Testing time: Trump’s blue-collar voters want quick proof promises will be kept
Provincetown, Massachusetts (CNN) — Daybreak on the Atlantic is a slow, hypnotic explosion of color. Black skies turn ash gray; next, a sideways sliver of orange divides the vast horizon.
A pause, then a breathtaking ocean dawn: Churning deep blue waters collide with the palest of blue skies. Wisps of clouds turn whiter and brighter as the sun climbs.
First light changes everything.
A pod of dolphins emerges to play alongside the “Jillian and Peri” as it motors out to deeper waters. Their squeals as they pass below the hull echo onboard and stir Andrew Konchek from his wooden bunk below deck.
Time for another subfreezing day at the office, fishing 15 miles or so off the Massachusetts coast.
“It’s a little cold,” Konchek said. “It’s definitely hard work. Not for everybody.”
But it defines him.
Konchek went to culinary school. Worked as a chef. But the ocean called him back.
“Because I love it,” he said. “I can’t see myself doing anything else but fishing.”
That love powers his politics and his belief that Donald Trump back in the White House is his best hope for job security.
“Oh yeah, all day,” is the answer when Konchek is asked whether the new Trump term makes it more likely he will still be working the water two and four years from now. He adds this bitter pill for Democrats: “Republicans are for the people.”
We met Konchek 16 months ago, in the early stages of our All Over the Map project — an effort to track the 2024 campaign through the eyes and experiences of voters who live in key places or are part of critical voting blocs.
Though fishing off Massachusetts this visit, he is a New Hampshire resident who backed Trump in the state’s early primary and then again in November, as he did in 2016 and 2020.
Konchek is just one example of Trump’s blue-collar appeal, his ability to connect with working-class voters who were long considered loyal Democrats.
Immigration is a central piece of this puzzle. Konchek is with the vast majority of Trump voters who want more aggressive and effective border policies, even mass deportations.
“If they came over to the country legally then it wouldn’t be a problem,” he said.
But Konchek’s support — and hope — for Trump is more personal: The president-elect mentions the fishermen when he comes to New England, and he promises to reverse plans for offshore wind farms that Konchek believes would destroy New England fisheries and his way of life.
“The hundreds of miles they’re going to put in the ocean here, in the Gulf of Maine, we wouldn’t be able to fish it,” Konchek said. “So, I would be out of a job.”
Trump will be president the next time Konchek leaves port. He wants quick evidence promises made will be promises kept.
“Keep the whole windmill promise,” is Konchek’s first test. “What other promises? He talked about the border control. Obviously, I think this time around if he builds the wall, it won’t be stopped and he can probably complete it.”
We met up with Konchek at Provincetown Harbor after some time exploring Trump’s blue-collar appeal in one of the deepest blue places on any presidential map: Boston.
Vice President Kamala Harris won 77% of the Boston vote. Yet the city offers a critical laboratory as Democrat try to learn from their 2024 drubbing.
Trump’s share of the Boston vote climbed from 15% in 2020 to 20% in 2024, and he won two precincts in the city’s gritty Dorchester section.
Dorchester is my home and where my love of politics took root: I was a young, curious witness to kitchen table and VFW hall conversations, often feisty, about Vietnam, Watergate, forced busing in the public schools, racial tensions. The place where union guys like my father pondered whether Kennedy Democrats might switch to Reagan Democrats.
Lopez the Florist moved from Roxbury to Dorchester in 1962, one year before I was born. Don Lopez inherited the business from his father and is now handing it off to his sons.
“This neighborhood is pretty blue, pretty Democrat,” Lopez said. His next word would usually end any doubt about local politics: “Massachusetts.”
But Lopez the Florist is in one of the precincts Trump won.
“I wouldn’t have believed that,” Lopez said when we told him the local results.
He is reluctant to discuss his own vote for fear of hurting the business. But turn the conversation from names on the ballot to issues on his mind and his leanings are clear.
