No one would mistake Craig for a liberal. He worked in oil, drove a huge jeep, voted three times for Donald Trump, was buying bullets for one of his five guns and told me he believed transgender people were mentally ill.
Yet as we chatted in the heart of Texan cowboy country, this shaven-headed man went on to say that he thought the state’s abortion crackdown had gone too far, trans women should be free to live lives as they wished, the war in Iran was a terrible mistake and he felt betrayed by the “greedy” President he helped to elect.
“American politics has failed for sure,” he concluded. “We failed, somewhere along the way our lines got crossed, and I don’t know how the hell we get out of it.”
I heard such sentiments repeatedly during more than a fortnight speaking to voters in California and Texas – two of the biggest, most important and yet most different states in America – ahead of next month’s crucial mid-term elections.
I heard them from diehard Republicans, devoted Democrats, dithering independents. This feeling that politics had grown too extreme, Washington was failing voters, the political narrative was too focused on issues driving divisions instead of the daily concerns of voters confronting surging inflation, struggling schools and inadequate healthcare.
“I hate the way our country is going,” said one former soldier who voted for Trump in 2016. “There’ll always be divisions but they seem to be deliberately trying to separate us.”
I left feeling a little more optimistic for America’s future than after my previous trips reporting on United States elections over the past decade, which provoked dark thoughts about possibilities of civil strife in such a bitterly-divided nation swamped with firearms.
This might seem counter-intuitive when it is governed by the most destructive, immoral and venal president of my lifetime – and arguably at any point in its 250 years of history. And perhaps this sounds naive in this age of artificial intelligence, inequality and nativism, at a time when democracy looks so fragile and politicians so weak, while the super-rich often seem so arrogant and unshackled social media is so corrosive. Yet I found slivers of hope in the fervent desire of ordinary folks and wiser politicians to heal wounds and restore some semblance of unity.
One preacher, a lifelong Republican who admitted benefitting from Trump’s policies aimed at middle-class families, was so troubled by the president’s “moral character” and aggression towards his foes that he was considering switching sides. Another deeply religious Republican in his twenties wondered why the party spent so much time attacking trans people – who feature extensively in their election commercials – when they are such a small group in society and there are so many more important issues. A cancer surgeon, describing himself as a former George Bush Republican, said he was troubled to see uninsured people facing bankruptcy or having to sell homes when confronting serious health conditions. “I struggle with where we are right now,” he said. Others worried about Trump’s bullying of allied nations.
In California, even some opponents of a proposed one-off levy on billionaires spoke about the political dangers of failing to tackle mounting public anger over inequality and restrain the tax-dodging super-rich when living standards were flatlining for most families. I spent several days in San Francisco – seen for so long as a leftist hotbed while failing to tackle grotesque problems of addiction, housing and mental health blighting the city. It has ousted its left-wing district attorney and elected the pragmatic centrist Daniel Lurie as mayor, and after 15 months in office, he had an impressive 74 percent approval rating – way above any recent mayor at that stage.
This mood was reflected by some politicians and activists. A leading Republican told me “everyone with a working brain” agreed with the need to clamp down on illegal immigration – but went on to complain about the inhumanity of the ICE crackdown and political consequences of alienating a Hispanic community that comprises one in five Americans, shares their aspirational values and switched heavily to Trump in 2024. The progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joked “Woke 1 was crazy,” seen as her dismissal of the “defund the police” nonsense and identity politics. A Texan Democrat candidate for the House of Representatives said to me that the Republican focus on anti-Muslim and anti-trans rhetoric was failing since voters “don’t want to hate their neighbour” any longer.
These are, inevitably, snapshots – a handful of voices in a diverse, sprawling nation of 342 million people. More than one-third of voters remain bewitched by the MAGA cult, the hard-left is strengthening among disenchanted younger generations and a majority of US citizens lack faith in how their democracy is working. As I wrote last week, I fear that if Trump loses control of both houses next month his behaviour will grow even more contemptible and extreme. And there is every chance he could be succeeded by an even more dangerous populist – such as his vice-president JD Vance – or by a Democratic Party obsessed with revenge after his reign’s toxicity.
The US, founded by revolutionaries, is a violent place that has seen four of its 45 presidents murdered. Polls suggest many Americans fear civil war. We live in a disruptive era where people fear the fast pace of change and fall for the seductive simplicities of populist snake-oil sellers. In places such as Bosnia, Libya, Syria and Ukraine, people have often told me they never expected war to rip apart their lives, and I fear people in a major democracy might one day say the same. France – with its political paralysis, rampant extremism and violent discontent – looks increasingly precarious. Yet I left the US feeling this is a nation where many people want to pull back from the brink.
“It’s not the first time in history we’ve been so divided and we always managed to come together,” said one wavering Republican. Let us hope she is right.