Duane Miller realized at the “very last minute” last November that he was going to vote for a candidate he didn’t much like, Donald Trump. He did not even really vote for Trump, to hear him describe it.

Instead, he voted against Washington fecklessness and corruption, which he saw as embodied by Hillary Clinton, in his eyes the ultimate establishment candidate, who was doubtlessly going to win anyway, he thought.

Trump's big test: will his swing voters stay loyal? Read more

“I thought there was no way that Trump could beat Hillary, right up till the end,” said Miller. “Right up to the night before.”

That was almost a year ago, now. Enough time for the surprise of Trump’s victory to sink in. Enough time to get a look at Trump in the White House, and to assess his performance as president.

Miller, 79, a Democrat and the former mayor of Bangor, Pennsylvania, has not been impressed by Trump – but it would be inaccurate to say that Miller is surprised, either, because, as he puts it, he never mistook Trump for a political savior. It is a view shared by many of the customers at his paint store, he said.

“Trump’s losing support because of his, of the complete stupidity – you know, maybe we should give him an IQ test with others,” Miller said, referring to Trump’s recent challenge to secretary of state Rex Tillerson to compare IQ tests. “People are getting fed up with that. But there’s not much of an alternative. We’ll elect someone in four years. So.

“There is a sense of regret.”

Conversations with Trump voters as the anniversary of the 8 November election nears do not typically reveal such regret. Most people who voted for the president are still solidly behind him, at least in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Barack Obama twice before opting for Trump last fall.

For our series The Promise, the Guardian has been interviewing Trump supporters in Northampton since before the inauguration, to gauge whether support for the president in this key bellwether county is changing, and to find out whether Trump voters feel that the president has delivered on his promise to Make America Great Again.

Trump’s core supporters in the region are still with him, although the president appears to have slipped with impulsive or protest voters like Miller, said Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in neighboring Lehigh County.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Duane Miller, 79, the owner of Miller Paints in Bangor, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“There’s a difference, right?” said Borick. “There’s the Trump voter, and there are people who voted for Trump last year. And Trump voters are still every bit as passionate, or even more so, than they were last year in Northampton County. Those folks are going nowhere.

“But there are those folks that made the call last fall – because they didn’t like Clinton, or they just wanted to blow things up – now a year in, that aren’t enamored any more. They kind of have a bit of buyer’s remorse.”

Are there enough of those “buyer’s remorse” people to reverse the presidential result and hand Trump a defeat in Northampton, if the election were held again tomorrow?

“I think it would be a very close race,” said Borick.

In 2012, Obama beat Romney by 6,160 votes in the former steel industry heartland of Northampton County as he comfortably held on to the state of Pennsylvania. Last year, Clinton nearly matched Obama’s performance in Northampton, but she lost the county by 5,461 votes as Trump won some Democrats and saw a surge in first-time and dormant voter turnout on his way to narrowly winning the state by 0.7% of the votes cast.

It’s too early to judge the battle lines for future elections. But it’s clear that the sense of disillusionment that created an opening for Trump in places like Northampton did not go away, and may only have deepened, with his victory.



Jeff Fox, 57, of Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, said he reluctantly voted for Trump “given the situation”. But Fox lamented the “lack of civility” in politics, frustration with which drove him to switch his party registration from Republican to Independent before last year’s election.

“I have very rarely heard the real reason I think that Donald Trump won,” said Fox.

“People just got fed up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bath, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

In touch with Main Street

For many people who follow US politics from the coasts or overseas, Trump’s presidency can seem like a string of endless scandals. Trump personally promises $25,000 to the father of a fallen soldier which he then fails to deliver until it becomes a news story. Trump blasts football players for kneeling during the national anthem and calls press freedom “frankly disgusting”. Trump responds to a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, by saying “both sides” were responsible for ensuing violence. The list goes on.

But viewed from the other end of the telescope, the list isn’t a parade of offenses. It’s a list of examples of how Trump’s words or his intentions are repeatedly twisted by the media, which seem to regard the president as an enemy. It’s also a list of examples of how Trump is in touch with the pulse of Main Street, USA.

“With the national anthem, that’s a really big thing among the little people,” said Joe D’Ambrosio, a barber in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, who switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican so he could vote for Trump in the state’s closed primary.

D’Ambrosio said there was “no question” that the president was on the right side of the debate over National Football League players kneeling during the national anthem, which players have explained is a protest of police violence against African Americans but which Trump has framed, successfully it appears, as an attack on patriotism.

“What these guys ought to do is start looking at the History Channel and watch how many people died in our wars, and see what kind of contribution they made in the military,” D’Ambrosio said. “All they’re worried about is their millions.”

Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville had been similarly misinterpreted, many voters in Northampton told the Guardian.

“He isn’t the best public speaker,” said Fox. “And that’s Trump. That’s who he is. But I think to take what he said and twist it into, you know, ‘He supports racists and white supremacists’ – I mean, c’mon. No. Taking little soundbites – no. Not if you look at the whole picture.

“What I’m saying is that there are people that stir the pot and contribute to a lack of civility in discourse, that are blind to the fact that they themselves contribute to the lack of civil discourse, and blame it all on Trump, for example.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A worker arranges Halloween decorations inside an office in Bethlehem. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

Growth spurt

For 10 weeks every year, from mid-October through Christmas, the city of Bethlehem suspends an ordinance prohibiting the placement of debris in the street to allow for leaf clearance. Residents rake leaves off their lawns and into neat piles in the gutters, where eventually they are vacuumed up (at some volume) by city crews.

