WASHINGTON—The very first Donald Trump supporter I met in person, aside from the guys at his surreal Trump Tower launch speech who may or may not have been paid actors, was a woman named Ann Marie Ashworth.

It was October 2015. Trump’s rivals and much of the media were still treating him as something between a fad and a joke. I didn’t know what to think. When he scheduled a rally at a NASCAR track in Richmond, Va., a couple hours from my home in Washington, I decided to go talk to some of the people who had propelled him to the top of the Republican polls.

Why was this happening? How was this happening?

Ashworth, a diminutive 75-year-old, explained it to me.

“He’s going to bring this country back the way it should be,” she said, staring at me with a sudden intensity. “He’s going to save Social Security. He’s going to help our vets. He’s going to get rid of the Chinese and the Mexicans.”

Well.

I talked to a man in a Confederate flag shirt. I talked to a girlfriend-boyfriend pair of white supremacists. I talked to a professional woman who fell in love with Trump by watching The Apprentice. And on my way back to the car, I bumped into a pair of seniors, the charming Faye and Tommy Croker, who knew from “the computer” that Barack Obama was a Kenyan.

They were 66 and 67, and they had never voted before. Now, for Trump, they were going to. Had I gone on the computer and seen how tall his impenetrable wall was going to be?

I drove back to my apartment that night having reached two conclusions. One, this was crazy. Two, this was not going away.

The 2016 presidential election never got more normal. Over the course of 16 months, I spoke with voters in 17 states, filling rental cars with McDonald’s cartons and my digital recorder with some of the most alarming, most amazing notes I’d ever taken.

I settled a controversy over whether Trump had ejected crying baby from a rally. (No.) I had to ask a campaign spokeswoman if her candidate had mental health issues. (Response: “Perhaps the healthiest individual….”) I walked past a protester in a duck costume, past Apprentice villain Omarosa, into a gaudy hotel, named for the candidate, for a speech in which he made international news by acknowledging that the president of the United States was born in the United States.

It was all-consuming, the kind of election that infected your vocabulary. To my tremendous chagrin, tremendous, I started talking a tiny bit more like Donald Trump.

I thought Toronto’s 2014 mayoral election was the weirdest race I’d ever cover. This one made it look — as someone might say — like a baby.

When you’re a Canadian reporter in America, you’re not ferried around on a campaign plane and deposited in a media pen. Instead, you — I — crank up the Blue Rodeo, guzzle a gas station Slurpee for the late-night sugar, and drive. Which means you have less access to insiders but more access to outsiders.

In New Hampshire, I watched the primary results from a couch in a 226-year-old farmhouse: “Breakwind Farm,” owned a couple of Rand Paul fans who made a product called “Fartootempting Baked Beans.” In rural North Carolina, I ate curry at a Thai restaurant beside a Christian who believes that devout failed NFL quarterback Tim Tebow is both persecuted and the next big baseball star. When my car somehow sunk into a ditch in a muddy parking lot in Virginia, three Trump supporters volunteered to push me out.

America is still pretty great.

Whenever I tweeted I was at a Trump event, I received condolences in response. Truth be told, I was having a blast. Trump was unpredictable and entertaining, pure newspaper gold. And most of his supporters were friendly and respectful, even if they believed objectionable things, even if they professed to hate The Media.

At least to a white guy.

I have never been more aware of my colour and gender than when I was covering Donald Trump. Stuff you had the privilege of mostly ignoring, if you were white and male and comfortable, Trump made you address. Racism, sexism, income inequality, elitism, sexual assault — his campaign forced national conversations about all the things it is easier to not talk about.

So maybe that was good. But what I’ll remember most is the fear.

I was used to elections in which people worked themselves into a frenzy while arguing the merits of underground rail transit instead of above-ground rail transit. This election was existential. Everywhere I went, there were people terrified that they were about to lose their very place in the country.

The week of the Texas primary, I met with Ali Zakaria, a Muslim lawyer with a bouquet of American flags in his office. He had never wondered, until Trump came along, whether his teen son would be massacred while playing basketball at his Houston mosque.

A couple days later, I went to the suburban house of Wendy Ramirez, an accomplished university graduate and a DREAMer: an immigrant brought illegally to the United States as a child. Trump wanted her family deported. After the interview was over, she asked me, without a hint of hyperbole, if I knew how she could move them to Canada if he won.

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There was fear on the other side, too — of being left behind, economically and culturally. At a diner in blue-collar Scranton, Pa., I heard 2008 Clinton supporter turned 2016 Trump supporter John Drobnicki talk about how Obama-era outsourcing had cut his wages in half. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Ron Frerick, 72, didn’t hesitate when I asked what he liked about Trump: he would bring the country back to how it was in the ’50s and ’60s.

