Donald Trump’s 2016 election win may have been propelled by white working-class men, but another key group in that narrowest of victories was white women with college degrees.
After heavily favoring Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, enough of these voters broke ranks to help Trump over the line, tipping the balance in crucial states in the midwest and elsewhere.
In 2020, however, after four years of tumult, there are signs that Trump has not managed to hang on to that constituency.
“I really failed my fellow American citizens,” said Claudia Luckenbach-Boman. “I’m extremely disappointed in myself, and sometimes I am really afraid to talk about it.
“If I were to vote again for Donald Trump in 2020, it would be just as much a failure as an American, but also a failure as a human being.”
Luckenbach-Boman was a 19-year-old college student in November 2016. From a Republican-voting family, she cast her ballot for Trump in Wisconsin, a swing state which he won by just 22,748 votes.
Voting for her first time, Luckenbach-Boman said she believed Trump, as a political outsider, was the change the US needed. She quickly changed her mind.
“It was just a few months into his presidency that I realized the biggest mistake I could have made as an American citizen was not informing myself,” Luckenbach-Boman said.
“I started hearing that the economy was great. And I started looking more into that, and I realized that the economy is great for the 1%, and for the people who aren’t really working to make the country function on a day-to-day basis.
“I watched a lot of people in my life who still support Trump still flounder in finances.”
Despite her regret, Luckenbach-Boman said that vote had “changed her life”. She decided to focus on politics at college, and has worked on two campaigns to register voters this year.
She will vote for Biden in Michigan – another key swing state Trump narrowly won in 2016 – and harbors hopes of one day running for elected office.
Luckenbach-Boman is not alone. Polling shows Biden ahead of Trump by an average of 6.4% in Wisconsin, and 8.4% in Michigan. The swing isn’t just down to white women with college degrees, but their switch has hurt Trump’s chances.
In 2016, Trump still lost this group, but narrowly. Exit polls showed him just seven points behind Clinton among college-educated white women. In June this year, a New York Times poll found Trump trailing Biden by 39%.
It’s a switch that could help propel Biden to victory in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the state where Biden grew up, where he leads Trump, and where he is winning former Trump voters.
“I just want to apologize to the world,” said Julie, a fraud manager from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who asked that the Guardian not use her real name.
“I feel so guilty for having a part in voting this moron in.”
Trump clinched a narrow victory in Pennsylvania, beating Clinton by 44,292 votes. For Julie, it was a combination of concern over healthcare and distrust of Clinton that swung her towards Trump.
“I didn’t think Hillary was honest about wanting to help women,” Julie said.
“I just found her very unbelievable, and Trump kept hitting on the one thing that was important to me – decreasing healthcare costs. She did not.”
Julie, 51, has three children, two of whom have an autoimmune disease and another who has a chronic digestive disorder, while her husband was forced to stop working after becoming sick.
Her medical bills amount to $20,000 a year, and have put her deeply in debt. This year she finally managed to pay off her bills – from the year 2014.
“American healthcare just sucks, and he said he was going to change it, so I wouldn’t have such huge co-pays,” Julie said.
“By the second year he was in office, I realized my deductible didn’t go down at all. There was no change, whatsoever, my deductible was still astronomically high. And nothing was being done.”
While many Democratic voters are wary, given what happened in 2016, of predicting a Biden landslide, polls suggest that with less than 100 days to go till election day, even traditionally red states like Texas are not beyond the Democrat’s reach.
Monica Rey Haft, an insurance defense attorney who lives on the outskirts of Dallas, is among the ex-Trump voters hoping for a Biden win.
“I’m riddled with guilt,” she said. “I know it wasn’t my vote that single-handedly that put him there, but I think with a lot of Republicans it was a lack of checking into it, it was just falling down party lines, it was disgust and disdain for Hillary Clinton and her policies, and I regret that. I regret that I wasn’t more informed.”
Rey Haft has a son in the military, which also influenced her decision – Trump had repeatedly pledged to invest heavily in the armed forces.
She also thought Trump’s behavior before and during the election – he attacked a range of foes, particularly women, including Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz’s wife Rey Haft – would calm down.
“I thought it’s gotta be a shtick, it can’t be real. I thought he would behave like a human being, that he was gonna change.”
But “it wasn’t even the inauguration” before Haft changed her mind, she said.
“Over a few days, it was probably several tweets, or something I heard him say, I thought: ‘Oh my God. This is who this person is.’ And I immediately just thought he wasn’t going to be fit.”
The Trump administration’s separation of families at the border confirmed Rey Haft’s fears, and in November the lifelong Republican voter, has had it with the entire party. She’s voting a “straight Democratic ticket”.
In Oklahoma, a solidly Republican state that few expect Biden to win, Nancy Shively, a special education teacher who lives in the outskirts of Tulsa, is similarly disenchanted.
She has been donating to Democratic candidates, and like Rey Haft plans to vote all blue.
“I am more angry with the people in power who have enabled Donald Trump than I am with Donald Trump,” Shively said.
“Donald Trump is clearly a flawed human being. He’s incapable of having any kind of empathy or thinking about anybody other than himself. That being said, he could not have wreaked as much damage as he has without other people enabling him to do that.
“Every single Republican senator that failed to fulfill their constitutional oath is complicit. And so in my opinion, all of them, with the possible exception of Mitt Romney, need to never hold public office again.”
Shively, 61, has two autoimmune diseases, and is particularly concerned at the Trump administration’s determination to reopen schools in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak. In Oklahoma, where cases are surging after the state hurried to reopen, the situation is particularly dangerous.
“As embarrassed as I am that I voted for Trump, if I have to go back in the classroom, the fact that I voted for him and he has been such a disaster in dealing with this virus, that vote could mean I’m not gonna live,” Shively said.
It has been Trump’s failings on coronavirus – as of Tuesday the US had recorded more than 4.2m cases of Covid-19, and nearly 147,000 people had died – that came as the final straw for Shively.
She and her husband are in the process of updating their wills ahead of her return to school, and she is struggling to come to terms with the impact of her vote.
“There’s a straight line between his election and 140,000 dead Americans, that didn’t need to die. It just makes me incredibly sad. And regretful.”