Basking in rare mid-afternoon November sunshine outside the polls at Canaan Hall, Dan Fleetham recalled watching a fellow supporter of Donald Trump walk a gantlet of Democratic sign-wielders earlier on Election Day.
“One of them asked him, ‘How are you?’ ” the Canaan resident said while holding signs for GOP candidates with Rachelle Vanier and her husband, Dean. “He said, ‘I’m tired of you people stealing my hard-earned money!’ ”
That’s about as angry as the trio of Trump supporters saw anyone get, at the end of a campaign as fraught as most observers can remember.
“We’ve gotten a lot of thumbs up,” said Dean Vanier, who works in real estate with his wife.
For her part, Rachelle Vanier dared not just to dream, but to speak of victory for the candidate who had captured their imagination during a primary-season campaign rally at Plymouth State University.
“I’ve been seeing that glimmer in people’s eyes. They’re coming out like this,” Rachelle Vanier said, while holding up fingers crossed with one hand and a totem pole of campaign signs in the other. “Like they’re saying, ‘It’s going to happen.’ ”
While “it” didn’t happen in Canaan, where Hillary Clinton outpolled Trump, 938-850, other small, neighboring communities that tend toward Republicans went for the billionaire businessman, among them Grafton, by a count of 397-267.
“I think this is the most people I’ve seen,” Grafton town librarian Deb Clough, who was working at the polls in the town fire station, said at about 4 p.m., as a new wave of voters pulled into the parking lot. “We had a lot early, and it’s been pretty steady.”
Soon the ballot box would tick past 500.
How much of that kind of turnout to attribute to the enthusiasms of Trump supporters versus fear and loathing of Trump kept statisticians and pundits and Vegas oddsmakers busy for months.
A little more than an hour into the polling, Enfield resident Paul Morey held a signpost full of GOP posters, with Trump on top, outside Lebanon City Hall, and predicted that the purveyors of conventional wisdom “are going to be surprised when tonight’s over.” He added that Trump tapped into a well of frustration.
“The liberals are ruining the country,” Morey said. “Too many rules and regulations. They’re always in our pockets.”
In Charlestown, nurse Rae Hess, a self-described independent who voted for Trump, declared herself disappointed that health care reform didn’t help her with medical expenses, which she said are “killing me.”
“I don’t think Hillary has done anything to help the working class,” Hess said. “I think you have to be either a baby mama with six kids or super-rich” to benefit from her policies.
Holding signs for Trump and other Republicans outside the Ward 2 polls at the Lebanon Methodist Church, Michael Balog, who was running for one of four Lebanon seats in the New Hampshire House, attributed the rising tide for Trump as much to the Republican’s reputation as a business whiz as to anger among voters tired of what they see as ingrained corruption in Washington.
“He has a knack for making a deal,” Balog said. “He’s able to bring together a conglomeration of people. That gives him an advantage.”
For Fleetham, who supported former Texas Gov. Rick Perry during his brief run for the White House in 2012, the aura of confidence and success helped Trump’s cause, too.
“When he came down the stairs (at Trump Tower in New York to announce his candidacy in May 2015), I could see things were changing,” Fleetham said. “I thought, ‘That may be what we need. We need a businessman to run USA Inc.’ ”
In the eyes of the Vaniers, Trump’s bluntness on issues ranging from building a wall against the perceived tide of illegal Latino immigrants to changing the way the federal government works has emboldened Americans who might have stayed in the shadows during an ordinary campaign.
“The anger is directed at Washington,” Dean Vanier said. “The feeling is, ‘Drain the swamp’ — only the swamp consists of Republicans as well as Democrats.”
Added Rachelle Vanier: “I’m seeing more of the Silent Majority not being so silent. They’re happy to be at a point where they’re able to say what they think. There’s no need to be silent anymore.”
On Election Day itself, voters in some towns remained reluctant to talk about whom they voted for, or at least to identify themselves after acknowledging votes for Trump.
While many voters seemed to have made up their minds before arriving, Hartford resident Tyler Courtemanche, a carpenter, said at the Hartford High School polls that he remained conflicted into the 11th hour.
“Honestly I don’t like anybody in this, but in the end, I went for Mr. Trump,” said Courtemanche, who recalled casting his first presidential vote for Al Gore in 2000. “I like the fact that he’s not a career politician. I don’t like the fact that he’s a little over the top in the things he says, but for me, he was the lesser of two evils. … I wouldn’t say anger is driving the appeal for him. I think people had a hard time understanding the other side of the coin.”
News Editor John P. Gregg contributed to this report. David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.