Why this Maine voter says he’s a part of the ‘silent majority’ supporting Trump in 2020

Polarized is a weekly series featuring voters in all 50 states sharing their thoughts on the 2020 elections. Click here to read more from this project.

You would never know Chris P*’s political leanings just by listening to his radio show.

He has served as the host of a prominent morning radio program for nearly eight years in northern Maine. A native of Houltown, a town on the US-Canada border, the morning show host describes his community with a deep love and familiarity.

“I spend 6am to 10am entertaining folks, talking about lots of things, playing some really great classic hits. Love my job, love what I do, love the area I live in,” he says. “I’ve chosen to make my life in the northern part of Maine and live through the hellacious winters that we have. But it’s also as close to heaven as you can possibly get during the summertime and the fall.”

He says his network largely began avoiding political news following the 2016 elections due to the heightened polarization across the country.

“You will alienate half of your audience – or your whole audience – depending on what point of view you to decide to express,” he says, adding later: “Cancel culture is real.”

However, just because he doesn’t focus on politics during his radio show doesn’t mean Chris P isn’t tuned in to the latest in Washington. The Maine native says he stays up to date on current events by filtering through the news every day to find credible sources of information.

Though he remains quiet about his political views, he says he’s not alone. He’s a part of the “silent majority”, as this voter describes it: a term first used in the mainstream political world by Richard Nixon on his 1969 platform, that has now been adopted by the president, Donald Trump. The theory is that there is a majority of American voters who support the Trump presidency, yet remain silent about their views, fearing potential societal repercussions.

His radio show invites every single politician running in the district to sit down for an in-depth interview that has no agenda besides informing the public on the candidate’s platform, policy goals and key issues. This sort of impartiality is something Chris P says is important nowadays, at a time of heightened polarization in both society and the media.

“It’s not a gotcha interview,” he says. “It’s more, ‘tell us everything about you, and let people make their own choices.' We’ll ask the tough questions, but not leading in a way that indicates I’m a Republican and you’re a Democrat, or you’re a Democrat and I’m a Republican.”

Described as a “tale of two states” by the nonpartisan electoral site 270ToWin, Maine was unique during the 2016 elections in that both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton received electoral votes.

Instead of giving all of its votes in the electoral college to the candidate who receives the popular vote, as the former Democratic nominee had done, Maine provides two out of its four electoral votes to the winners of its two congressional districts.

Since Trump won Maine’s rural 2nd district by double digits, he received one of the state’s electoral votes, while Clinton won three.

Chris P says he voted for Trump in 2016: “There’s a million different reasons to justify it, but I did vote for him. Sometimes you kind of have to vote for the lesser of two evils. What I was surprised about – honestly, I like what he has done.”

He says he was initially “suspicious” of Trump: “He was a Democrat, and ran on the Republican ticket, and I really thought he was going to be more of a Democrat.”

But eventually, he came around to the president and – perhaps most importantly – was happy with the conservative agenda he was enacting both at home and abroad.

“I know he’s a very bombastic individual, and he’s narcissistic, and there are things about him that I definitely do not like, but his policies were a pleasant surprise to me,” Chris P says with a laugh.

Some of the Maine voter’s top concerns surround foreign policy, and his belief that American troops should not be involved in as many foreign wars as they are today. Specifically, he says he supports the president’s efforts to “get troops off of foreign soil and continuing to move people out” of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.

And though he says he believes climate change is real, he supports the president’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, questioning whether human activity has an impact on global warming.

“Getting out of the Paris Accord to me was the right thing to do because we were bearing the brunt of all of the changes that should have been going on worldwide,” he says. “I have to agree with him on that, and I think that’s helped us domestically in that we’re not spending huge dollars in that Accord to have to live up to some of the things they outlined while they were not asking other countries to do the same thing.

“I don’t think there’s anybody in the planet that can’t say, ‘there is no global warming,’” he continues. “There is climate change. It is happening. Whether or not we are as a species contributing to that and what impact our actions have, I’m not really sold on that part of the science yet.”

Trump has often denied global warming was real, claiming climate change was a “hoax” created by China, or at others times claiming it was perpetrated by the Democratic Party.

Chris P admits he is irked by some of what Trump does, and notes how his “narcissistic personality” is apparent in his response to Covid-19 and his own diagnosis, in which he did drive-by greetings in a car outside of Walter Reed Medical Center to his supporters camped out after he was flown to the hospital last week.

But this voter, who considers himself to be an open-minded voter and says he would vote for Republicans or Democrats, says the Democratic Party moved too far to the left during the 2020 primaries. Now, he fears that the party’s nominee would be easily swayed by its progressive wing.

“You can say what you want while trying to win the middle back, but really, their true colors showed during the primaries,” he says.

So, Chris P says he now considers himself a part of that “silent majority”.

“We’re silent about our attitudes,” he says, “but we’ll make up a majority of the vote.” 

*The Independent has verified the identity of this voter, who requested partial anonymity to discuss his political views candidly. We are withholding his last name.