Los Angeles
Here’s the main feature of riding a Greyhound bus for two weeks from Los Angeles to New York in the blazing summer of 2024, through the undecided swing states of the nonstop shouting match known as pre-election America: When the bus stops, you do, too.
Experienced long-haul bus riders know it is imperative – even if you carry only a small suitcase, as opposed to everything you own, which is the case with many bus passengers – to find accommodations near the station, to make lugging your bags easier when you have to get back on the bus. The downside of this strategy is that bus stations are never in a great part of town. But the shadows have some bracing stories to tell, ones we hear less often.
My plan is to document the 16 days of my journey, to see whether it’s possible to ascertain the general mood of the United States in the lead-up to one of the most significant – and crazily extreme – presidential elections in its long and eventful history. A bus is an unpredictable way to cover the territory, at once dissociated and intimate, a hurtling tube over whose trajectory its passengers have only limited control.
“On a plane, you have first-class and economy,” a rider would say to me on the first day of the trip. “On a bus, you have no idea who’s on there with you.”
The bus is also the last truly democratic way to get from here to there, at a time when a critical slice of Americans can’t decide which road to take. There were 168 million registered American voters in the last presidential election. Polls suggest they are deadlocked between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The election will be decided by an estimated three million undecided voters in swing states – among them Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all places I plan to debus for a glance around before I reach New York City. (Georgia and North Carolina are also swing states, but I have only two weeks, so they’re off the itinerary.)
All of which is to explain why, on a Saturday in late summer, I was standing in the doorway of a four-person tent pitched on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a short walk from my hotel and the nearby Greyhound station.
The tent is the home of Renay, her 11-year-old son, her 13-year-old daughter and their small white fluffball dog, Prince. I’m using Renay’s first name because she doesn’t want her ex-partner – “a very abusive man” – to find them. There are an estimated 653,104 homeless people in the United States – roughly the population of Boston. More than 46,000 of them are crimped and folded into the city of Los Angeles.
Renay’s tent was donated by Blue Hollywood, a street sanctuary for homeless people. The sanctuary offers practical information and a fleeting sense of community to the homeless and others, runs various harm-reduction programs, and provides naloxone kits for fentanyl overdoses. The kits are also free in bus stations across America in refurbished newspaper boxes, now that most people no longer buy newspapers.
Renay is Black and was born in Ohio. Unlike many of the chronically homeless men and women assisted by Blue Hollywood, Renay neither smokes nor drinks. She and her kids and their dog had been on the street for 35 days. “I’ve never been at my lowest like this,” she said. “I’ve never been in a tent before.”
Like many Americans in an election where the border is a top concern, she resents even the (minimal) government help offered to migrants from Central America – they have their own sidewalk camp a block to the east, on Towne Avenue – when she, a U.S. citizen, is homeless. But she is grateful for the community the sanctuary provides. She is also no stranger to travelling by bus. She and the kids loved the one that brought them to L.A. from Georgia. “They had wonderful WiFi and wonderful A/C and wonderful bathrooms,” Renay remembered. “And free movies,” her son piped up from inside the tent.
Many of the highways into Los Angeles wind through hot, dry country like this expanse near the James Dean Memorial Junction, which commemorates the location where the actor died in a car crash in 1955.
Renay wants to find work as a cook, but she can’t leave her kids alone in the sanctuary. She looks for space in homeless shelters every day, but many forbid dogs, and Renay won’t give up the dog because the dog is one of the few things her children have to love. Such are the contingencies of desperate need. The kids – polite, quiet, readers – attend school online, at least when they can get WiFi. That way, Renay said, “they don’t have to admit in school they’re homeless.”
So Renay and her kids live and cook and eat and sleep and pee (in a bottle) in the tent on the sidewalk. Everything they own in the world lines the inner wall of their tent to shoulder height. It’s a tight fit, about the size of the Apollo command capsule. The kids sleep on a cot; Renay kips on the floor of the tent. They wash themselves in local parks. “It’s scary,” she said of surviving on the street.
What Renay misses most is cooking in her own kitchen. She turned 45 last April and doesn’t know where they’ll go next, except that it will be somewhere cheaper than L.A.
It wouldn’t be difficult for the United States, the richest empire in history, a nation that produces US$25-trillion worth of goods and services every year, to gin up the fractional US$30-billion that Scioto Analysis, an economic consultancy out of Columbus, Ohio, estimates it would cost the country to house its homeless. Instead, the U.S. glories in its success and buries its shame. I wonder about the cost of that denial, its price in displaced defensiveness and anger toward those in need. By comparison with the homeless, most Americans have very little to complain about. Not that you’d know it from the election campaign.
Renay doesn’t plan to vote because, she said, “I haven’t studied who is running.” But she knows about Trump. Americans have had no choice in that regard for more than 50 years.
“I don’t like the things he’s doing. I don’t like the things he says. It’d be great for a female to step up, because if I did vote, I would vote for her.” Until that afternoon, when I passed the news along, she wasn’t aware Kamala Harris already had.
Las Vegas
Seven hours after boarding the bus from L.A., I’d arrived in Las Vegas and was having a conversation about the recoil from an AR-15 rifle.
“It’s one of the easier ones,” Ketzu Bethea, the manager of The Gun Store on Tropicana Avenue, reassured me in the shooting range at the back of the store. “It’s designed to be ergonomic. It has the user in mind.”
He handed me the gun. Seven pounds. The weight of an infant or a small dog.
