WARRENTON, VA.—“She’s a whore,” said Jim Brewster, a 62-year-old farmer, as he walked into the bakery for some coffee.

“Murderous, rotten, no-good, pious … bitch,” said Waldo Ward, a 60-something retiree, as he left Walmart with Halloween candy for the neighbourhood kids. “She should be taken out and shot. Absolutely.”

“I confess that I’m a Christian, and I shouldn’t hate, but it’s awful close,” said Charles Graves, a smiling 71-year-old recently retired from a career in logistics.

“It’s not like I’m not a Donald Trump fan,” said Rusty Gibson, 47, an electrician. “But it’s like good versus evil.”

This was not a Trump rally. This was not some downtrodden bastion of blue-collar rage. This was four guys going about their Saturday in a Republican-leaning high-income Virginia town an hour from Washington, D.C.

Each one of them said that they were not especially fond of Trump. But asked about his Democratic opponent, on the record, and they could barely contain their loathing or didn’t even try.

Hillary Clinton is favoured to win the presidency next week. She is also detested by much of the country. If she succeeds, she will almost certainly be the most disliked person ever elected.

Her numbers have improved in the wake of the three debates. But she is still seen unfavourably by 54 per cent of the public, compared to just 44 per cent who see her favourably.

And “unfavourably” doesn’t begin to describe the intensity of the antipathy.

“America is Flight 93, and Obama and Clinton have hijacked it,” said Ed Gordo, 62, a retired military man, as he stood outside a yarn shop with his dog.

Clinton does worst with white men without a college education. In a recent ABC poll, she tied Trump, 42 per cent to 42 per cent, with men with degrees; with non-college men, she had 29 per cent to his 60 per cent.

Her chief problem is the widespread perception that she is deceitful and dishonest. Her dreadful numbers — only about a third of Americans say she is honest and trustworthy — have been hampered by the never-ending email controversy that roared back to life on Friday.

“I just don’t believe a thing she says,” said Scott Steinmeyer, 55. “There’s no doubt that America could benefit from a female president. I don’t think that’s her.”

It remains entirely unclear what exactly was found, during the FBI’s investigation of Anthony Weiner’s sexting, to prompt director James Comey to inform Congress that his team was now going to conduct additional investigation of Clinton’s emails. It remains unclear even whether the newly located emails were Clinton’s.

But the email saga has reinforced perceptions about her that were formed more than 20 years ago. In Warrenton’s quaint Old Town on Saturday, people could immediately — though often inaccurately — describe controversies dating back decades: the Whitewater real estate imbroglio, her big gain trading cattle futures in the 1970s, most frequently her handing of the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Democrats point out that Clinton was not found to have committed any wrongdoing. The people who despise her say her record is incompetence, selfishness and corruption.

“Look at the evidence. Just look at it,” said Bill Price, 69, a retired television engineer with a handgun in his shirt pocket. “She’s as dirty as the day is long. It’s so obvious. A blind man on a fast horse in a dense fog could …” He trailed off. “Trump is not great. Trump is all we have.”

Some of the criticism from Clinton-despising men in Warrenton was either tinged with sexism or openly sexist. Gil Troy, McGill historian and author of Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady, said sexism is one of the main reasons for her perception issues. But he said they cannot be blamed on that alone.

“She has a long history of saying dumb things or doing dumb things,” Troy said. Another factor, Troy said, is the “deep, effective anti-Clinton machine that is irrational in its hatred and that takes any one of their minor missteps and blows it up into a major scandal.”

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The effects of this conspiracy industry were on vivid display in Warrenton.

Among other things, three of 15 men interviewed said Clinton had something to do with the 1993 death of White House lawyer Vince Foster. (She did not. It was a suicide.) Ward, who wants Clinton shot, acknowledged that he “can’t prove” this. But he is comfortable with his “assumption.” Clinton, he said, is a sociopath.

“She’s totally incapable of telling the truth,” he said. “And there’s a distinct possibility she might not even know what the truth is.”

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