George Martin was searching for the word that best captured the vibe shift that has taken place between American voters and Donald Trump over the last couple of years. But first, as we shot pool at the Eastern Palace Club in Hazel Park, Mich., a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Martin wanted to explain why so many Black men had voted against America’s first Black female presidential nominee.

First, there was abortion, an issue that Kamala Harris made a centerpiece of her campaign but that didn’t resonate much with Black men like Martin. More important, though, was Harriss’s record as a prosecutor in California.

“One of the biggest knocks on Kamala was that she was AG during a time when Black men were prosecuted for all sorts of things,” Martin said. “And whenever she was questioned, she sort of minimized it or made it seem like it didn’t happen. That was an enormous deal for me. During that time as Black men, we were looked at as 'super predators.'”

I first met Martin in 2017 and have interviewed him several times since. A former Obama voter, Martin backed Trump in 2016. He voted for the libertarian presidential candidate in 2020 but returned to Trump last year.

I asked Martin whether he knows many other Trump voters. “A majority of my friends are liberals,” said Martin, who lives in Detroit’s Bagley neighborhood and plays in a rock band. Even so, Martin suspects that a few of them voted for Trump. Trump won about 20 percent of Black voters in 2020, the highest share of any Republican in a quarter century.

“Was it easier to tell people you were voting for Trump this time?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Martin said. “It was a lot easier to come out of the closet to say, ‘This ain’t working.’ Minorities in general, in 2016, you could get kicked out of your family for saying you like Donald Trump. But now, you might get looked at funny, but in the back of people’s minds, they kind of understand how it happened.”

“A lot of us were politically weary,” he continued. “We’d been screaming at each other for so long. We were going at each other’s throats for a few years. I mean, now more people are thinking that [Trump’s second term] isn’t the end of the world. We’ve had four years of a Trump presidency, and we came out just fine.”

Finally, Martin found the word he’d been searching for. “Overall, I think the only way to say it is there’s been a real softening [toward Trump].”

I spent much of 2017-2019 reporting from nine swing counties for my book, “On the Road in Trump’s America.” Immersing myself in communities across the country, I learned a great deal about what motivated people’s votes both for and against Trump.

Following Trump’s 2024 victory, I was curious how people’s views might have changed over the last five tumultuous years. So, in January, I traveled through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, spending time in former Obama strongholds that had flipped to Trump. I interviewed many of the same people I had talked to at length during Trump’s first term and in the run-up to the 2020 election.

My first stop was Erie, a working-class city in the Northwest corner of Pennsylvania that has been battered by manufacturing job loss. I met up with Jim Wertz in a downtown food hall, just off Perry Square. Wertz chaired Erie County’s Democratic Party in 2020 before running unsuccessfully for the state Senate last year.

Trump won Erie County by nearly 2,000 votes — a few hundred votes more than Joe Biden’s even slimmer 1,400-vote victory in the county in 2020.

Wertz felt Democrats had lost many potential voters in the fast-moving events of last summer. “Midsummer, I was knocking on a lot of Republican doors,” he said. “These are people that we’d ID’d as persuadable for whatever reason. And the older Republicans, the folks that were Biden in 2020 and GOP down-ticket, they were saying they’d vote straight Dem because they were upset about the national conversation. I wonder how many of them had been battered by GOP messaging and turned [to Trump].”

I asked Wertz whether the problem had less to do with messaging than with policy.

“I don’t think Democrats have a policy problem,” he said. “I think they have a problem talking about their policies. I think that’s been true for a long time.”

“But what about the criticism of Democratic policies as too 'woke' or too lenient on illegal immigration and crime?” I asked.

“I think if your messaging is sound, you can humanize a lot of that wokeness and make people understand why that policy needs to be in place,” he said. “It comes down to human rights.”

Many Democrats I spoke with insisted that the party’s policy positions are broadly popular and that they only needed to do a better job of packaging them and mobilizing their voters.

“Democrats across the board from the top down spent time trying to convert a lot of voters and that’s just not good campaigning,” Wertz said. “You’ve got to turn your people out.”

When I interviewed Wertz in 2020, he seemed baffled by religious voters’ continuing support for Trump. “I’ve thought a lot about it,” he said when I asked him about it again in January.........

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