“Well, not ’60s — ’50s,” Frerick clarified. “That’s what I like.”

I learned quickly, though, that it was a mistake to attribute Trump’s popularity to economic anxiety or simple nostalgia — or even, as some liberals contended, to simple bigotry. Something had happened to the Republican electorate. Whether it was the fault of talk radio or Fox News or new-wave right-wing outlets like Breitbart News or Republican leaders themselves, something had gone haywire in the conservative information stream, something that will take years to fix.

No matter where I went, it sometimes felt like the party had been taken over by conspiracy-monger Alex Jones. I heard over and over that the Clintons had killed Vince Foster, the White House lawyer who died by suicide in 1993. I heard over and over about shadowy “globalists” plotting to seize America from Americans.

I spent a January day following Ted Cruz around tiny towns in rural Iowa, from the bar that smelled like fried pickles to the library of a community college, where a smiling supporter handed out instructions to an adorable chant: “Ted, Ted, he’s the man/He’s the man to lead this land!” American democracy at its quaintest.

I interviewed the chant leader after Cruz left. She was as sweet as she looked.

And she believed Barack Obama was conspiring with the New World Order and the United Nations and the …

I tuned her out until she finished.

It was harder to escape the flood of online nonsense from the trolls of the racist, Trump-loving “alt-right.” When I noted on Twitter that Trump’s disparagement of Muslims would have produced more outrage had it been targeted at my Jewish people, someone responded with an insult of “my” country — Israel. It was the first time in my life someone had ever said something anti-Semitic to me.

Covering the Democratic primary was like stepping into an alternate universe of pleasantness. At Hillary Clinton rallies, the lusty masculine chants of the Trump crowds — “build that wall,” “lock her up,” “drain the swamp,” “CNN sucks” — were replaced by a smiling feminine roar: “Woooo!” Somehow, the Republicans had decided to let their opponents become the party of optimism and good cheer.

Not that all Democrats were thrilled. I stood on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol last April, with just a couple dozen reporters, as Bernie Sanders ambled out of the Senate to begin his candidacy with these immortally grumpy words: “We don’t have an endless amount of time. I’ve got to get back.” I took him seriously enough to be there, but at no point did it occur to me that the obvious sincerity of this frizzy-haired leftist would pose a formidable challenge to the well-oiled Clinton machine.

Just as I didn’t understand the fury of older white conservatives, I didn’t understand the unease and discontent of progressive white millennials. Nor the extent to which these young people, and so many others, were unenthused by the history-making potential of Clinton’s candidacy. “It would be great to see a woman,” I heard again and again, “but it has to be the right one.”

Clinton crowds, diverse and upbeat, looked much more like the America I knew. But they weren’t wholly representative, either. There was another group of voters I kept encountering: the one filled with people who wouldn’t be caught dead at either a Trump rally or Clinton rally.

The America of 2016 is absolutely as polarized as you’ve read. But all the stories about the two warring tribes haven’t communicated just how many people are united in discontent with both options.

There was the Georgia Republican who said she cried herself to sleep thinking about her dreadful choice. There was the South Carolina independent who asked me, in all seriousness, if I could get Trump and Clinton to agree to resign so Mike Pence and Tim Kaine could take their place. There was the Pennsylvania 23-year-old who told me Tuesday that she wasn’t voting for this reason: “Hillary’s a liar and Trump’s an idiot.”

The most eye-popping thing I heard this year was not from Trump devotees. It was from people who were wavering about whether to vote for him — because he was just, at the moment, a tiny bit too rough around the edges. Around the country, I heard thoughtful people say they’d be fine with him if he just read from a TelePrompTer a little more often.

As America continues to get more racially diverse, it will get harder and harder for a demagogue to get elected on white grievance. Even in 2016, the electoral map is rough for Trump. This time, though, I believe a habitual liar promising to commit war crimes and stop all Muslims at the border might be leading in the polls, despite everything, if he had been 25-per-cent gentler.

Not 50-per-cent gentler, though.

In retrospect, the funniest night of the campaign was the night I watched John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, try to win a Republican primary by being a nice guy. At his 100th town hall in New Hampshire, he promised to win the hearts and minds of Democratic congresspeople by making birthday phone calls to their moms.

It was cute. Everybody laughed. Three days later, Trump beat him 35 per cent to 16 per cent, and that was that. Republican voters, obviously, were not in the mood for kindness.

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