How Trump's coronavirus briefings convinced one of his voters to turn to Joe Biden

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-coronavirus-briefings-convinced-one-184151188.html

Chris Riotta
,The Independent•July 24, 2020

Nancy Shively has a difficult choice to make.

The school she works at has announced plans to reopen just as it normally would after the summer months, despite a raging pandemic that has taken nearly 150,000 American lives.

When the students return to classrooms in mid-August, they won’t be required to wear any face masks, according to Shively.

The 63-year-old Oklahoma resident lives in a little town just north of Tulsa, and has feared contracting the novel coronavirus since it reached the United States earlier this year. Shively has multiple autoimmune diseases, and is immunosuppressed because she does not have a spleen.

“I’m pretty high-risk for bad stuff if I catch it,” she says about Covid-19. “At the moment I’m trying to decide whether I’m going to go back or not.”

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The pandemic has provided Shively — and many voters like her — with a moment of reckoning. A lifelong Republican who has voted for every GOP presidential candidate since 1976, Shively will be casting her ballot in November for former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.

She’s completely withdrawn her support for Republicans, going so far as to change her voter registration to independent just a few months ago in the midst of the Covid-19 outbreak. And it all started when Trump began addressing the nation about the coronavirus on a daily basis.

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“There’s a lot of people that are Trump supporters around here. Oklahoma is as deep red as it gets.”

And yet, more and more Republicans like Shively appear to be breaking away from the GOP to instead support Biden — something she never would have predicted happening in her life.

“Over the years, I’ve always been conservative, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more moderate,” she says. Still, she felt Trump was “gross and a misogynist” during the 2016 election, “but picking between him and Hillary Clinton was like choosing the lesser of two evils.”

“I figured he was the lesser of those two evils,” she says. “Well, I was wrong on that one!”