The steak and eggs had just been served at Davie’s Chuck Wagon Diner, in the suburbs of Denver, when the discussion turned to conspiracy.

“They’re gonna steal the election,” said Charlene Hardcastle, a nurse in a “Colorado Women for Trump” T-shirt. “I think we’ve all seen that on the internet.”

There were nods and murmurs of agreement from the assembled Republican activists.

This was not so much a campaign to elect Donald Trump – it was an effort, in Hardcastle’s words, to “shake the foundations of democracy” should Hillary Clinton be declared the winner.

“We can get out the vote as much as we want, but if they recalibrate that voting machine, it’s like – forget it,” she said.

That was three months ago, the first of dozens of times I would hear similar complaints as I traveled the country with my colleague Tom Silverstone filming the Guardian’s Anywhere But Washington series, a 4,500-mile trip to eight mostly battleground states.

Trump has fueled talk of a rigged election in the final weeks of the campaign, but the loss of faith in America’s political system has been brewing for years and bestrides both sides of the political system.

Recently a Bernie Sanders supporter cornered me in a cafe in Tucson, Arizona, to explain how she believed voting machines controlled by Dick Cheney awarded Clinton an additional 3 million votes in the Democratic primary.

If there’s a single theme to emerge from my encounters in states as varied as Maine, Wisconsin and Nevada, it is abject disillusionment: a feeling everywhere that the country has been deprived of a serious election.

Instead of a conventional campaign, voters feel they have witnessed a Netflix political drama, an outlandish plot consisting of a Republican who is a former reality TV host, and unmasked as a sexual predator, and a Democrat who, courtesy of an aide’s husband’s sexting habit, cannot shake the shadow of an FBI investigation.

This is not politics – it is entertainment. The tragedy is that while America has been binge-watching this made-for-TV spectacle, many have failed to notice how this election has shifted the ground beneath their feet.

Inequality meets unrealistic promises

There are few places where the political landscape is turning to quicksand as quickly as McDowell, the poorest county in West Virginia.

A forlorn place dotted with shuttered coalmines and abandoned homes, McDowell was once a Democratic heartland but is quickly shifting allegiance – Barack Obama won there in 2008, but Mitt Romney took it by a wide margin in 2012.

This year, it was the county in which Trump won his highest percentage of primary votes. There are more than 3,000 counties in the US – none voted for Trump as overwhelmingly as McDowell, where he secured 91.5% of the vote.

How can it be that a tax-avoiding billionaire who flies around in a gold-plated private jet is most popular in a place where more than half the population lives off donations from a food bank?



One reason is that there is hope in his promise – dismissed by energy experts as unrealistic – to revive a coalmining industry that is no longer profitable. “We’re going to put the miners back to work,” he promised 12,000 people at a rally in West Virginia days before the state’s primary. “We’re going to get those mines open.”

But the roots of Trump’s popularity in places such as this precede his candidacy; indeed, they have been decades in the making.

Democrats in McDowell have lost faith in their party, which has run the local government their entire lives and controlled the White House for most of the past quarter-century.

“It’s our own fault,” said Martin West, the local sheriff, a Democrat who will vote for Trump. “You keep voting for people that never come to assist you.”

It’s our own fault. You keep voting for people that never come to assist you Martin West, sheriff in McDowell, West Virginia

The combined presidencies of Bill Clinton and Obama have done little to arrest soaring inequality in America, and some would argue both presidents accelerated it.



The situation in McDowell, by almost every measure, has gotten progressively worse throughout that period.

Life expectancy – the starkest gauge of all – has declined continually since 1981. The high rate of suicide and the impact of the opioid epidemic have combined to put McDowell’s rates of mortality on par with Ethiopia.

“None of us are that blind to think that Trump is going to save all of us,” said Brian Harrison, a coalminer who switched from Democrat to Republican eight years ago. “But at least there’s some hope.”

He added of Trump: “I think he’s more for the working person than Hillary is.”

Industrial decline hits the heartlands

There is evidence of blue-collar Democrats fleeing to Trump this election in other pockets of the industrial rust belt, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and New Hampshire.



Clinton still looks poised to win those states, all of which Obama won in 2008 and 2012. But even if Trump loses these places, his candidacy has peeled back the bandage to reveal Democratic heartlands reeling from industrial decline.

Democrats might reassure themselves that Trump’s populist candidacy will not be easily repeated – that no conventional Republican will abandon free-market principles, as the real estate mogul has done, to embrace protectionist trade policy.

