“I didn’t vote for Trump because I wanted him to be my best friend,” Ms. Schenkel said. “I wanted to make a change and a difference.”

“If he thinks it’s the right thing, he doesn’t care who’s going to get mad at him,” she added. “I think he’s very misunderstood.”

Asked about her two votes for Mr. Obama, Ms. Schenkel faulted him for doing little, in her view, to heal racial divisions or lift the Black community. She cited a “blood bath” of crime in Chicago whose victims are mainly young Black men, and a high abortion rate for African-American women. “I feel he made race relations the worst I’ve seen in my 50 years,” she said…

Other Trump supporters outlined myriad reasons for wanting to re-elect him, ranging from the pragmatic, like a new job made possible by the administration’s policies, to a gut-level attraction to his hard-nosed personality. His supporters related “aha” moments in their upbringing when they realized they were conservatives, which they spoke of as nonnegotiable beliefs woven into their identity, like opposition to abortion.