CHARLOTTE, N.C.—At the Polished Nail Bar on Tuesday afternoon, the Cabernet was flowing and the TVs were on. A few women were inside in various stages of relaxation. Feet dipped in tubs. Nails painted in pastel colors. Above the bar itself, the television screens were full of tension. One showed Bill Cosby, hands shackled at the waist, not long after he was sentenced to three to 10 years for drugging and raping a woman. But before long, the news focused in on one story: whether the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court would survive allegations that he drunkenly groped a 15-year-old girl when he was a high school student more than 30 years ago. Still, on this day, not quite 48 hours before Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was scheduled to testify in Washington, the talk in the salon was casual and directionless. The news was on mute. And then, someone asked the women in the room whether they believed Kavanaugh’s accuser.

“I think it’s ridiculous. It’s high school. It’s high school,” said Maryann DeBlanco, as she got up from her chair. DeBlanco is in her late 40s. She has two sons, one 30, one 17. “If you had something to say, you should have said it, way before now. And I’m a sex abuse victim. So I’m saying it from that point of view.”

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A family member did it to her until she was 17, she told me. “It affected my life,” DeBlanco said, “and not in a good way. It’s kind of like Monica Lewinsky. She’s still being talked about as if she’s a horrible, horrible, horrible person. And she’s not. She’s a kid. And that was the most powerful man in the world,” she said of Bill Clinton. But as for Ford? “That did not affect that woman all these years,” she said, reacting to the California professor’s disclosure the alleged incident traumatized her. “As a sex abuse victim, this is bullshit.”

As DeBlanco talked, I could see a woman two chairs away watching us intently. Shelley Leibman didn’t want to get into an argument, so she waited until DeBlanco left. Leibman is 69, a retired teacher who worked in schools in the Bronx, upstate New York and here in suburban Charlotte. “I believe,” she said of Ford’s accusations. “Something happened to me a long time ago. Something bad, if not worse.” She wouldn’t go into detail. “I remember every second of what happened to me. I didn’t tell because it would have killed my father’s family, because it involved a cousin who was eight years older than me.” She said she held it in for a long time. Before that, “I always thought I was guilty. That I was a bad child.”

Leibman, unlike DeBlanco, did not vote for Trump. “Are you insane?” she said.

“When we moved here in 2001, it was mostly Republicans. It’s changed because of all he northerners that have moved here. We know some people that we’re friendly with that voted for Trump. We don’t understand it. No one we know now is on the fence.”

“Here” is Ballantyne, a planned development some 10 miles south of the skyscrapers of Uptown Charlotte. In 1994, it was just acres of hunting preserve, covered in scrubby loblolly pines and oaks. It grew to be extremely popular—the schools were good, the land was cheap—and became an enclave of upper-middle class homes, ballooning from a population of 9,500 in 2000 to more than 23,000 now. Most of Ballantyne sits in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District, which starts on the outskirts of Fayetteville and runs westward through the rural peach-producing counties along the South Carolina border. The district has been held by a Republican since 1963, but the voting precinct in which Polished Nail Bar sits was almost perfectly split in 2016 election, with Trump winning by just four votes. This year, a Democrat named Dan McCready is considered a tossup to win the open seat. “In this state, suburban counties are the most Republican areas, a natural home base for the GOP,” says Dr. Michael Bitzer, a professor of political science at nearby Catawba College. But, if those counties were, somehow, to start to swing more Democratic, it could be a sign of a coming blue wave. “The 9th is not the canary in the coal mine,” says Bitzer, “but it’s a harbinger of things to come.”

The key in this, and other suburban areas, may be women. Already, in other special elections, women have swung away from President Trump and Republicans, allowing Democratic challengers to win or, in other cases, run competitive races in places where they’d previously been assured of a rout. Places like, say, Ballantyne, where the Brett Kavanaugh story has been closely watched.

I talked to a dozen women here, asking for their thoughts about Kavanaugh and the accusations. Three of them brought up their own assaults, unprompted, while they tried to explain how they felt. The story seems to be tapping a nerve among women nationwide. This week, the National Sexual Assault Hotlin e reported a 57 percent increase in calls. And while a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll this week showed that support from conservative women for Kavanaugh had cooled considerably over the previous seven days, dropping from 60 percent in favor of confirmation to 49 percent, that that mounting defection was not yet evident in Ballantyne. Earlier this week, before Ford had issued her emotional opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, before Kavanaugh had choked up defending himself, the battle lines were drawn not by gender but by party lines.

