“The first few months he was entertaining to me,” said Carol Williams, 61, a small business owner who lives in Fayetteville, Tenn. “ I didn’t really think he was going to go anywhere — I really didn’t in the very beginning — and then I said: You know, I really like everything he’s saying. Everything he’s saying sounds like me talking.’”

Trump’s following includes an Austin realtor who long supported the Bush family but has become tired of career politicians, even though she’s afraid to share her support of Trump too loudly. An immigrant from the Philippines, now living in southern Georgia, who thinks Trump is best poised to shrink the national debt and crack down on illegal immigration. An Oklahoma veteran with a long list of visible and hidden injuries from his 23 years in the Marines who lost his job in November, forcing him to drop health insurance for his wife and teenaged daughter.

And in Saturday’s primary in Louisiana, it will include a 40-year-old father who installs security gates and considers Trump the sort of guy who would come to a backyard crawfish boil with him and his “gun-totin’ redneck” buddies.