“I don’t know if I could bring myself to vote for any Republican again,” says McCammon. “If they backed Trump in any way, they will never get my vote.”
McCammon, 69, lives in a house with a view overlooking the Mississippi River in the Buffalo County community of Alma, about 55 miles north of La Crosse. Born in Nebraska, she moved around the country with her family growing up, graduating from high school in La Crosse.
As an adult she wound up in southern California, where she lived for some 35 years until moving back to Wisconsin in 2017 after a high school reunion.
For most of her life, McCammon says, she avoided paying much attention to politics. “I dreaded election years because of all of the ads,” she says.
“I’ve got to be brutally honest, if I had not been called on the carpet by a gentleman my dad used to work with years ago about voting, I don’t know that I would have been voting,” McCammon says. “By the time he was done lecturing me about the importance of voting, I’ve never failed to vote since then.”
GOP was ‘a safer bet’
More often than not, she cast those votes for Republicans. “I think I paid just enough attention that I felt the Republicans were a safer bet,” she says.
She voted for George W. Bush for president in 2000 and 2004. She admired Arizona Sen. John McCain and says she would have voted for him in 2008 — until he picked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
“I think he was just trying to get the female vote. She was an insult to female intelligence,” McCammon says.
She was happy to have voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but when Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016, she voted for Trump “because I thought eight years of Clinton was enough.” Looking back, she adds, “I was so very wrong.”
In her day-to-day life, though, McCammon says she didn’t really follow political news until the 2016 election.
“I only started paying attention when Trump came on the scene,” she says. “My thought was, maybe we need someone who is not a career politician. Maybe we need somebody with a fresh set of eyes.”
In her community, “we had a challenge with illegal immigrants,” McCammon says. “I have absolutely no problem with anyone who wants to come to this country — I mean, why wouldn’t they want to? But it was the illegal part of it. So, of course, I believed him when he said, ‘I have a plan, and Mexico’s going to pay for the wall.’ Well, I didn’t realize that was all a lie.”
Even though choosing Trump that year was in line with many of her past votes, she says she found herself regretting that choice almost immediately. And when it comes to politics, “I’ve paid very close attention ever since then.”
‘Revolving door’ at the White House
Trump’s public statements quickly soured on McCammon. A friend introduced her to the cable channel MSNBC and commentator Rachel Maddow’s program. She became a regular viewer of Maddow and other MSNBC regulars, particularly Lawrence O’Donnell and Brian Williams.
Trump had “a revolving door on the White House. I mean, he just fired people and fired people and fired people,” McCammon says. “He turned the presidency into literally a joke.”
McCammon says she was disturbed to learn that as president Trump
accepted the word of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a 2018 meeting in Helsinki that there was no Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 election — contrary to what U.S. intelligence agencies had found.
Trump’s exchange of warm, flattering correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “was an embarrassment,” McCammon says.
Along with Maddow, O’Donnell and Williams, McCammon particularly took to the programs of another MSNBC host, Nicolle Wallace. “She’s a former Republican, and she’s worked in the White House, and I appreciate listening to people who kind of went the same way I did for years and then woke up and realized that they were in the wrong universe,” McCammon says.
TV ads in 2020 for Republican Voters Against Trump caught McCammon’s attention. She went to the website listed on the screen and watched videos posted there. There was an invitation to record her own story, and she took it.
“At the end of that one, I remember I was almost starting to get emotional, because I was begging the Republicans to do something — just begging them,” she says.
Sometime in the week that followed she got an email from RVAT, asking if she would speak to news organizations. She agreed and was interviewed by ABC and CNN, “and then it just rolled from there.”
In all, she did interviews with journalists from eight countries, she recalls. The most memorable might have been a BBC correspondent, who expressed concern about the future of NATO if Trump won reelection in 2020. She also recorded a video for the Democratic super PAC American Bridge.
Keeping the peace with neighbors
In 2024 she has again
recorded a spot for the Republican Voters Against Trump. She begins the video by talking about the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by people attempting to stop the certification of the election that had just been won by Joe Biden. “Trump is 100% responsible for what happened on Jan. 6,” she tells the camera.
In the video McCammon goes on to criticize Project 2025, the policy agenda for the next GOP president that was assembled by former Trump advisors, for proposals she fears would jeopardize her Social Security benefits and her Medicare coverage.
McCammon was a one-day spectator at the Democratic National Convention as a guest of American Bridge, and she was recognized at a panel discussion about suburban voters, where she says members of the audience came up to her and thanked her for speaking out.
Back home in Alma, McCammon has friends and neighbors who share her views, and others whom she knows remain Trump supporters.
“I kind of know where they stand,” she says. “I don’t want to create any challenges, so I don’t. If they ask me, I’ll talk about it, but otherwise we don’t.”
McCammon, an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, says she admires Republicans including former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger and former Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan who have endorsed Harris and condemned Trump.
And she’s angry and frustrated by Republican lawmakers who criticized Trump, sometimes harshly, before he won the GOP nomination in 2016 and have since fallen in line to support him.
McCammon allows that becoming a vocal critic of the former president has been an unexpected journey.
“All I wanted to do is just go on the website and record my little video and have people watch it and hope that it would change somebody’s mind,” she says. “And then it just snowballed from there.”