Back inside the nail salon, Leibman paid her bill as Madelyn Warlick, wearing a white T-shirt with the word “Vote” screen-printed across the front, sat down at a bar, flicking at her phone which sat next to a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. Above her, the flat screen TVs flicked between political ads and the trial of Kevin Olsen, a former quarterback at UNC Charlotte (and younger brother of a Carolina Panthers tight end) who had been charged with raping his girlfriend. Warlick, 21, was purposefully tuning most of it out. She just graduated from a medical assistant program and was looking for a job. But the one story that had broken through was the Kavanaugh nomination. “I’ve been in a situation that’s very similar,” she told me. It was a college setting. A guy she was seeing. “One night after a party, he took me home, and he and his roommate sexually assaulted me. So, I definitely feel for the women that have been coming out, saying, this is something I’ve been through, but I haven’t been able to speak out about it because a woman’s voice is never heard. Or it’s rare for a woman to, like, be listened to. So that for me is a strong belief that a woman should have the right to come out and say, ‘Yes, this is what happened to me, and I think this person should be punished.’”

But so far that experience had not morphed into animus toward Republicans. She said she’s not sure who she’s going to vote for in November. And she has no reason to regret her decision in 2016 to vote for Trump.

“I grew up pretty much a Republican. My family, we just have very conservative beliefs,” she said. “I don’t have any problem saying who I voted for. I mean, I like him.”



***

On the other side of the shopping center from the nail salon, Deborah King was working on a waffle cone full of butter pecan ice cream. Her 7- and 10-year-old daughters were wildly playing in the outdoor food court in front of a Chipotle.

“I think it’s interesting to see what kind for treatment Ford is given,” she said, imagining the hearing to come. She wondered how far we’d actually come from the Clarence Thomas supreme court confirmation hearings 27 years ago, when professor Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. King is a trust attorney who lives in Marvin, a few miles away. She has voted Republican in the past but won’t do it now. “Their behavior,” she said, “shows a lack of understanding of how men and women interact.”

Then Deborah nodded toward her mother, Anne, who’s standing next to her, eating cookie dough ice cream. “She’s on the other side.”

“My husband served in Vietnam,” Anne said. “He was a communications officer, which meant he had to undergo an FBI investigation. So for Mr. Kavanaugh to get to this stage, he’s had to have an FBI investigation. So for some people to be calling for an FBI investigation at this point in time—he’s already had one.”

It’s partisan, Anne said. “The lawyer for her is a Democrat supporter,” she said, and then took her last bit of ice cream. “It’s true.”

“That doesn’t make her claims unfounded,” Deborah replied.

“I didn’t say that,” Anne said. “But if a senior Democrat member of the committee has had it for six weeks, why is it just now coming up?”

Anne, who owns a house cleaning company in Ballantyne, said she’s not dubious of the claim per se, just the timing. And, she said thinks Trump is doing a great job. Obama?

“He didn’t even respect the flag,” Anne said. “I think currently now the president and the Republicans are respecting…”

“How did Obama not respect the flag?” her daughter asked, interrupting.

“Look at the policies that he did.”

“What does that have to do with respecting the flag?”

“I don’t think he respected the flag!”

“You think Trump-- okay, okay,” Deborah said, giving up.

The argument stopped before it could pick up momentum. “It has to,” Anne said. “We’re family.”



***

On Thursday afternoon, after nearly nine hours of occasional tearful testimony, pointed questioning and bitter recriminations between senators, I checked back with DeBlanco and Leibman. Leibman’s arthritis was acting up, and she watched the senate hearing until 1:30. She fell asleep long before Kavanaugh was sworn in. “It was conducted extremely well,” she said, and she felt that the committee members showed respect for Ford. She still believes her. “I’m more certain now than before.”

She saw Ford’s calm poise, but not Kavanaugh’s fiery response. DeBlanco did, and it made her cry. She, too, is now more certain than ever before. “It’s not that I disbelieve that something happened to her,” she said. “I believe that she believes something happened to her.” But she doesn’t feel that what happened to Ford, if it’s true, she said, rises to the commonly-accepted level of assault. “I think there’s a lot of confusion, even with the term.”

At one point Thursday, Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona sex crimes prosecutor brought in by Republicans to question the witnesses, asked Kavanaugh a series of questions about the definition of sexual assault. She referred to a manual whose definition included what Ford said she had experienced. Did you grind your genitals on Dr. Ford, Mitchell asked Kavanaugh. No, he said. In the absence of a corroborating witness, that’s more or less where things wound up—with Ford asserting “100 percent” confidence that Kavanaugh was her laughing, drunken attacker and Kavanaugh emphatically, angrily denying every single assertion she had made from the same chair hours before.

That uncertainty did not seem to change the certainty of the women in Ballantyne, which, even after a painful and dramatic day of testimony, had not wavered an inch from where it was at the nail salon on Tuesday. On that day, after two hours of talking politics, the manager asked me to leave. “My customers are trying to relax,” she said. I thanked her and walked out, with the salon full of women, and the news still on mute.



Jeremy Markovich is a writer in North Carolina.