The AR-15 is the most famous gun in America – the semi-automatic rifle (it shoots a bullet each time you pull the trigger, without having to be reloaded) that was (mostly) banned for a decade but has since been used in mass shootings in Uvalde, Tex. (19 children dead), Buffalo (10 dead shoppers), Pittsburgh (11 dead in the Tree of Life Synagogue) and the July attempted assassination of Trump, to cite only a handful of its recent appearances.
The number of “active shooter incidents” in the U.S. has tripled since 2015, but gun rights are a foundation of the Republican platform. Even Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, has touted his love of hunting (as well as his stands against the National Rifle Association). A Harris-Walz camo hunting cap is a massive viral hit – as is Harris’s appropriation of Trump’s no-tax-on-tips idea, a popular issue here in Nevada, where pocketbook economics matter. All this for six electoral votes.
No one I spoke to mentioned Nevada’s statewide water shortage, or climate change. It was 39 C by late afternoon. The AccuLumen Brightness Index was 10 (“Very Bright”) and the UV Index was “Extreme.” Stepping outside was like being instantly and simultaneously peeled, flensed, baked, microwaved and air-fried.
Ketzu Bethea, manager of The Gun Store in Las Vegas, charges US$40 for customers who want to fire an AR-15, the infamous model of semi-automatic rifle.
“How do you feel when someone uses one of these guns to kill innocent people?” I said to Bethea at the gun shop.
“I’m just angry,” he replied. “But you gotta realize there’s sick, nasty people out there. Owning firearms, there are pros and cons, like everything else. I’m a good, law-abiding person. I’m probably the one who’s going to help you. I’ve stopped two armed robberies. And I took a bullet for it.”
Bethea quickly demonstrated proper gun-shooting stance, and how to hold the weapon. “Just hold it tight to your body and cheek.” He was speaking directly into my ear. “Use that red dot in the scope to aim with. Just take your time. And pull the trigger gently. Safety’s off.”
I took half a breath and held it, as Bethea instructed. The shot went off. The first word out of my mouth was a profanity. There was no recoil to speak of. “You’re a pretty good shot,” Bethea said.
The sound of the gun was momentarily deafening and created a sonic cocoon of isolation. Everything is anticipation and adrenaline, and then when you pull the trigger you know you have committed an irreversibly violent act, taken the shot, acted. You can’t take that back. I was filled, oddly, with regret. By the time I got to my hotel I was exhausted.
Nevada to Arizona
Day 3. Las Vegas to Holbrook, Ariz., a seven-hour-plus bus ride, US$41.98. At that low price, buses come with a lot of rules: no sleeping in the terminal, no bathing or shaving in the bus-station bathroom, no drinking or smoking on the bus. Cellphones on silent mode, never on speaker. All these rules are broken constantly. But the driver’s word is final.
Meanwhile, everyone on every bus is on their phone, all the time, nonstop. The bus WiFi is reliable everywhere except the mountains and the remotest desert. Hardly anyone talks, submerged in screens as they are. Many are playing colourful blobby video games. I’d seen one book and zero newspapers since we left L.A. The aura of privacy emanating from my bus mates is so intense, so fierce, that I hesitate to start conversations. And I’m always the one who initiates them.
By bus-station standards, the one we just left in Las Vegas is Eden. Greyhound Lines Inc. started in Hibbing, Minn., in 1914 because a Swedish immigrant named Eric Wickman discovered he could charge to drive miners to and from work. The Minnesota winters were so harrowing he almost gave up; today, Greyhound is the largest inter-city bus service in North America.
The company’s long and checkered roster of owners includes the Laidlaw Company of Burlington, Ont., which paid US$542-million for the North American outfit and eventually sold itself in 2007, after a brush with extinction, to a British buyer for US$3.6-billion. Greyhound is now operated by Munich-based FlixBus, which has eliminated baggage handlers (no liability) as well as many indoor bus stations, which won’t be pleasant in the winter in Flagstaff, Ariz. But the buses run on time.
Arizona is a swing state with libertarian urges. The state’s population has doubled since 1990, with the result that a third is now Latino. Roughly a third of the state is also unaligned with any party. An 1864 ban on abortion has been challenged and reasserted and challenged again. Arizona’s 8th district, northwest of Phoenix, was the throbbing heart of Trump’s campaign to cast doubt on the results of the last election.
The three Latinas I met on the bus platform in L.A., headed to Tijuana to celebrate one of them turning 70, were thrilled with Harris: “Such a relief,” one said. The shy white guy behind them in the MAGA hat said he would vote for Trump again. “Don’t want Harris,” he muttered. “She’s a woman. I’m not sure she has the experience.”
The 40-year-old accountant waiting to have her picture taken with her sons in front of the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign was voting for Trump: “He’s a strong personality. He knows business. He can fly off the handle a bit, but he’s gonna make America good.” Her boys, seven and 11 years old, agreed.
A third of the people I talked to won’t vote at all. “Why not?” I asked a tattoo artist in Las Vegas, whose answer was common amongst non-voters: “My little vote won’t do anything. The system doesn’t reflect your wishes.” He thought politics was a waste of time. “I’d rather focus on me, my family, and being happy. Raising my kids.”
All but two Americans I’d met on the bus were voting for Trump. They claimed he’s a better manager of the economy. Never mind that, without him in office, inflation is down, the stock market is soaring, or (more to the point) that presidents have very little direct effect on the economy.
A lot of people want Trump for murkier reasons, too: He’s their surrogate bad guy and enforcer. Lisa Thiempkey, a 44-year-old woman who cleans houses for a living and relies on social services that could fall victim to Project 2025 if Trump is elected, told me she likes Trump “because he’s tough.”
