Trump vs. Harris Divides a Marriage, a Town and America on Election Eve

The Washington Post / Hannah Knowles

16:46 JST, November 5, 2024

DULUTH, Ga. – Cathy and Ken Parker walked up to their polling site unable to understand each other. The married couple of 34 years had always disagreed on politics, but in this election, the rifts ran especially deep.

Ken, 71, said Donald Trump stands for law and order.

“Really?” replied Cathy, 63, who is supporting Kamala Harris. “How many times has he been convicted?”

When Ken said he thinks the government was behind an attempt to assassinate Trump this summer, a baseless theory, Cathy jumped in with her own thoughts on the gunman: “He should have been a better shot.”

A deeply divided nation is headed to the polls to elect its 47th president after an unprecedented campaign encompassing ugly insults, two assassination attempts, a criminal conviction for Trump, a surprise nomination for Harris and constant misinformation that has left voters split over basic facts. On the eve of the election, Americans on both sides are largely motivated by fear of the other, dozens of interviews show.

Some warn of doomsday under Harris – as Trump declares the United States “an occupied country,” warns of a migrant “invasion” and attacks opponents he calls “the enemy from within.” Others are convinced that a second Trump term would do irreparable damage to government institutions and democracy, echoing Harris’s case that Trump is unstable and “out for unchecked power.”

Voters are hopeful: some for an expansion of abortion rights or for a woman of color to hold the world’s most powerful job; others for a crackdown at the border or a return to an era when their money went further.

But they are also scared of what will happen, even if their candidate wins. They worry about chaos and violence – another assassination attempt, another brazen effort to discredit a Trump loss, another mob like the one that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after believing Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“The people that were angry in 2020 are going to be twice as angry, especially if he takes that same stance,” Cathy Parker said. “I just see almost a civil war-type situation.” She thinks Trump “preaches nothing but hate.”

Ken Parker was already raising suspicions about the vote as the couple went to cast their ballots recently, echoing Trump’s baseless predictions.

“I hope it ain’t fixed,” he said. Cathy shot him a look: “Do you truly believe that?”

“I said I hope it’s not fixed,” Ken repeated. The people in power, he speculated, “don’t want to lose the power they have, and they will do whatever it takes, in my opinion.”

The Parkers joke about their differences. They tease each other. But they’ve given up trying to change the other’s mind.

“No reason to talk when someone’s not listening,” Ken said.

“He believes the lies. I don’t,” Cathy said.

And with that, they went inside to vote.

‘You asked for it, this is what you get’

Sitting in the back room of the auto shop she oversees seven days a week with her husband, Lynne Gold longed for a time she felt politics wasn’t so full of vitriol.

The Golds are staunch Trump supporters. “It’s about what he can accomplish,” Lynne said, “and it’s what he accomplished before.” They viewed Harris as incompetent, worried about undocumented immigration and hoped Trump would crack down at the border.

“Whatever the outcome is, either way, the political divide needs to come down,” said Lynne, in her 50s.

Their front yard in Montrose, Michigan – a small town in the redder, rural outreaches of Genesee County – sends a very different message, however. There’s a Trump sign – and a Biden-Harris sign designed to look like it’s full of bullet holes.

The Golds said they were just responding to someone who slashed their old Trump sign. “You asked for it, this is what you get,” David Gold said.

Trump has hurled insults, threats and falsehoods at his critics. But the Golds don’t blame him for the ugliness in politics. And they worry for his life.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s another assassination attempt between now and Election Day,” David said.

On his desk was a Trump bobblehead – a Christmas gift from his late son, a Democrat. David likes to say he “got indoctrinated in D.C.,” but he said they were always able to have a civil conversation.

David, who tends to assume that Trump has the best of intentions and brushes aside his controversies, rolled his eyes at the news that Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, had called his old boss a “fascist.” David could believe that Trump told Kelly something about wanting generals like Adolf Hitler’s, but he thought it was taken out of context. (Trump has denied saying it at all.)

As for Trump’s comment that he would be a “dictator” on “day one”: “I think what he meant by that is he’s getting right down to business.”

‘Those people don’t look like me’

Yashica Robinson was skeptical about both Harris and Trump. But one question helped guide her: “Who is going to understand me more?”

There was Trump, whom Robinson saw as catering to a richer, Whiter swath of America. “Those people don’t look like me,” said Robinson, a Black woman in her 40s. “They don’t have the bank account that I have.” She knew he had bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade.

“That doesn’t help me,” she said.

And then there was Harris, a Black and Indian American woman who talked about growing up in a middle-class family and, just like Robinson, belonged to a historically Black sorority. A woman who said she supports changing federal law to guarantee the right to an abortion.

“When I am elected, I will walk in on your behalf with my to-do list,” Harris said at a rally in Atlanta over the weekend, vowing to bring down costs and protect “the fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”

Women voters are propelling Harris, polls show, reflecting a nationwide gender gap, with men strongly backing Trump. Democrats are hoping that Harris’s closing argument will help energize women to turn out in large numbers for her in battleground states such as Georgia.

