Not everyone was lukewarm. Gail Wiesner, a Raleigh resident, said she’d been a superfan since she lived in Arkansas during the days when Clinton was first lady, and proudly wore an “I voted for Hillary’s husband” button in 1992. But time and again, the rationales voters offered for supporting Hillary turned out to be rationales against voting for Trump. Jose San Martin told me he “loved” Clinton. But when I asked what attracted him, the conversation just as quickly turned to Trump. San Martin, who was sporting a “Duke Class of 2020” shirt, lives in Fuquay-Varina, south of Raleigh, but he’s originally from Mexico. Right now, he’s on a student visa, but wants to become a citizen—and for that, “I need a Democrat,” he said. San Martin didn’t mince words about Trump. “I don’t agree with anything he does,” he said. “He’s a racist. People say he’s not, but come on, he wanted to ban all Muslims!”

One might expect that people at a Trump event would be unequivocal about their candidate. But they have their hesitations, too. At a big rally in Greensboro last week, one woman wouldn’t to let me quote her by name. “I’m not ready to come out as a Trump supporter yet,” she said with a sheepish grin. (Although Trump has been using the media as a punching bag for months, something had changed at this event. More than at any other Trump rally I’ve covered, attendees declined to talk to me, and one of Trump’s biggest applause lines came when he boasted of refusing to credential reporters from The Washington Post.)

The recognition of how toxic Trump’s reputation has become isn’t lost on his strong supporters. “There’s never going to be a perfect candidate, but Donald Trump is the strongest candidate out there,” Bijan Vaziri told me off the bat. “Donald Trump says some out-there things—we all know he does—but he’s not a career politician.”

More than anything, Vaziri was skeptical of Clinton, who he viewed as essentially dishonest. Like many attendees, he was a veteran, having served in the Marines. He was frustrated by a culture of “political correctness” that he blamed on leftists who were unwilling to respect differing opinions. But he wasn’t a typical small-government conservative. He lamented the state of the economy in his hometown of Winston-Salem, but he thought the answer wasn’t the private sector, but making the public sector better. “What I believe it is, over the last two generations, we’ve said, ‘Forget the government,’” he lamented. It was time for people to come together to repair the national project, he said. Vaziri had frustrations about the way the government was run, but he recognized its value. (He pulled up a pantleg to reveal a prosthesis he’d gotten at the VA.) In fact, he was thinking of going to law school and entering public service, and he spoke in crisp soundbites—with more discipline, perhaps, than his chosen candidate.