“He’s an asshole,” someone replied.
“Basically the same thing,” Thiempkey answered.
Partway through this leg of the trip, I moved aft in the bus, toward the bleachy toilet smell that starts two-thirds of the way back. Jazzmine McGruden, 27, was corralling her six kids (ages 3 to 9, matching outfits). Her husband died two years ago of complications from Agent Orange at the age of 73. McGruden met him in a bank, but he’d been a friend of her family for years.
“He said he wanted kids,” McGruden told me. He got what he wanted. She had been in Las Vegas for four weeks visiting her mother, and was on her way home to Phoenix. She would never get an abortion herself – “all my pregnancies are here,” she pointed out. “But I’m pro-choice. I think a woman should have control over her own body.”
She pays her bills with the help of a government military subsidy, and two of her kids are still too young for school, which means paying US$200 a week each for daycare – a financial burden Harris has promised to address with a tax cut and child credits. Trump’s plan, or concept of a plan, for child care is a vague blanket reassurance that his tariffs on foreign goods will pay for that and everything else.
So who is McGruden supporting in the election? “To be frank, Trump. Because everything went up in price. There were more jobs.”
And Harris? “I don’t know. She didn’t do much for minorities.” The fact that Harris, like McGruden, is Black and female “might matter to some. But not to me.”
Arizona to New Mexico
Nine hours on the bus from Holbrook, Ariz., to Tucumcari, N.M.
I keep forgetting to buy water and snacks before I get on the bus, then have to rely on bus-station vending machines that sell GoGo Squeez On the Go Apple Cinnamon muck and Pepoli’s Pepperoni Rolls in “New Stay Fresh Packaging” alongside SIM cards and headphones and Wet Ones. The bus makes rest stops every couple of hours at gas-station convenience stores, but so do other buses, and the competition to go to the bathroom and buy something to eat in the strict driver-allotted 15 minutes in the chronically understaffed restaurants nearby becomes a scene from The Hunger Games. The other option I have – peeing on the moving bus – is essentially Space Invaders with a penis.
On a tiny side road on the edge of Holbrook, I had met Mike Reidhead, a rancher for the past 50 years. He’s 72. We were leaning on his truck and chatting. His grandson, Brooks, a handsome 12-year-old, was hanging around in a Stetson the size of a small sailboat.
Reidhead is a Trump supporter, albeit a gracefully amused one. “We vote,” he said in a western accent as wide as a shovel, “but they don’t let us win. So what’s the point?” He was upset about the price of diesel (he figured it would be lower if Joe Biden hadn’t restricted oil drilling, a debatable contention).
He recently had to hire a zoning lawyer to sort out a standoff with the town over the use of a patch of his land, which struck him as evidence of the interfering corruptibility of government. “It’s all political. I just don’t know which of the county supervisors to pay,” he joked.
He doesn’t watch Fox. “I don’t watch any of it. None of it is true.” His most notable trait as a Trump supporter was his lack of anger. His political concerns were local and practical, with the result that his politics hadn’t been nationalized and generalized into a state of unfixable complaint and rage. The Holbrook dogcatcher wanted to fine him for letting his dog run loose on his own land, which struck him as a crazy rule. The dog was a Great Pyrenees. It lives outdoors.
“I tell you one thing,” he said. “Them neighbour dogs, they don’t come round no more.”
As I recalled my bucolic conversation with Reidhead, drama erupted on the bus. We were on the old Route 66, the same road migrants walked in the Dust Bowl years, the road John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath, and had changed drivers on a layover in Albuquerque. Our new driver, Cindy – medium height, huge dyed blonde bouffant, voice like a sergeant major – laid down her law before we set out.
“This is a bus!” she shouted. “There is no smoking. There is no drinking of alcohol! There is no weed! No heroin! No crystal meth! No anything!” Pause. “And no crybabies!”
But 20 minutes beyond Albuquerque a woman with a child came forward complaining that a couple had been smoking drugs in the bathroom of the bus. “My daughter got a faceful of it when I opened the door!” she said. “It smelled like meth!”
Cindy instantly yanked the bus over to the curb. It wasn’t clear how close we were to an exit. It was somewhere around midnight, and about 30 C outside. Cindy stomped to the back of the bus. Shouting, accusations, counter-accusations, whimpering. The couple denied it was them, but were immediately ratted out by their seatmates, and were soon hustled off the bus.
Their names, I later discovered, were Erika and José Negrete. They were 37 and 40, respectively. They had two kids, not on the bus. They claimed they were not smoking meth, and felt there should have been an “investigation.”
Erika talked a mile a minute and was so highly strung it was a wonder she could draw breath. José kept saying how long he’d been in love with her and Erika kept talking about what hell it had been to raise their kids. They were headed to Knoxville, Tenn., to help her father on his farm “and hopefully develop a more wholesome life,” Erika said. José, meanwhile, was pro-choice and figured “there’s definitely no middle class any more. I’m afraid to let Trump come back into power.” They spent the night in a gas station.
At Loretta’s Burrito Hut in Tucumcari, the owner and a patron told The Globe they planned to vote for Kamala Harris. ‘Why not a woman? If I can make this business successful, why can’t she run the country?’ owner Loretta Muller said.
New Mexico to Oklahoma
It took nine hours to get to Oklahoma City from Tucumcari. New Mexico isn’t a swing state (Biden beat Trump by a 10-per-cent margin in 2020), but Tucumcari was where I met the second and third Harris voters of this odyssey.
