestyle blog called Maplewood Road, the name of their street. Both support Ms. Harris. “What matters to me is decency — the humanity of a person who is going to be president,” Mr. Boenzli said. “It’s obvious to me that he’s not a decent person, and I don’t understand the people who want to vote for him.”
We were sitting at an outdoor table overlooking the river. Riegelsville is in the far north of Bucks County, surrounded by corn and soybean fields and only about 10 miles closer to Philadelphia than to New York City. “You see it’s so nice here,” he said. “It’s an amazing town. But politics has kept people a little separated. It has broken up some friendships.”
Over my time in Riegelsville, I found that I had less to talk about with the Harris voters. They liked her even if some felt they were still getting to know her. And they trusted that she would govern as a sort of standard-issue Democrat.
The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.
But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying, his misogyny, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.
“I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”
Mr. Chase is one of five members of the Borough Council in Riegelsville, an elected but unpaid position. He is a Republican, though the party affiliation is not, as he put it, “a nametag you wear here.” Like most of the Trump supporters I talked with, he gets his information from Fox News.
He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.
Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”
I first talked with Mr. Libasci and his wife, Yeyi, at the post office and then again one evening over drinks at their home. They had moved to Riegelsville several years ago from upstate New York and live in the John L. Riegel House, built by a son of the town’s founder.
Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”
Ms. Libasci, who emigrated to the United States from Panama as a teenager, is an interior decorator who has been spending her time painstakingly restoring their home. I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”
I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.
“I think she practiced very well,” John Shoemaker, 78, said. “Trump didn’t. And you could tell the moderators were out to get him.”
Mr. Shoemaker was sitting at a table behind Mueller’s General Store and Kitchen, along the Delaware Canal, with a group of friends who gather there most mornings. (The general store is just beyond Riegelsville’s town limits, in Northampton County.) He had owned a tool and die shop in town before he closed it about a decade ago.
“John can take a piece of metal and make anything out of it,” Michael Schaffer, 74, the lone Harris supporter at the table, said. “These guys I meet up with every morning, they’re brilliant, each of them in their own way. That’s why I just don’t understand their attraction to Trump.”
I sat with this group two mornings. They reflected the town’s somewhat eccentric nature. Mr. Schaffer is a dressage trainer. Another man at the table had owned a tavern, which he referred to as a gin mill.
I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.
A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”
On one issue — women’s reproductive rights — there was agreement at the table that Mr. Trump’s positions were hurting him and might cost him the election.
“It was a mistake,” the retired car dealer said of Mr. Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He said his wife, daughters and granddaughters were all voting for Ms. Harris, and some had contributed to her campaign.
“Trump puts his foot in his mouth just about every time he speaks, but on abortion it’s the worst,” the man said, adding that “the abortion thing is going to kill him.”
Americans and their presidents
It’s true that the righteousness we have attributed to some American presidents has been misplaced, or born of myth, going all the way back to the fable of the young George Washington confessing to his father that he had taken a hatchet to a cherry tree on the family property. (The story was invented by an early biographer.) In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.
I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.
Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.
A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either. They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.
The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control. Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act of Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.
Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want. Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.
What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric? Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare.
I’m from the opposite end of Bucks County, about 40 miles south, closer to Philadelphia. My father was a judge in the county, a Democrat appointed by a Republican governor as part of what was then called a gentlemen’s agreement — an informal pact under which the parties in Bucks County took turns sending nominees to the bench to ensure that they were qualified jurists rather than political hacks.
I was raised to have admiration for the people “up county,” as we would say. They tended to be a little wealthier and, for all I knew, Mayflower descendants. They somehow seemed more civilized than those of us in the lower end of the county.
When I began to explore Riegelsville, I’m sure I had some of this in mind. As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it.
I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”
I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.
Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of “Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town and the Magic of Theater” and other books.
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