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Cindy Jager was the lone worker on duty in the crammed aisles of an old-fashioned variety store overflowing with hardware and party supplies and fake pumpkins.
When I came across her, she was carefully rearranging cleaning products on a back shelf of the shop in Walker, Mich. When I brought up the election, she pulled herself into a full-body cringe, bending at the waist and grimacing, fluttering in nervous laughter, hands flying to touch her frosted hair.
“It’s embarrassing,” Ms. Jager, 56, said. “Everything’s a joke. I don’t even watch the news anymore.”
I asked if she planned to vote. Definitely, she replied. “For whom?” I asked. She cringed again.
“That’s the question,” she said. “Out of millions of people, why do we have these two?”
Walker is a onetime farming district thick with peach orchards, now a city on the western flank of Grand Rapids. It has made national news at least twice — once in the 1980s, when a couple of health care workers were smothering their charges in a nursing home, and again when Donald Trump went there to speak in late September.
Mr. Trump stood on a loading dock of a manufacturing plant there and told the crowd that Vice President Kamala Harris had allowed droves of violent criminals to cross the border illegally and carry out crime sprees in U.S. communities. “Blood is on her hands,” he said floridly.
“What Kamala Harris has done is unforgivable,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s a crime what she did. There’s no greater act of disloyalty than to extinguish the sovereignty of your own nation.”
Ms. Jager was not convinced by Mr. Trump’s theatrics. She found them unnerving. “I like what he says most of the time, but then sometimes it’s embarrassing,” she said. “And you’re like, ‘What did he say?’”
I asked her, then, if she would end up voting for Ms. Harris.
“But … I’m not Democrat!” she exclaimed.
It was a simple cry, but it contained the germ of the matter. Ms. Jager has simply always thought of herself as a Republican, and she was not prepared to stop thinking of herself that way. Her favorite president was Ronald Reagan. She talked about Democrats as if they were another species; she heard they were trying to force everybody to drive electric cars. And while she seemed torn over Mr. Trump, even a little undecided, it was not really that. I think that, like a lot of voters I met, she was just pained by and a little incredulous at the choice she’d probably make.
Ms. Jager worked for years driving a trash truck, and she loved it. She spent her days out on her own, independent, driving the streets. When her boss retired, she ended up finding work as a shopkeeper. Rattling off these details lightly, she came across as scrappy and optimistic — the kind of person who would always land on her feet. The election has left her discouraged.
“It’s not exciting,” she said grimly, “to be a voter right now.”
I’d stopped in Walker while driving a slow, winding path across Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, from Grand Rapids to Detroit, pulling over to chat with people in some of the swingiest spots of this notoriously swingy state. I was looking for undecided, or at least conflicted, voters — a hazily understood group that has taken on tremendous significance in tossup states like Michigan, where polling suggests 15 electoral votes still hang within reach of either Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump.
I met plenty of people who, in their first breath, told me they were undecided — only to admit or make plain, the longer we talked, that their presidential choice had already come together in their minds, even if they weren’t exactly saying it aloud. Many people seemed reluctant to admit — even perhaps to themselves — that they were really going to vote for that person.
Most of the time, that person was Mr. Trump, but not always. A pleasant, middle-aged woman working the register of a small-town sandwich shop told me she had generally been a Republican voter. This election, though, she was balking. She talked loudly and freely about her indecision before finally whispering to me, so that her co-workers and customers couldn’t hear, that she was probably going to end up voting for Ms. Harris because she really, really couldn’t stand Mr. Trump. Then she grimaced, as if to say: What have we come to? Then she declined to tell me her name.
These exchanges suggest that “undecided” is not the best word for many of these voters. They are uncomfortable, even disgusted. They described the election as presenting an unpleasant choice that must be made. Mr. Trump’s image, full of chaos and invective, has clearly soured, even in the minds of voters who voted for him before and are likely to vote for him again. As for Ms. Harris, I heard over and over again that people didn’t know who she was or what she wanted to do. There was an unfamiliarity so vast that for some, it gave way to distrust.
I am familiar, of course, with the indignant howls of colleagues, neighbors, television pundits: Who could be undecided at a moment like this? The conflicted voters I met seemed unlikely to be won over — they are too far gone for that — but were instead bobbing back and forth on the eddies of their own revulsion. That, too, creates movement, albeit an uninspiring movement.