One was 60ish Joann Valverte, who grew up in Tucumcari back in the prosperous years when Route 66 was the main street and three railroads brought passengers here multiple times a day. “The town was more racist then. There were more white people. But it has changed.” As for Harris, she said, “I just don’t understand Hispanic people or Black people not supporting her.”
Loretta Muller, 62, is also voting for Harris. She’s the owner of Loretta’s, the Tucumcari restaurant where Valverte and I were eating breakfast. (Muller’s fried egg burrito should be a contender for best breakfast in America.) Her story was one of those jaw-dropping sagas you hear from strangers on the road, because they can be intimate with no consequence: Thirteen years on meth (she first took it to lose weight), 10 months in prison for trafficking, three faithless ex-husbands, found God, got clean, started selling burritos out of a food truck and then four years ago opened this place. She had made her last mortgage payment that very morning. She is a brilliant cook.
“I do not support Trump,” Muller said, scraping the flattop in the kitchen. “I was taught that what comes out of your mouth is in your heart. How could you lead the country when that comes out of your mouth?” And while Trump’s incivility rendered him unqualified to be president, Harris’s gender was, for Muller, a plus. “Why not a woman? If I can make this business successful, why can’t she run the country?”
It wasn’t until the next day at the American Quarter Horse Youth World Championship in Oklahoma City that I met the angry brand of Trumper. The championship is a fancy affair. Three-quarters of the contestants are girls (it helps them get into university) leading immaculately groomed and trained horses with names like Hautee and Slam I Am and Woulda Coulda Shoulda through their paces. The horses run anywhere from US$20,000 to US$250,000.
A rancher in his 70s who would only go by the name of Jim told me he had a spread in Texas, near Dallas. I asked him what one looked for in a quarter horse.
“It’s a beauty contest,” he said. “It’s just like humans. You don’t want the bowlegged girl with the pot belly.” He made a couple more jokes like that and then he said, “It’s not horses that are complicated. Some people still make excuses about Joe Biden.”
He wasn’t amusing and amused the way Mike Reidhead had been in Holbrook. Jim was furious, somehow personally betrayed by the Democrats. “Kaaaamala” – he drawled it out – “goes out with the same bucket as Biden. Condoleezza Rice, she’s Black and a lesbian” – false, according to Rice’s 2012 memoir – “but I’d still vote for her over Kamala.”
Jim poked at his phone for a while and eventually pulled up a long-debunked picture of a sex worker in a garter belt, a woman who vaguely resembled a younger Harris. “Does that look like someone you want as president?” He was for Trump, “hundred per cent. He’s not my preacher. But he’s my best horse trader.” The media were “liberal pricks.” The whole world was his enemy. As for Jan. 6: “All I know is, Trump said to go and peacefully protest.” (Sure, Trump did use that word, but in many other instances egged the rioters on, telling them to “fight like hell.”)
I asked Jim whether he thought civility – a trait Trump disdains – was important in the leader of a large democracy. “No,” he said, “I’m the only person that counts in my life. You’re the only person that counts in your life. And Trump hasn’t lied to me.” Then he tried to crush my hand in a handshake.
Oklahoma City
Anger is everywhere in the United States these days: Fury is the national default. The Oklahoma City National Memorial commemorates what is still the deadliest act of domestic terrorism the U.S. has ever seen: the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on the morning of April 19, 1995, by Timothy McVeigh.
The memorial’s reflecting pool is flanked by 168 bronze chairs that commemorate the people who died that morning. Nineteen of the chairs are small, because 19 of the dead were children in a daycare centre in the building.
McVeigh set off his 4,800-pound fertilizer bomb on the second anniversary of the federal government’s siege of Waco, Tex., where David Koresh and 82 members of his cult, the Branch Davidians, died in a fire and a standoff with the FBI. Oklahoma City was McVeigh’s act of revenge for Waco.
Trump kicked off his current presidential campaign with a rally in Waco. It, too, is a campaign of revenge Trump openly insists he will rain down, if he wins, on everyone who opposes him – an intention he has stated many times. This is how the fireball of American anger gets passed along. McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols were members of the Patriot movement that grew out of anti-bank farmer protests of the late 1980s. It’s resurgent today in militias such as the Proud Boys.
I walked through the Memorial museum to the Survivor Tree, a now-massive elm that somehow survived the blast. Its seeds have been harvested and planted all over the United States ever since.
It was late afternoon. A couple in their 60s were standing under the Survivor Tree. Their names were Kristy and Roger Valentine, teachers from Nebraska who had retired in Houston. They were lifelong Republicans of the old school. They seemed shaken by the memorial.
“The school shootings at Columbine happened a couple of years later,” Kristy said. “This is where the downward spiral began.”
“The downward spiral?” I asked.
“Of trying to destroy one another. We had just never seen someone be so brutal and so destructive to mankind.”
“People destroying our own people just for the sake of whatever was in their head at the moment,” Roger added.
I asked them if they thought the bombing in Oklahoma City had any connection to Trump’s incivility and the Jan. 6 uprising three decades later.
“It’s like we’re very tribal right now,” Roger said. “We have two different schools of thought and it’s very separate.” But he didn’t want to talk any more about it, or say how he was voting. “People are so tensed up that I don’t really talk about this to anybody. Because I don’t know what side they’re on. I don’t know whether they’re going to attack me.”
Not every American I met was angry, of course. I found pools of tolerance, but I found them unexpectedly. On my last night in Oklahoma City, after the run-in with the embittered rancher and the sobering memorial, I found my way to a bar on the edge of the city. A group of local libertines were having drinks together. There was a guy wearing backless chaps and a leather horse mask, and another guy dressed as a cat. I met someone who goes by Dreame, who described themselves as “female, he/they, nonbinary, demi-woman, transmasc attracted to all of the above.” Dreame was with a pal, Iris, a charming 42-year-old “femme-dom bisexual” who seemed very much in love with her cis-gendered submissive partner Ethan. (They met, Iris informed me, “at a face-sitting class.”)
