These Michigan Voters Aren’t Exactly Undecided — They’re Cringing

Cindy Jager was the lone worker on duty in the crammed aisles of an old-fashioned variety store overflowing with hardware and party supplies and fake pumpkins.

When I came across her, she was carefully rearranging cleaning products on a back shelf of the shop in Walker, Mich. When I brought up the election, she pulled herself into a full-body cringe, bending at the waist and grimacing, fluttering in nervous laughter, hands flying to touch her frosted hair.

“It’s embarrassing,” Ms. Jager, 56, said. “Everything’s a joke. I don’t even watch the news anymore.”

I asked if she planned to vote. Definitely, she replied. For whom, I asked. She cringed again.

“That’s the question,” she said. “Out of millions of people, why do we have these two?”

Walker is a onetime farming district thick with peach orchards, now a city on the western flank of Grand Rapids. It has made national news at least twice — once in the 1980s, when a couple of health care workers were smothering their charges in a nursing home, and again when Donald Trump came to speak in late September.

Mr. Trump stood on a loading dock of a manufacturing plant here and told the crowd that Vice President Kamala Harris had allowed droves of violent criminals to cross the border illegally and carry out crime sprees in U.S. communities. “Blood is on her hands,” he said floridly.