“I’m not the small business they talk about, I’m the small, small business.” Erica Michel, an owner of two small businesses, one of which has closed.
LOVELAND, Colo. — That Americans are angry and anxious heading toward the Nov. 2 elections has become a truism, an assumption built into candidate calculations from the lowest local alderman on up. Plot a voter’s place on the rage scale, and voilà, out pops a prediction of the expected anti-Democrat, or anti-establishment, backlash.
Voters like Daryl Pike have a different word for it: lost.
“Everything is fractured,” said Mr. Pike, 63, a roofing salesman and lifelong Democrat from this city in northern Colorado.
Mr. Pike said he felt that the country was on an uncharted course, economically and politically. That belief has torn him from the moorings of loyalty that he felt for decades to the Democrats. There is not one on the ballot in Colorado he really likes, he said. But he is not sure he’s quite ready to vote for a Republican, either. “I have no idea what I’m going to do,” he said.
In dozens of interviews in Loveland and across Larimer County, a similar conclusion emerged time and again: uncertainty or trepidation about the future — with the election simply an expression of those deeper currents.
On issues from the economy to the state of democracy, many people described themselves as out to sea and adrift. Some said they feared that lost jobs might never return. Others were clinging more tightly than ever to the things they thought worth fighting for: family, school, church.
That diffuse, hard-to-pin-down mood — despairing or resolute, and, yes, sometimes simply angry — will be transmuted into the black-or-white binary code of win or lose on Election Day. And Larimer will be pivotal to the outcome. Hard-fought races rage across this state, from governor to United States Senate, to seven seats in the House of Representatives, and this swing county an hour north of Denver — historically Republican, recently more mixed — could help decide the final tilt.
Though Republicans are widely expected to make big national gains, interviews and polls confirm that Americans are not ideologically driven any more now than they were when they made history and elected Barack Obama president in 2008.
What they want is reassurance — a steady hand holding the helm in a direction that seems sure and true. Anger, people here said, is just insecurity tied in knots.
Uncharted Waters
Volatility and a kind of jumpy inclination against party fealty is easy to find in Larimer, with many people saying they plan to vote Republican in one race, Democratic in the next, while leaving some lines blank if they have come to detest all sides. A predictable surge in one direction? Maybe not.
Rachel Howes, for example, a 29-year-old dental hygienist in Fort Collins, the county’s largest city, said she planned to vote mostly for Democrats, except in the governor’s race, where she likes a conservative third-party candidate, Tom Tancredo, a former congressman. She opposes tax measures that would increase school financing, though she has children in public school.
Her measure of stability and how good to feel about the world is her husband’s job as a carpenter.
“He’s not finding work,” she said.
Or consider James Cherry — no handy label for him either. He is a structural engineer and an unaffiliated voter who leans, he said, toward the Republicans on gun rights and abortion.
But he is also heavily involved in philanthropy, and the federal health care overhaul passed by the Democrats touches on his passions about caring for others. He enthusiastically supported the change and has no patience for Republicans or Tea Party enthusiasts who want repeal. Indeed, he is unhappy with both parties that the law does not include a single-payer government option that liberal Democrats had favored. His wife, Julia, is on the same page.
“I’ve always volunteered for those underserved who don’t have a voice,” she said.
A former mayor of Fort Collins, Ed Stoner, a Republican, said he would vote mostly for Democrats — including Betsy Markey for the local Congressional seat — but abstain from the United States Senate race between Senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat, and his challenger, Ken Buck, a Republican.
Roslyn Merrill, a stay-at-home mother, said she was so unhappy with both major party Senate candidates that she would support a third-party candidate.
Larimer County itself seems in transition to an uncertain place. The collapse of the dot-com bubble around 2000 hit the county hard, with its concentration of tech jobs, and by some measures things never returned to normal. Median income fell as the economy churned toward lower-paying employment, even before the recession.
College students, an important political constituency in 2008 in Larimer’s — and Colorado’s — shift toward the Democrats, have also been thrown a curve heading toward November.
The federal economic stimulus propped up the economy through money that flowed into Colorado State University, a dominant presence in Fort Collins. But with timing that creates its own pre-election wild card, the university said earlier this month that dwindling financial support could force big tuition increases.
News as Attack Ad
Combative, distorted, partisan information and news have been a huge factor in this election, making people like Patrick Piscani angry not just at politicians, but also at the system itself that has cranked and whirred its machinery to reach him.
Colorado’s Senate race alone ranked first in the nation as of last week in the flood of money from outside groups, with more than $23 million spent mostly for attack ads, according to the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks campaign spending. Three close Congressional races, including the Fourth District here in Larimer County, drew $6.7 million more among them, mostly again to pay for invective.
“If I were to base it on what I’ve heard up until now, I wouldn’t vote for anybody — it’s been horrible,” Mr. Piscani said.
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