“Don’t you find it oppressive, living in a hyper-conservative place like Oklahoma City?” I asked Iris. “Or is your sexual set your haven of liberty amid all this conformity?”
“You got it,” she said. “I find most of my friends in the community.”
“So why don’t you move to San Francisco or New York or L.A.? Those communities are much bigger and less hidden.”
“Don’t get me dreamin’,” she said. “I’d love to. But I have three kids. And Oklahoma City’s cheaper.” (You can rent a four-bedroom apartment here for US$1,200 a month.) “It’s just what I know. I know these jackasses. I don’t know those jackasses.” She’s for Harris.
Oklahoma, part of the deeply religious American heartland, has given its electoral votes to the Republicans in every election since 1968.
Oklahoma to Minnesota
Seventeen hours overnight on the bus from Oklahoma City to Minneapolis. I inhaled an order of Arthur Bryant’s pork ribs outside the bus station during the layover in Kansas City. And then after a night on the bus the dawn rising over the adventurous architecture of Minneapolis, the washed-down city quietly girding itself for another round. My favourite time of day.
The longer the bus ride, the more I realized about a quarter of the passengers on any given bus are not just getting from one place to another. They are American nomads semi-permanently in transit, a tier of quasi-homeless on the move between “family” and “friends” and “roommates.”
They travel with everything they own, wearing, say, fur-trimmed shower slides on their feet and parkas against the relentless bus A/C. They treat the bus as a form of provisional mobile home between other provisional homes that don’t move around. They move from one place to a cheaper place, work as Uber drivers or DoorDash deliverers, and move on.
“There’s no excuse for people not to make money, there’s too many options,” Aquan Q. McCloud had told me a few days earlier in the outdoor bus shelter in Flagstaff. He had just pocketed US$1,500 in Las Vegas delivering for Grubhub, and was on his way to Amarillo, Tex. “After that, who knows?” He was lugging a roller suitcase and a duffel and two huge storage bins containing his DJ gear.
On the bus to Minneapolis, I met Jazi Nyx, a trans woman with dyed pink hair who hates Trump and was moving from her family home in Iowa to live with someone she called her “adopted brother” in Illinois: She was desperate for “a family, a small circle, just a little bigger than the one I have now.”
Nyx spent two hours talking about computers and God (she’s an atheist) with Lamont Combs, 36, and his wife Ashley, who are not atheists and who were sitting across the aisle on their way back to “family” in Milwaukee after four years in Las Vegas. Their house had been broken into, Ashley had lost her job, and Lamont’s sister, with whom they had been staying, died of a stroke. “And all that happened within the last week,” Lamont said.
Every aspect of life at this level of economic precarity is tenuous and contingent and ever so delicately suspended on a wobbly frame of luck and circumstance; the smallest change can collapse the entire structure. Lamont is a musician, but makes his living playing video games. Ashley is pregnant; it’s a girl, and they’re going to call her Lana.
“We need better humans in this world,” Lamont said. Meanwhile the bus was passing signs that read “Exit Now! This is Where It’s At!” and pink churches announcing that “God Lives Here,” both of which claims, judging from the surroundings, seemed unlikely.
I am always eager to get off the bus after a long haul, to get away from so much sadness and unslakable rootlessness. But I am always eager to get on again the next day, because once you dare to break the ice, everyone wants to talk, to tell the stories of their lives that few people ever ask to hear. It’s a generous impulse, even humbling. The people I rode with on the bus reminded me that, whatever happens, I can never say I have not been lucky.
Minnesota to Wisconsin
The feel of the country started to change as the bus got closer to the swing state of Wisconsin. The land was greener. There were more curves in the road. Opinions became more nuanced, less hardline. On Day 10 of the trip, I stopped at the massive Mall of America in the mostly conservative suburbs outside Minneapolis, prime territory for potential swing voters. The majority of people I spoke to still intended to vote for Trump, but the majority was much thinner. (This was before the Democratic convention and Trump’s disastrous debate.) More and more people said, “If only Trump could keep his mouth shut.”
People started to apportion blame for the country’s ills in more sophisticated ways. In Minneapolis I called a friend of my brother’s, David Wilson, a retired executive at Accenture (740,000 employees) married to a retired anesthesiologist named Michael Peterman.
“Liberals are hopeful people, and hopeful people are happy people,” Wilson told me over lunch at the Walker Art Center. After a week on the bus, a garden salad and public sculpture felt like winning a small lottery. “And right now,” Wilson continued, “Republicans are so afraid. Trump is a symptom of people who are afraid. And there are lots of good reasons to be afraid. I think the Democrats share the blame with the Republicans. I really would have preferred this country had resolved homelessness and the drug problem before they solved, say, gay marriage.” Wilson and Peterman are both for Harris.
Wilson in turn introduced me to Charles Zelle, the chairman of Jefferson Lines, on one of whose coaches I had ridden up from Kansas City. We had breakfast the next morning, before I got back on the bus. Zelle’s grandfather started the transportation line in 1919; Zelle worked in the investment business before he restructured the bus company out of bankruptcy in 1987. He is now also chairman of the Metropolitan Council, a vast octopus that encompasses 180 mayors and oversees everything from planning and parks to transit and housing, because they’re all interconnected.
