How an ‘indignant’ Trump supporter grew to love Biden

^{Polarized is a weekly series featuring Americans from all 50 states sharing their views on the 2020 elections. Click here if you would like to be a part of this project}

Marie Garofalo and her family seemed to do the impossible in 2020: they sat down and had civil conversations about politics.

What may sound like a simple act has caused genuine stress fractures for families across the country in the age of Donald Trump, particularly in homes where loved ones hold diametrically opposing views.

That was the case for Garofalo, a 61-year-old mother of four who lives in Norwalk, Connecticut. In a recent interview with The Independent, Garofalo says she was an ardent Trump supporter in the 2016 election, despite her husband and four children all vehemently opposing the current president.

“I was very indignant when I voted for Donald Trump. I ate crow so bad on that,” she says with a laugh. “To be honest with you, when I voted for Trump – I’ve learned a lot since then about being an informed voter – I kind of just went with a gut feeling: I was sort of amused, but I also thought that he had something to say.”

Garofalo does not consider herself politically motivated or inspired – or at least, she didn’t until Trump came along. She says she voted pretty consistently with the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan, though she broke with the GOP to cast a ballot for Barack Obama as he sought re-election in 2012.

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While she typically didn’t think much about Washington affairs after election day, her family decided to keep Garofalo informed about Trump’s agenda once he assumed the Oval Office.

She says those discussions with her family eventually served as a “catalyst” for her to start paying more attention to politics in general.

What Garofalo found was that she was “frightened” by Trump’s impact on everything from the climate to the nation’s court system – and “ashamed” of supporting his candidacy in the first place.

“I started to become more informed about everything that was going on within the administration,” she explains, citing help from her husband and youngest daughter who would “constantly” send her news articles. “I’m not polished, I’m not political, I’m just a mom-slash-housewife-slash-person-who-lives-here, and I have a lot of values. Over time, what happened with Trump was that I became more aware of what bothered me.”

Trump’s steady rollback of environmental regulations were a large contributing factor to Garofalo’s newfound disdain for the president, she says, with his decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord serving as the straw that broke the camel’s back. She notes how that “total dismissive behavior towards science” clearly ended up shaping his administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

“When he ignored the massive climate report his own government released, that’s when I began to seriously worry about my children and grandchildren, and the children of the world,” she says.

Garofalo also began to seriously consider her support for the Republican Party at a time when it was working to remove women’s reproductive rights in states across the country. Her husband, a gynecologist, and children shared stories with her about states like Missouri and Louisiana closing clinics which provided abortions and passing laws which made it virtually impossible to access such services.

“All of a sudden I found myself saying ‘what am I doing?” she says. “And all these laws were supported by the judges Trump was appointing little by little in these states. I was so depressed a couple years ago by this, right when I realised he didn’t actually have good people behind him – everybody was leaving.”

Check out more of The Independent’s series, Polarized: Voices From Across America

Before she knew it, another election was right around the corner. Rather than giving in to hopelessness or despair, Garofalo says she started to listen and debate more with her family.

“My family’s voices were very powerful to me,” she says. “We would debate about why I liked Pete Buttigieg, and they liked Bernie Sanders. They’d ask why I support someone like Joe Biden, and you know, I started to realise that [my vote] does matter.”

As she came to develop her own political beliefs – at the heart of which was a respect for the conservative values outlined in the constitution – Garofalo found her candidate in the 2020 elections. She supports Biden over Trump, and to prove her total rejection of the president to the GOP, switched her party affiliation to Democrat this campaign cycle. Garofalo now says she can never picture herself going back to the Republican Party.

“One thing about Biden that speaks to me as a voter now is that he’s a unifier instead of a divider,” she says. “All Trump does is divide, hate, point fingers – it’s just horrible. I think we need Joe Biden right now. I think the world needs the United States to have Joe Biden right now.”

She adds: “Biden makes me feel that I will be able to sleep at night knowing that he won’t be sleeping with Putin, so to speak. I think there’s dignity to Joe Biden, and empathy, and that’s what we need right now because we have the least dignified person in office.”

The conversations Garofalo had with her family strike at the heart of Polarized: Voices From Across America.

The purpose of this 52-week project is to feature discussions with Americans from all walks of life and political ideologies, in every single state, as well as DC and Puerto Rico. These discussions – once standard practice at family dinner tables and in coffee shops nationwide – have all but disappeared between friends and loved ones with opposing views. By spotlighting sometimes-tense discussions with folks who may view things differently than others, our goal has always been to hopefully reignite those conversations once again.

When I tell this to Garofalo, she says she has a word of advice for readers.

“I think if we can find a way to have meaningful discussions with people, without getting crazy, irate, just listen … people can change,” she says. “Read. Read different publications. You cannot just watch CNN. You cannot just watch Fox. You should watch the BBC, watch Al Jazeera, watch Reuters: flip through everything to try and really see what’s going on. It’s a very interesting journey, just like I’m sure it was a very interesting journey my kids had with me.”