Instead, he voted against Washington fecklessness and corruption, which he saw as embodied by Hillary Clinton, in his eyes the ultimate establishment candidate, who was doubtlessly going to win anyway, he thought.
“I thought there was no way that Trump could beat Hillary, right up till the end,” said Miller. “Right up to the night before.”
That was almost a year ago, now. Enough time for the surprise of Trump’s victory to sink in. Enough time to get a look at Trump in the White House, and to assess his performance as president.
Miller, 79, a Democrat and the former mayor of Bangor, Pennsylvania, has not been impressed by Trump – but it would be inaccurate to say that Miller is surprised, either, because, as he puts it, he never mistook Trump for a political savior. It is a view shared by many of the customers at his paint store, he said.
“Trump’s losing support because of his, of the complete stupidity – you know, maybe we should give him an IQ test with others,” Miller said, referring to Trump’s recent challenge to secretary of state Rex Tillerson to compare IQ tests. “People are getting fed up with that. But there’s not much of an alternative. We’ll elect someone in four years. So.
“There is a sense of regret.”
Conversations with Trump voters as the anniversary of the 8 November election nears do not typically reveal such regret. Most people who voted for the president are still solidly behind him, at least in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, which voted for Barack Obama twice before opting for Trump last fall.
For our series The Promise, the Guardian has been interviewing Trump supporters in Northampton since before the inauguration, to gauge whether support for the president in this key bellwether county is changing, and to find out whether Trump voters feel that the president has delivered on his promise to Make America Great Again.
Trump’s core supporters in the region are still with him, although the president appears to have slipped with impulsive or protest voters like Miller, said Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College in neighboring Lehigh County.
“There’s a difference, right?” said Borick. “There’s the Trump voter, and there are people who voted for Trump last year. And Trump voters are still every bit as passionate, or even more so, than they were last year in Northampton County. Those folks are going nowhere.
“But there are those folks that made the call last fall – because they didn’t like Clinton, or they just wanted to blow things up – now a year in, that aren’t enamored any more. They kind of have a bit of buyer’s remorse.”
Are there enough of those “buyer’s remorse” people to reverse the presidential result and hand Trump a defeat in Northampton, if the election were held again tomorrow?
“I think it would be a very close race,” said Borick.
In 2012, Obama beat Romney by 6,160 votes in the former steel industry heartland of Northampton County as he comfortably held on to the state of Pennsylvania. Last year, Clinton nearly matched Obama’s performance in Northampton, but she lost the county by 5,461 votes as Trump won some Democrats and saw a surge in first-time and dormant voter turnout on his way to narrowly winning the state by 0.7% of the votes cast.
It’s too early to judge the battle lines for future elections. But it’s clear that the sense of disillusionment that created an opening for Trump in places like Northampton did not go away, and may only have deepened, with his victory.
Jeff Fox, 57, of Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, said he reluctantly voted for Trump “given the situation”. But Fox lamented the “lack of civility” in politics, frustration with which drove him to switch his party registration from Republican to Independent before last year’s election.
“I have very rarely heard the real reason I think that Donald Trump won,” said Fox.
“People just got fed up.”