“The more local you get,” Zelle said of American political life, “the less polarized it is. This is when things get done – when everyone realizes no one can do anything by themselves.”
That sentiment – as opposed to the stark individualism of the empty red-state American West – was getting more common as the bus travelled east, as the country got more crowded. Zelle, too, is voting for Harris.
Cashton, Wis.
The countryside near Cashton, Wis., is a soft green blanket. People here respect the dignity of hard work. Nick Mlsna milks 2,600 cows on 3,000 acres on what is known locally as the Driftless Ridge, in the never-glaciated terrain of mid-Wisconsin. His great-great-grandfather started the dairy farm in 1903. Mlsna is at least 6 foot 4 and can’t weigh less than 325 pounds. At 56, he looks 40. We were talking in his office in his newest milking parlour.
Mlsna’s cows are milked three times a day. Each time, each cow steps onto one of 80 stalls on a giant rotating lazy Susan, and technicians a level below wash and wipe and attach automatic milkers to the cow’s udder. Eight minutes later the milkers fall off and the cow backs out of its stall and another walks in, all without any help from a human. It’s a bit like watching the June Taylor Dancers, if that means anything to you, and revises my opinion of the organizational ability of cows.
“They like going in,” Mlsna said. “They like it so much that sometimes they don’t want to get off. That can be a nuisance.”
Every cow wears a chip-embedded collar that measures when they milk, how fast they milk, how much milk they give, and even – by measuring head bobs – how long they eat. “A high-producing cow,” Mlsna explained, “will spend seven hours a day at the feed trough.”
A good Holstein will churn out 12 gallons, or about 80 to 100 pounds, of milk a day, for an average of four years. The milk goes straight from the cow through a filter and a chiller into a shiny milk-hauling semi-trailer: Mlsna’s cows squirt out five semi truckloads, or about 250,000 pounds, a day. He sells a lot of it via a co-op to Kwik Trip, the convenience-store chain. Wisconsin dairy farmers claim you need to make at least US$15 to US$17 a hundredweight to break even, which is one of the reasons why the price of fuel (which in turn affects the price of feed corn; Mlsna grows 2,000 acres of it) is a big election issue around here. Mlsna called himself “very, very conservative,” and plans to vote for Trump.
Why? “Taxes. Farming, at the end of the day, isn’t a huge cash game. We’re building equity. I’d like to return something to my family without getting taxed off the farm.”
Then Mlsna drove over to Jay’s Diner, a restaurant in Cashton proper, to play some pinochle with Earl Laufenberg and Denis Schreier and Mel Schmitz. It was lunchtime, after all. The trio are in their 70s, former dairy farmers who either sold their farms or lease them to big operators like Mlsna, to keep their land in their families. All three were born and raised hereabouts. “We were conceived here, too,” Laufenberg added. “And we all nursed here. Put that down.” Dairy humour.
Laufenberg ordered a BLT and a chocolate milk. He claimed to be a hardened Trump supporter, but behind his back his pals said he might vote for Harris. “I’ve never seen a government go to hell as far as this one,” he said.
“Well,” Schmitz said, “Trump’s the one who didn’t want the border legislation passed because he didn’t want the border fixed.” Schmitz voted for Trump in 2016, looking for change, and then for Biden in 2020. He’s dead set against Trump this time.
Laufenberg: “Fake news by a Democrat.”
“I’m not necessarily Democrat,” Schmitz replied, calmly, never looking up from his hand. “All I can say is, be careful what you wish for. Donald Trump is a dictator. And he means the end of democracy.”
To hear that here, in this calm, down-to-earth place, from these practical, unpretentious, seriously conservative white guys? That’s new.
Eau Claire, Wis.
I saw my first (now inaccurate) Biden-Harris sign of the trip on the morning of Day 12, half an hour outside Eau Claire, Wis., where Harris and Walz were staging a rally. They’d taken over a treeless 20-acre field. There were local cops in full battle dress and state troopers and Secret Service everywhere, a new tier of anxiety trowelled onto campaign life given the massive surge in threats to the lives of politicians in the past five years. By 9 a.m. the line of cars waiting to get into the parking lot looked infinite. The Secret Service had positioned black-uniformed snipers on a barn roof behind the podium, as well as high on a nearby hill.
Harris wasn’t expected until 2 p.m. It was swelteringly hot, but 11,000 people had shown up, according to the estimate of the Secret Service: all ages, more women than men, mostly white. (It was Wisconsin.)
Unlike Trump rallies, which often begin with evangelical Christian preachers leading prayers that invoke Trump as God’s avenging angel on Earth, this one started with a regional campaign manager who described himself as “a Black trans man with two amazing brown girls” urging the crowd to get involved in the election.
And unlike Trump’s often bitter and restive rallies, where Harris is referred to as “demonic” and where the former president and his audience often use profanity (he recently referred to Joe Biden as “a broken down pile of crap”), this one featured middle-aged women (multitudes of teachers) dancing in the stands to 1970s hits and voluntarily staffing faucets to hand out endless cups of water. The rowdiest cheer was “We’re not going back!,” and “I Don’t Vote for Convicted Felons” was as mean as the T-shirts got.
Harris finally took the stage to rapturous cheering. Her voice was wavery at first, too soft, and it was hard to hear her. Her thoughtful style seemed unsuited to addressing 11,000 wilting humans in a former cornfield. But she amped it up steadily, and the television networks later used her most animated clips. (The contrast with her confidently polished performances at the Democratic convention and on the debate stage weeks later suggest she’s a quick study.)
“This is beyond Donald Trump,” she told the crowd. “It’s about two very different versions of the future.”