This election may be an experiment in the power of the negative — the inverse of the charismatic politician whose gravitational pull tugs voters across party lines and assembles them in a formerly improbable bloc. That was Barack Obama in the optimistic flush of 2008, rallying a broad coalition in which independents and some Republicans joined the Democrats.
This moment is not that. American optimism is, at least for now, in short supply. The public’s view of politics and elected officials is “unrelentingly negative,” a Pew Research Center study concluded last year. More than a quarter of the respondents (28 percent) had unfavorable views of both parties; 63 percent had little or no confidence in the future of the political system.
But, as the researchers at Pew pointed out, the general unhappiness with politics coincided with historically high levels of voter turnout. People may take a jaundiced view of the candidates and the resulting governance, but many of them still vote.
Consider the contrast between two young Michigan women who planned to vote specifically in the hopes of advancing their views on abortion — although on opposite sides.
Joy Johnson was strolling along the main drag of Howell with a baby balanced snugly on her hip. At 23, Ms. Johnson is a stay-at-home mom. She and her husband went to high school together; after graduation, he got a solid job working on power lines for an electric company. The couple bought a house shortly before interest rates went up. She doesn’t think they’d be able to buy now. Her brother has been house hunting for over two years, with no luck.
She seemed to attribute both the housing squeeze and what she felt to be a high tax burden to the Biden administration and believed her family would fare better under Mr. Trump’s tax plan, but that’s not what was deciding her vote.
Ms. Johnson is a Christian and is firmly opposed to abortion. There was no other issue that she viewed with the same degree of seriousness. “I’m looking for abortion and what I believe lines up more with God,” she said. “It’s not if I like him. I don’t necessarily like Trump.” Still, she seemed at peace with casting a vote for him. “You always wish you had stronger choices,” she added cheerfully. “I don’t think you’ll ever feel good about it.”
Then there was Nina Brown, a 22-year-old psychology student who, as evening fell over the far northern suburbs of Detroit, was hunched over her books in the student center of her community college. She would vote for Ms. Harris because she wanted to protect women’s rights, she told me — but she was utterly nonplused about it.
Ms. Brown mentioned the economy, which she considered dismal. She was barely getting by. She’d vote because it needed to be done, but at the same time, she didn’t believe it would make much difference. She didn’t have much, if any, faith in politicians across the board. “I’m basically one of those going for the lesser evil,” she said with a shrug.
The most conflicted voters I came across tended to be middle-class or working-class women. Naydelin Lucas, who at 18 is looking forward to voting for the first time, was a study in conflicted impulse. A curbside supercenter worker who takes classes at a community college in Grand Rapids in hopes of becoming an ultrasound technician, she found the presidential choice confounding. Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump both, Ms. Lucas contended, have “a lot of cons and pros.”
Stuck in her parents’ house because she couldn’t afford a place of her own, she was worried constantly about the state of the economy, high prices and her earning potential. She was troubled by the general possibility of war (she didn’t closely follow foreign policy), especially because her long-term boyfriend just enlisted in the military.
Ms. Lucas approached the election with an accumulated outlook of skepticism tinged with grievance. Her generation came of age under the constant threat of school shootings, distant wars raging in the background, harsh warnings of climate collapse and fascism pouring from screens. Her education and mental health were badly damaged, she said, by pandemic lockdowns and distance learning. Having been told all her life that disaster lurks just over the horizon, she has grown disenchanted.
She was simply not convinced by the grandiose framing of the election as a crossroads leading us to national collapse on the one hand or the salvation of our collective soul on the other. She told me that mostly, she wants a better job.
Ms. Lucas didn’t always agree with Mr. Trump. But he was critical of U.S. involvement in foreign wars and, when he talked about inflation, it sounded to her as if he knew what he was doing. To her, that was something. Ms. Harris never kept her attention. Ms. Lucas watched a few videos of Ms. Harris’s speeches online but came away somewhat unmoved, she said, without a clear idea of the Democratic candidate’s goals or priorities. In short, neither of them struck Ms. Lucas as an unambiguously better choice.
“I might just put ‘undecided’ for that race. I don’t think either one of them is necessarily going to ….” She trailed off, and I recognized a note of disappointment in her voice. “I’m feeling some type of way about it.”
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