On a recent visit to town, the leaves were piled high streetside, and the ubiquitous American flags on porches had become crowded by seasonal Halloween company, in the form of carved pumpkins, fake cobwebs, giant plastic spiders and novelty skeletons.

By the numbers, the region is thriving in an America with Trump for president. Local cheers went up last month when the US commerce department released data showing that the Lehigh Valley, where Northampton is located, had set a record for economic output in 2016, with gains in transportation, warehousing, insurance, real estate and manufacturing. Warehouse workers are enjoying a bidding war for their services, the local Morning Call newspaper reported recently. Economic clouds linger, especially in the county’s northern reaches. But, in general, the picture is sunny.

Matthew Dietz, 40, is a corporate pilot flying out of the Allentown airport who grew up in the Slate Belt in the north of the county. He’s busy, but a lot of people in the Slate Belt have not regained a level of employment they knew when the region’s clothing mills and slate quarries were still booming, he said.

Though the area has not seen a direct economic bounce from Trump, Dietz said, support for him remains solid.



“I think those that were for him before the election are still there, and those that were against are still in that camp as well,” he said. “I agree with a lot of the stuff that he’s working towards, and of course if he wasn’t so vocal, I think he’d get a little bit more done. But that’s his style that he was elected on, so.

“Locally, we haven’t necessarily seen any new jobs or anything created up there, but obviously most everyone has retirement locked up in the stock market, which is great and gives them some security.

“On the local level, I’d say that’s the biggest impact that we’ve seen.”

Trump regularly touts the huge surge in the stock market since he was elected, and his supporters are likewise quick to point out the Wall Street gains as an example of how life is good under Trump.

“We’re full employment here, pretty much,” said D’Ambrosio, the barber. “The one thing that the little guy got for him is the Dow hit 23,000, and if you have a 401(k) [retirement savings plan], they see it growing. Even the guys that don’t like him say it’s the Trump effect.”

Frank Hawkey, who worked at Bethlehem steel for 31 years and who brands Trump a “psychopath”, said that at his current job as a bus driver, “tons” of Trump voters had grown sour on the president, though “you still have that few that say, ‘he’s doing a great job, look at the stock market.’

“Oh really? That’s who he wants to help. The people who have stocks. You know, ‘How many stocks do you have?’



“‘Well, I have none.’”

D’Ambrosio, who owns rental properties and does some investing on the side, is way more upbeat. “I’m beating my broker!” he said. “I’m actually doing so much better than my broker it’s unbelievable.”

Bruce Haines, a former steel executive and local businessman, said he remained a strong supporter of the president, but he was concerned “that the bold agenda will get watered down,” especially on taxes.

Haines was disappointed, he said, that Trump had caved to pressure from big business interests such as retail giant Walmart to remove a proposed border tax on US imports from his fiscal blueprint. Such a tax was needed, Haines said, to create the kind of renaissance in US manufacturing that Trump described during the campaign.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The coffee urns in the shape of the iron ore blast furnaces. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“I don’t think we’ve seen the dramatic changes with new manufacturing opening, coming back from overseas, for example, which you would hope to see – but it is going to take awhile,” Haines said. “With the exception of the border tax, I think he’s still trying to enact his bold agenda, and that’s why I support him.”

Trump voters who admit to impatience with the enactment of key planks in his agenda – tax cuts, border wall construction, healthcare reform, a travel ban – to a person blame Congress, not the president, for the delays.

Lance Prator, mayor of Portland in the extreme north-east of the county, said he wanted to see a border wall built “because you need to take care of the home front,” but he did not feel impatient about it.

“Even in Portland, we work at the speed of government,” Prator said. “I understand the speed of government. You can’t just magically wave a wand and build a wall. It’ll probably be 25 years after it’s all said and done that the first brick will be put down.”

‘Everything is an argument’

It was a nice day for a ballgame, but the IronPigs minor league baseball team had already lost their league and the season was long over. Instead, Coca-Cola baseball park in Allentown was hosting a forum for candidates in the county executive races to be held early next month.



Audience members grazed the buffet, sponsored by regional manufacturing giant Air Products, and drained coffee from urns the shape of the iron ore blast furnaces as seen in a mural at the ballpark, or in person six miles away.



Republican John Brown, the current Northampton county executive, spoke at the forum about open space preservation, bridge maintenance and the slump in the Slate Belt. Afterwards, he observed that a climate of acrimony that seemed to seep into life in the region a year or two ago had not fully dissipated.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest John Brown, the Northampton county executive. Photograph: Mark Makela/The Guardian

“Everything is an argument,” he said. “And I find that very interesting that that has not waned. That that has kind of expanded and accelerated. Things have taken on a much more abrasive nature. I’m not sure where it’s coming from.

Can Trump really make America great again? Read more

“You can point to Trump’s election, but it’s not always political, and it’s almost as if there’s still a wake that’s following everything, that still – everything else is still getting washed through, after years of being submerged. It’s something else.”

Jeff Fox, up in Pen Argyl, saw the same thing. “I think if Trump ran today, it would be messy,” Fox said. “I think the problem is – me personally – I believe that the problem really goes beyond politics. It comes to how we treat one another, how we converse with one another.”

For Duane Miller in his paint store, the picture was no rosier. “The people are disgusted,” he said. “They’re absolutely saying, we don’t care. Tax cut – who believes it? Healthcare – who believes it?

“The political climate for the average American, from my point of view here in the little town of Bangor, is one of disbelief. The American people don’t believe anything any more. And that’s where the apathy is overwhelming.”

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