She ended with a question: “What kind of country do we want to live in? A country of laws, or a country of chaos?”
Wisconsin to Michigan
It takes eight-and-a-half hours to travel by bus from Tomah, Wisc., to Battle Creek, Mich. I kept thinking the Trump tide would ebb the further east I went, but that’s the thing about a swing state like Michigan, which has 15 crucial electoral votes: It’s never of a single mind.
Biden won the state narrowly in 2020, after Trump took it much more narrowly in 2016. Battle Creek itself is even tighter: Biden received 12,218 votes across the city’s precincts in 2020, to Trump’s 10,090. A quarter of the population works in manufacturing. John Harvey Kellogg, the famous health nut and eugenics fan, got his start here, as did his brother William, who invented Corn Flakes – hence its nickname, Cereal Town. Sojourner Truth, the abolitionist, is buried here. The Underground Railroad ran through Battle Creek.
I walked down Michigan Avenue, into the handsome if stolid red-brick First United Methodist Church where Martin Luther King spoke in 1960, and found Jean – she didn’t want me to use her last name – a 62-year-old white woman (a demographic that helped put Trump into office in 2016) who is voting for Harris. Because, she said, “Trump’s a pig. He’s a racist, fascist, misogynistic traitor. Even when he was in Home Alone 2, he wasn’t satisfying.” She pointed out that Trump still owes the city of Battle Creek $93,000 for police services he required for a rally here in 2019. She was convinced that “people who follow Trump hate the same people that he hates – any person of colour, any woman, any immigrant.”
Then I walked a little farther down Battle Creek’s main street, alongside the rivulet that escaping slaves once followed to get to Canada, into the elegant 10-chair Chris Edwards Salon. There I met Chris Edwards, a 55-year-old Black businesswoman who thinks Harris has degraded other Black women because the candidate’s first rally in Atlanta featured Megan Thee Stallion twerking at a concert.
“Harris doesn’t represent the Black community, especially as a woman.” She thought the candidate was unqualified, disloyal to Israel, “and let’s not even talk about the border.” Edwards was also anti-abortion, so there was that. She discusses none of these views with anyone except her closest friends. “Because then it’s, ‘What? You’re a Trump lover?’”
See what I mean? It’s a swing state. People don’t conform to the cliché of their demographic. The fact that we expect them to is surely evidence of our addiction to oversimplification bred by partisan cable news and siloed social media. We keep trying to make life simpler and easier. Maybe we should take the bus instead.
Sisters Cloie and Carli Hotz, aged 14 and 12, say the Pledge of Allegiance at Toledo’s Fifth Third Field while Scott Wilson, a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, gives a military salute behind them. They are here to watch the local International League baseball team, the Mud Hens.
Michigan to Ohio
Day 14. Four hours on the Greyhound from Battle Creek to Toledo, Ohio, the state J.D. Vance represents as a senator, the same state where Trump will later claim Haitians – read: Black people – are eating cats and dogs.
In the lobby of a hotel I met Dan Tutman. He is in his 70s. He is also Black. He had an interesting theory. “There are so many Black people, African Americans,” he said, “who are reaching out, trying to bridge the gap between Black people and white people, to find out what’s really going on. We can’t do anything without white people, though white people can do a lot without Black people. But there are too many of us now in positions of power and economically empowered for white people to act completely independent any more – you know, without shame, without exposure, without a spotlight on what they’ve done, saying, hey, this is fucked up. The cops can no longer murder Black people with aplomb. The rules have changed, but the change has happened within the last 10 years. Which is overnight. And that freaks them out.”
Ohio to Pennsylvania
Seven hours on the bus by daylight to Pittsburgh. The composition of the bus was changing: more tourists and commuters, fewer semi-permanent wanderers. Young people on the bus were headed back to college.
Pennsylvania could be the deciding swing state, with 19 electoral votes. The Democrats have taken it in every presidential election since 2000, with the exception of 2016.
As I approached Pittsburgh, the pending US$15-billion merger between U.S. Steel and Japan’s Nippon Steel was becoming a political football. Pittsburgh – Steel City – once produced a third of the country’s steel. That was 50 years ago. But the nostalgic mythology of all-powerful industrial postwar America persists.
The most vocal opponents of the merger are the United Steelworkers Union, based in Pennsylvania, and Biden (also from Pennsylvania), who has threatened to nix the deal (which has now been conveniently postponed until after the election). With Trump calling for America-first import quotas to lead the country back to its industrial glory days of yore, and the swing state of Pennsylvania in the balance, Biden had no choice but to oppose the merger.
But the reality of postindustrial Pittsburgh is very different than it was in the boom years after the Second World War. The former U.S. Steel building is the tallest on Pittsburgh’s intricately knotted skyline. Today that building is the headquarters of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center – the massive integrated medical research, health care and insurance provider that dominates Pennsylvania’s economy and reaches into many others. U.S. Steel has 22,000 employees. UPMC has 100,000. It’s a non-profit that pulls in US$28-billion in revenue a year; U.S. Steel lost US$80-million last quarter. Two-thirds of UPMC’s business is government-funded.
That’s a far more likely model for the future American economy than the walled ghost town Trump has nailed together in what passes for an economic platform in this election.
These mirages take a long time to evaporate. I took a walk over the Andy Warhol Bridge that connects Pittsburgh’s north and south sides and ran into Bob Borkoski, a graphic designer in his early 80s. He grew up in the old white, male, industrial America, and still displayed all its crankiness.