Inside the polling place in the Atlanta suburbs, Robinson said a prayer – out loud – that “whoever gets chosen realizes it’s about us. Not politicians. Not rich people. Us.” She picked Harris but thought she had a lot to prove.

“What. Are. You. Going to. Do. To. Help. Us,” Robinson said emphatically. “I’m gonna hold her feet to the fire.”

Robinson was struggling. Everything was expensive. She was reeling from death after death in her family. She thought the moldy-smelling air in the place she was staying was triggering her asthma.

“There’s people with real stuff going on right now,” she said. “We need a leader.”

She was voting in Gwinnett County, a racially diverse area that lurched to the left in 2020 and helped flip Georgia blue. Many others streaming in and out of the polling place were deeply concerned about Trump. They had heard about the warnings from former Trump aides and the GOP nominee’s suggestion that the military could be deployed to handle “the enemy from within.”

“I think if she wins – ” began Carol Welch, 71.

“When she wins -” interrupted her friend Pam Tuggle.

“ – when she wins,” Welch said, “all hell’s gonna break loose. Just like it did before.”

Clashes in a ‘Certified Welcoming City’

Planted just across the street from Trump’s town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, two friends set up with Harris-Walz signs.

The town itself was liberal, a Democrat-led “Certified Welcoming City” with a long history of absorbing refugees and immigrants. But the county around it was decidedly red. Now people from all over Pennsylvania were flocking downtown to see Trump – and Douglas Wickenheiser and Tom Hassler, both Lancaster residents, wanted to stand as a counterpoint.

“Take care of the neighbor, not build walls,” said Hassler, 75, describing the message at his church, where he had spent the morning. Wickenheiser, 67 – who met Hassler through their kids’ little league – showed up in a “TRUMP IS A SCAB” T-shirt, displaying an insult for someone who crosses a picket line during a labor strike.

They lamented Trump’s political durability. “Trump comes out of that bus and said what he says, but everybody overlooked it, you know?” Wickenheiser said, alluding to a leaked recording in which Trump bragged about groping women.

“Deny, deny, deny,” Hassler said.

“And he’s still getting away with too much,” Wickenheiser said. “They should have shut him up a long time ago. Actually, I think he should be in Gitmo.”

Politics was personal for Wickenheiser: He said he hasn’t spoken with his brother since 2016, when they clashed over Trump. “Give the man a chance,” he remembers his brother saying; Wickenheiser thought he’d fallen for “propaganda.”

Now similar divisions were playing out in the street.

“Pagans are down the block!” someone yelled as they walked by. “Pagans are down the block!”

Melissa Keagy, 51, wandered by and joined the protest. “No rapists for president!” she yelled at passing cars, alluding to the civil case in which a jury found Trump liable for sexual assault.

A truck stopped in the road, and a man leaned out of the window. “She’s not gonna win,” he said.

“Oh, she’s gonna win,” Keagy said.

“Close the border!” the driver said.

“Yay rapists,” Keagy said as he drove off.

Across the road, Trump supporters were upbeat about the chances of a second term. But they also spoke darkly about the possibility of a Harris presidency. For months Trump had portrayed a country under attack with false and exaggerated claims, saying he would “rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered” and predicting that Harris would bring another “Great Depression” and even “World War III.”

Big screens at Trump rallies sometimes showed pictures of tattooed Latino men with the message, “Your new apartment managers if Kamala’s reelected,” a reference to Trump’s false claims that Venezuelan gangs were now running apartment buildings in Colorado.

Trump’s rhetoric on immigrants and Latinos is repellent to Pennsylvania voters like Maria Vializ, 62, who hated that Trump was scheduled to visit her majority-Latino city of Reading on Monday for one of his final stops. She heard about a warm-up speaker’s racist insult toward Puerto Rico at a recent Trump rally, and her friends, neighbors and others who don’t usually talk politics were similarly outraged. That moment was a “wake-up call, and a reminder that we cannot let him back in the White House,” said Vializ, who is Puerto Rican.

Other voters were focused on Harris.

“Kamala, it’s gonna be bad,” Grace Brady, 65, said to her friends after the Trump rally in Lancaster. “She had four, three and a half years, almost four now, what did she do? See the border?”

“Do you leave your door open at night?” she asked.

Rhonda McAlarney, 68, in a pink “Women for Trump” hat, said she agreed with another friend that the United States is “done as a nation” if Harris wins.

Asked if she saw the southern border affecting her community, Brady – a Filipino immigrant – said, “It will come.”

“They’re like roaches,” she said. “It will be right there.”

On Sunday, Trump was back in Lancaster County, addressing a rally from behind big panels of bulletproof glass. He dwelled even more than usual on his baseless claims of election fraud and said he wouldn’t mind if someone shot at the “fake news” assembled in the back.

Wickenheiser, the Harris supporter, was feeling better about her chances as he read about the event. Over the weekend, he went to see Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and other Democrats at a campaign stop hammering Trump over his warm-up speaker who had called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.” Wickenheiser had also heard about Trump’s embrace of a sexist insult toward Harris the previous night, as well as Trump’s violent rhetoric toward Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney a couple days earlier.

“The more and more he opens his mouth …” Wickenheiser said of Trump.