“We have the border,” Lopez said when asked the issues that mattered most to his 2024 vote. “They’re spending money in Washington like it is going out of style. … The country needs to go in another direction.”
The Eire Pub is a block away, a Dorchester icon and blue-collar magnet. John Stenson’s dad bought the place 60 years ago.
“First of all, Irish, many of them,” is how Stenson describes the regulars. “Secondly, blue-collar workers. Union officials. Union workers. Your everyday people who make up a neighborhood.”
Stenson was behind the bar in 1983 when Ronald Reagan stopped in to tip a pint. And again nine years later when Bill Clinton popped in as part of his effort to sell himself as a different kind of Democrat — meaning less liberal.
That Trump won two Dorchester precincts was no surprise to Stenson; the Eire is in one of them and walking distance from the other.
“I’m here every day and I hear the conversation,” he said in a lunchtime interview at the pub.
What was it?
“Immigration and cost of living at the top,” he said.
Stenson’s gut of how the Eire regulars voted:
“In favor of Trump. Probably 60-40.”
Most of the bar’s patrons are Democrats, Stenson said, but willing to go outside the box “if they feel like there is a man that represents them, especially the way they feel about major issues. … They saw that with Reagan, and I think they saw it again with Trump.”
It is cops and firefighters, plumbers and electricians who surround the Eire bar for conversations mixing politics with the ups and downs of the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics and Bruins.
These residents are forever loyal, even when grumpy, about their teams. But, Stenson said, they are mostly Democrats at heart who will stick with Trump only if he keeps his word.
“Between what they are paying at the grocery store and how they feel about what he’s done with the border in six months,” Stenson said. “That will give you your opinion.”
Konchek has the same test — plus the wind farms.
But he is skeptical any president can quickly tame inflation. He is also a registered Republican and perhaps more patient with Trump than are Democrats who voted GOP because they saw Harris as too liberal or out of touch with their blue-collar lives.
Not that he always agrees with Trump. Hardly.
His points of disagreement with Trump include a caustic tone that can offend Konchek, and his wife even more.
“He doesn’t think before he talks sometimes,” Konchek said in a conversation on the stern fishing deck.
He also wishes Trump would leave abortion and other reproductive rights decisions to women. And Konchek wishes Trump would stop denying the climate crisis he sees every day when searching for lobsters, scallops, cod and more.
The last part is an important distinction: Konchek lives the changing climate every day. There are more quotas and restrictions, more severe weather; some familiar fish are harder to find as waters warm, and some species are popping up much farther north than in years past.
So, he disagrees with Trump and those who cry “hoax.” But also takes issue with Democrats and regulators who, in his view, impose new rules and ideas — like the wind farms — without thinking about or seeking input from those who work the water.
“The Green New Deal is the worst deal I have ever heard of,” Konchek said.
Our day at sea is a promise we made to Konchek when we first met — to see the work and the waters he says the politicians don’t understand. Trips can last up to 12 days, with a crew of three plus a government observer sharing a spartan, cramped living cabin.
The giant nets are dropped 100 fathoms, or 600 feet, to the ocean floor. Every four to five hours, including overnight, they are cranked back to the surface and the catch is spilled out on the deck to be sorted.
What the rules or common sense say you shouldn’t keep — fish too small, lobsters rich with eggs, two mako sharks in this haul — gets tossed back to their home. What you can keep gets sorted into buckets and then either the lobster tanks or the ice-filled fish hold below deck. As the days pass, the layered stacks of cod, haddock, red snapper, flounder and more grow higher.
It was 23 degrees — that’s minus 5 Celsius — when we left Provincetown Harbor at 5 a.m. Everything on the deck is icy. You are lucky this time of year if it gets above freezing.
“It’s an honest living,” is how Konchek describes it, shrugging off the grueling conditions. “It’s in my blood. It’s me. I can’t see myself doing anything else.”
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