“I think Harris is going to be destroyed,” he said, clearly relishing the possibility. “Trump had Israel fixed. He had us out of wars. He had Putin eating out of his hand.” He is convinced the 2020 election was stolen because “Pennsylvania’s administration has always been Democratic. It’s as corrupt as Washington.”
But at a craft beer festival down by the converted warehouses of Pittsburgh’s newly hip Strip District, along the river on the city’s south side, I encountered a fresher perspective. Nearly everyone I met there, regardless of race or gender, was voting for Harris because of her race and because of her gender. They wanted to prove something about being equal – about being the same, not different, not apart, not antagonists.
Chantel Gibson, a Black woman in her early 50s, a special education teacher, put it well. “I thought racism would be better after Obama was elected,” she told me, citing the still unrepaired crack that runs through all American history. We were sitting on a bench in the Saturday afternoon sunlight. “But I think the racism is worse than ever.”
Like many other people I met over the course of the afternoon, Gibson believes Trump has made it okay to be a racist again. And so the fact that Harris, in addition to being capable and experienced, is also Black, of Indian descent and a woman, “is really important.”
“America is a melting pot,” she reminded me. “But some people are so stuck they just won’t let it happen. I just feel like everything is more out in the open, the distaste for other cultures is more open. People can’t let the progress happen.”
Pennsylvania to New York
My last bus ride, from Pittsburgh to New York City. It’s a gorgeous day, and I am eager for the crowded tolerance of New York, where everyone has an opinion but respects everyone else’s right to have one, too. I want the democratic hullabaloo of Union Square and a steak salad at the Old Town Bar on 18th Street. But rocketing through New Jersey – this driver is the speediest of the whole trip – I can’t help noticing how small Manhattan is. It’s an island, after all.
The passengers on this bus are the most varied yet. A Catholic priest visiting from Uganda. A 38-year-old Puerto Rican-American truck driver on his way home to his wife in the Bronx. (He spends US$9,000 a month on diesel and is voting for Trump).
My last conversation on the bus is with Nick and Stella Bakalis. They’re from Athens, here to help their son settle into a master’s program in AI engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and are now on their way to New York and their flight home. They figure their son will stay in America: The salaries are twice what they are in Greece, and this is where all the new ideas are.
“But I would like Americans to be more caring for one another,” Stella tells me. “I think they are spending their lives for the getting of money. They are not enjoying life.” She thinks this is a serious problem with roots in an American education system that prioritizes success – the famous American pursuit of happiness.
“Success is not money,” Stella continues. “Or to have a big home. The goal is not to be happy: You have to be happy to reach your goals. Because if you are not trying to be happy and positive, you are going to be toxic.” If they could vote, Stella and Nick would vote for Harris.
I think about what Stella said most of the way into New York. I think about other stuff, too. About Amber, the bus driver in Holbrook, Ariz., with the blood-red nails and the safety vest and the Big Gulp, who had been working overtime so assiduously she hadn’t been home to Las Vegas since February. About the packs of wild dogs that now roam Tucumcari. About Trinity Watsson, who was 19 and had moved 22 times in two years and was terrified because she was alone and couldn’t find a place to call home. About Lenny Andino, one of the few bus passengers reading a book when I met him, who was on his way back to New Jersey after wrapping up six months in the slammer for parole violation, who couldn’t wait to see his children again, who was still proud to be American. He was a lovely guy.
I think about the people who wanted to be happier and the ones who wanted someone to take them seriously, who were surprised when I did. I think about the teenaged girl and her gaggle of friends who tripped away down one of the countless halls of the Mall of America in suburban Minneapolis, and about her middle-aged father and the way he watched her and said, in a voice that sounded worried, once she was out of earshot, “We’re afraid our daughter’s race will be held against her. That the fact that she’s a white, strong, thin, blond American will be held against her. That’s who she is. And it’s unpopular.”
I think about the morning I heard Walz say on the radio, “We now live in a world where embracing complexity on an issue is seen as a moral failing.”
Mostly I think about the fact that the angriest Americans I met were some of the richest, while the poorest were more often foolishly hopeful, and how grave and important and impossible that distinction felt. The long tradition of American journeying has always been westward, toward a new, freer, less restrictive frontier, toward California and the open unknown. But California is now full and a lot of Americans think the frontier – with its proximity to the southern border – is busted.
Half the country wants to fix the country’s problems – its alleged misjudgment of who matters and who ought to matter, who is equal and who is not, who ought to be responsible for whom, if anyone – by going back to the old comfortable order. The other half says that is no longer possible, and wants to start over again, with everyone equal.
The bus makes its way through the granite tunnels onto Manhattan and up 8th Avenue to the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal between 40th and 42nd Streets. It’s the busiest bus station in the world, sucking in and spewing out 200,000 human beings on 7,200 buses every single day of the week. It has its own police force and its own blood bank.
The bus pulls up, and we get off. There are more than 400 gates in the massive terminal at the end of the line, all of them waiting to send passengers out to whatever America they hope to get to.
About our correspondents, and their journeys
Ian Brown is a feature writer at The Globe and Mail and the author of five books. For this story, he crossed the United States from west to east by bus, making periodic stops to report on his whereabouts in a string of swing states.
Barbara Davidson is a photographer based in Los Angeles, and a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy winner for her coverage of the city’s gang wars for the Los Angeles Times. For this story, she travelled the United States by car, tracing a route similar to the bus route followed by Ian Brown. The photos from California, where she covers homelessness and migration on a regular basis, were taken prior to the trip. She is originally from Montreal, and became an American citizen a year ago. This will be the first U.S. election in which she is eligible to vote.