But Trump’s appeal in parts of the country where manufacturing jobs have been outsourced overseas is not always connected to his specific opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership or denunciation of China’s currency manipulation.

Many voters just seem to appreciate his acknowledgment that towns and cities that were once booming are now in decay.

“People don’t understand trade policies,” said José Arroyo, who has been working with the United Steelworkers to stem the exodus of Democratic voters around Youngstown, an Ohio city surrounded by abandoned, crumbling factories.

“What they do understand is that they used to work at a place that paid them $80,000 a year, and now they’re working two jobs to make $30,000 a year.”

Ohio is one of the Obama states that Trump does look likely to win, in part through his appeal in places such as Youngstown to white, working-class voters without a college degree who previously identified as Democrats.

“I used to call myself and others robot voters,” said Leo Conway, a union worker and Democrat voting Republican for the first time in his life. “It’s the definition of insanity,” he said of his previous party loyalty. “You keep putting the same people in the same job and expect a different outcome.”

I met Conway at a Republican picnic in Ohio’s Mahoning County, known as ground zero for these crossover voters. But he was not drawn to Trump’s economic message so much as his muscular military rhetoric and his anti-establishment appeal. In fact, barely anyone mentioned the area’s industrial decline, which was most acute in the 1980s.

Instead, I heard people complain that illegal immigration is out of control, law and order is unraveling in the inner cities and government assistance is creating a lazy, welfare-dependent underclass.

There is often a racial connotation to all of these grievances, one that Trump has exploited, sometimes explicitly, but more often than not through an ugly brand of dog-whistle politics that has stoked racial tensions.

Those surfaced during my interview with Trump’s local campaign chair, Kathy Miller, who was forced to resign when we broadcast her comments.

“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault,” Miller said. “You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”



“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected,” she added. “We never had problems like this.”

How backlash could affect the ballot

Eight years after the election of the first black president, some have framed Trump’s rise as some sort of “backlash” by a silent majority of mostly white men who resent their fading political power.

There could be some merit to that analysis, but there seems to me an equal if not greater counterweight from the many people who feel offended and even threatened by the Republican nominee.

Most of America is not in decay, and its increasingly diverse population creates a built-in advantage to any Democrat seeking the White House.

The challenge for Clinton was always going to be reconvening the broad coalition of millennials, college-educated voters and minorities that twice helped elect Obama.

Clinton, hamstrung by controversy, especially over her use of a private email server for government business, has struggled to articulate a positive vision of the future that could inspire these voters.

The conversations I have had in supermarkets, churches and county fairs have made plain that while many voters see Trump as an almost comical liability, their concerns with Clinton take a more somber tone.

She has frequently been described to me as untrustworthy, corrupt and uncaring, the epitome of a rotten political establishment.

I’ve seen neighborhoods across America, from the affluent suburbs of Waukesha, Wisconsin, to Denver’s sprawling suburbs, where well-kept lawns are dotted with “Hillary for Prison” yard signs.

“That’s where she belongs,” said Bob Howe, who had one such sign outside his hunting lodge in Maine. “Frigging lying, cheating, thieving.”

In the face of such distrust, Clinton’s greatest asset has turned out to be her opponent, the only major presidential candidate in modern history who has been more unpopular than her.



Trump’s extraordinary campaign has scrambled the electorate, winning unusual allies while giving many of the people I met a reason to vote.

There was the woman in an Ohio restaurant who showed me a picture of her two-year-old son who is partially deaf and has cerebral palsy.



Her voice shook and her eyes welled with tears as she recounted the rage she felt watching Trump mocking a disabled person on TV. “I’m not a violent person,” she said. “But I just felt like strangling him.”

There was the barber in Milwaukee, a city reeling from a succession of police shootings of black men, offended by Trump’s claim African Americans like him have “nothing to lose”. “We have a lot more to lose,” he said, shaking his head. “Our lives.”

And there are the many people like Carmela Perez, a Mexican American who has raised seven children in a mobile home on the outskirts of Las Vegas and has dedicated the past four months to electing Clinton.

If the polls are correct, it is people like her – Latinos and women – who are poised to support the Democratic nominee in record numbers this election.

Perez took a leave of absence from her job washing dishes at the MGM casino to join Clinton’s army of ground operatives in Nevada after she heard the Republican nominee insult Mexicans.

She said Trump’s comments about women steeled her determination, canvassing for Clinton six days a week in the desert heat. By election day, she will have knocked on 5,000 doors.

“For me, this is personal,” Perez said. “I feel very offended, wounded. He stabbed me in my guts.”