Some Black Voters Are Souring on Democrats. It May Be Part of a Natural Drift.

“I almost voted for him,” Felicia Lowe, a 55-year-old Black woman, told me on Tuesday as she exited the polling place at the Metropolitan branch of the Fulton County Library.

The “him” in that statement is Donald Trump, and Lowe said that she had intended to vote for him the first time he ran for president, but she was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t vote that year.

Trump, she said, is “funny as hell.” Her granddaughter, impatiently waiting in her shadow, admonished her, “Nana, no cursing.”

Lowe says she’s glad that she didn’t vote for Trump back then because she now thinks “he’s trying to make the white America great, and we should all be included.”

“I’m a Biden person,” she said. “I’m a Democrat.” But she explained Trump’s appeal to people like her: “Trump used us, and at the same time bamboozled us by his charm and his humor and his straightforward talk. Not that it’s all true, but he just didn’t bite his tongue about certain things. And a lot of people want to see someone down to earth.”

To some, holding these two ideas at once — that Trump is “prejudiced,” as she put it, but still entertaining — may seem contradictory to the point of implausibility, but this is far from the first time I’ve heard this response. Whereas people like me find Trump’s performance of his persona repulsive, not everyone does. Some people are attracted to it.