Read: The limits of Trump’s white identity politics

Axios has reported that the Trump team became interested in America’s 47th state after a recent rally in El Paso, Texas, lured numerous people with New Mexico addresses. Yet the El Paso metropolitan area includes much of southern New Mexico, including 100,000 people in the Las Cruces area who work, shop, and visit the Texas city, just 40 minutes away, daily.

Nevertheless, what makes Trump supporters here tick, based on my interviews, isn’t the president’s electoral strategy, or his policies and promises. It’s the identification that voters like Tuttle feel with the president himself. Even if Trump’s signature promises are unfulfilled—or barely started—he gets points for his pugilism, and any blame is deflected at others.

“I love that he is standing up to China,” one woman said, “even if it takes five years.” Said one man: “We need that border wall, and Congress has slowed it down.” (Both declined to give their name for this story.)

I worked as a reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, the statewide newspaper, for many years, beginning in the 1990s. Back then, Republicans in Northeast New Mexico were interested in fiscal prudence and healthy defense spending. In the southeast corner of the state, abutting Texas, were oil barons, workers, and ranchers. The state has voted only once for a Republican president in this century, George W. Bush in 2004. In other words, New Mexico Republicans have never been monolithic.

Today’s Trump supporters in the region are similarly dissimilar to one another: They are libertarians; disaffected Democrats; Latinos; evangelicals; suburbanites new to the state; and those from the southeast quadrant of the state, nicknamed “Little Texas.”

Standing patiently in line to get into the arena last night was a blonde woman in a black dress with bright turquoise jewelry: Susie Galea, the former mayor of Alamogordo, New Mexico. A conservative Republican, Galea crossed the aisle last year to support the Democrat Xochitl Torres Small over the Republican Yvette Herrell in the race for the state’s Third Congressional District. Galea went so far as to appear in a television advertisement for the Democrat, arguing that Herrell was corrupt. A long shot, Torres Small won.

“I think the president has strengthened our families,” Galea told me. “And I think, when you strengthen our families, that strengthens our nation and our society.”

How has Trump done that? I asked. His opposition to abortion, for one, she answered. Galea said that Trump has helped women. And she believes that he supports a pathway to citizenship for immigrants—though, of course, he has led a historic crackdown on undocumented immigrants since assuming office. Her hope for Trump in a second term? That he places more emphasis on education, namely putting more technology in classrooms.