Easter has not forgiven Ted Cruz, whom he once donated to. “He and the others have alienated themselves from me and a good part of the United States,” he says. “They’re history. They’re has-beens. They need to get out of the way.”

Jerry Brown, a 67-year-old retired truck mechanic from Hawthorne, Florida, says, “The media is just against him, trying to make him look bad.” Of Ryan and the Republicans repudiating Trump, he adds, “These wimps deserve to lose their jobs. They’re running scared because they can’t face the truth.”

“He’s a man, OK?” says Brown’s friend Kim Cady, a 54-year-old housekeeper who wears her gray-brown hair feathered around her face. “Men are going to grab and grope. Somebody with that much money can grab your butt, big whoop. He didn’t rape anybody or have extramarital affairs.” Her favorite part of the last debate was when Trump told Clinton she would be in jail if he was president.

They do not believe the polls. A lot of things are new about this election, but the denial feels very familiar—it’s the same bunkered insistence that had Mitt Romney convinced he was winning, against far less conclusive evidence, four years ago. “I don’t listen to the polls. They’re all biased,” says Rick Johnson, 56, an electrician semi-retired on disability. “Look at the number of people coming to the rallies! This is a big majority of Americans!”