Despise Trump

Haters for Trump

Meet the people who despise Donald Trump so much that they plan to vote for him — just to send America a message.

By Ben Schreckinger

They think Donald Trump’s ideas are “disgusting.” They think he is making a mockery of the American political system and that even he doesn’t take his own candidacy seriously. And that is exactly why they say they plan to vote for him.

Meet Trump’s protest voters.

People who in the past might have gone to the polls only to register their disdain for politicians by writing in “Mickey Mouse” — or perhaps even “Donald Trump” — now have a Republican front-runner to rally around.

Like many sincere Trump supporters, they believe the system is totally screwed up. But instead of viewing Trump as the solution, they view him as the embodiment of the problem. And they say they’re prepared to vote for him to prove it.

“This is the candidate America deserves,” said Jeff DeFlavio, 29, a small-business owner registered as an independent in the nearby town of Lebanon. He said he plans to vote for Trump in the primary, but adds, “His immigration policy is disgusting to me. It’s absolutely revolting … I really don’t want him to become president ever. Ever. He would destroy the world, which is what’s so wonderful about him.”

DeFlavio said he has enjoyed watching Trump exploit a presidential-selection process that rewards celebrity more than substance. “There is this kind of wonderful irony in it, which I feel myself wanting to partake in,” he said.

These Trump voters come from both ends of the political spectrum and from nowhere on it. Their motivations differ. But they are united by both antipathy and a lack of regard for the man they say has their vote.

Pollsters don’t know how many of these voters are out there and have doubts about whether they will follow through and choose Trump on primary day. But they say the phenomenon is a real one, and in a hotly contested nominating contest, these protest voters could matter — perhaps nowhere more so than in New Hampshire, where independent voters can cast ballots in the Republican primary and, unlike Iowa, don’t have to caucus for hours to make their point.

On the Dartmouth College campus, a center of both mischief and political activity in the state, the idea has currency. “Voting for Donald Trump would make for great times. It would be great times,” said rising junior Charlie Lundquist, 20. “But it’s all fun and games until he actually gets elected and runs our country into a shithole.”

“You might see some higher turnout with some people who are totally nihilistically interacting with American politics,” said fellow student Ben Packer, 20.

And not just in New Hampshire. “I don’t think there necessarily is a best candidate for president,” said David Portnoy, an independent and the Boston-based founder of the popular sports blog Barstool Sports. He endorsed Trump in a post last week in which he wrote, “I don’t care if he’s a joke. I don’t care if he’s racist. I don’t care if he’s sexist. I don’t care about any of it.”

“I think politics is kind of a joke in this country. I don’t think it matters who will get elected president,” said Portnoy, who described Trump’s candidacy as “a real-life political mock-umentary.”

“Everything Trump says I don’t agree with, like building a wall around the country, but I don’t think it’s going to happen,” he said. “But I don’t think anything anybody else says is going to happen, and I’d rather have the guy who brings entertainment value.”

Portnoy said he has heard from readers across New England who feel the same way.

Packer said the most committed of these Trump supporters he knows is a student in California. “He’s really into this one French philosopher [Jean] Baudrillard,” said Packer, explaining that the student plans to vote for Trump to validate Baudrillard’s idea that image has become indistinguishable from reality. “This kid is so left he’s not voting for Bernie [Sanders] because of Palestine,” Packer added, referencing the Vermont senator’s record of pro-Israel stances.

Trump himself predicted he would win support from his political opponents. "I think I’ll have a lot of Democrats voting for me,” he said on CNN on Tuesday night.

But like Trump’s sincere supporters, this disdain-driven coalition is more diverse than one might suspect — and motivated by more than nihilism.

Rasheen Carbin, 38, chief marketing officer of the job search app nspHire, is a devoted Republican from Arlington, Virginia. He said he views his plan to cast his primary ballot for Trump as a form of creative destruction.

“I’m going to vote for him because I want the Republican Party to finally acknowledge that it’s broken, and if Trump is the nominee, I don’t know how it could be more obvious,” said Carbin. “Sometimes things need to be broken so they can be remade stronger.”

Pollsters have a hard time estimating how many of these Trump voters are out there, both because they may not be participating in Republican primary polls and because the polls are not designed to identify that sort of motivation. But if the phenomenon is widespread, it would bolster the belief among campaign experts, baffled by his sustained strength, that a sizable chunk of those who are professing support for Trump are motivated by anger at the system, not love for the candidate.

“There’s no way to know,” said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “We don’t ask why. We only ask what and who.”

It is also unclear whether such voters will see their cosmic joke through on Election Day.

DeFlavio said he voted in the past two New Hampshire elections, and considers himself a likely primary voter. Carbin said he has cast a protest vote before, for former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson in the 2008 presidential primary after Thompson had dropped out and because he seemed to be the candidate least interested in the job.

Jayson Bradley — a writer in Washington state who wrote an advice column last month counseling a reader against voting for Trump solely for the “entertainment value” — said several people in the right-leaning, Christian circles in which he runs have raised the possibility of casting a gag vote for Trump with him.

He is not sure how many of them will actually do it. “On a spectrum of seriousness it would vary widely,” said Bradley, who added that he has difficulty gauging whether his own wife is serious when she talks about voting for the businessman.

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray has doubts that any of the declared Trump voters — both those who are sincere in their support and those motivated by disdain for the political system — will follow through on their stated intentions. “This is the banter back and forth before a prizefight. There’s a lot of trash talk going around, like, ‘I’m voting for Trump,’” he said. “When they’re looking at it in the cold light of day in February, they might back down.”

But, Murray added, “Trump has already broken all the rules that we know of, so I can’t predict that he’s not going to break the rest of them either.”