As millions of Americans pick their next president, what is it that drives their choice as they mark the ballot paper in front of them?
We spoke to seven people about the moment they made up their mind.
For the most part, Allison McCullough, 43, has been a reliable vote for the Democrats.
“At the core, I lean to the left,” she said.
And as a black woman herself, Allison has, at times, been overcome by the historic nomination of Kamala Harris.
But Allison, a paediatric nurse and mother of two, will not be voting for her. Instead, in protest of the “heartbreaking” war in Gaza, she will cast her ballot for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
It wasn’t an easy decision. For months, Allison had gone back and forth, hoping that Harris would demand a ceasefire and fully acknowledge the damage that had been done.
But Harris has mostly stuck to the same talking points as Biden, Allison said.
“I cannot morally vote for someone who is allowing us to send millions of dollars and support somewhere where they’re actively killing women and children in the name of self defence.”
The paediatric nurse in me has been heartbroken at the images that I see coming out of Gaza
Then last month, Allison read an account of US doctors in Gaza treating bullet wounds in the skulls of children. The mental picture made up her mind.
Allison knows her vote may inadvertently benefit Donald Trump.
“But I’m looking at who’s responsible for things right now,” she said.
Until late in his 20s, John Doty was not especially political.
He felt mostly at home within the conservative circles he was raised in, first in Florida and then Indiana.
Then in 2016, aged 29, and four years into his career with the US army, he cast his first ever ballot for president – for Donald Trump.
“I guess the machismo of it, the toughness that Trump tried to portray, I bought into that.”
A few weeks after the election, he spent Thanksgiving in New York City with his now-wife, Ruth, and her family, who are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. That’s when Trump’s aggressive response to “illegals” started to rankle.
“My wife’s mom, she has been deported before… one day police showed up and her mom’s gone,” he said. “You shouldn’t do that to kids, to families.”
From there, John’s confidence in Trump began to unravel, and by 6 January 2021, the day of the Capitol riots, he had turned on the president for good.
And when he heard Kamala Harris speak at the Democratic National Convention earlier this summer, he knew she had his vote. In that moment, he felt more positive about the country than he had in a while.
“I was so pumped up, I texted my friend about it. He said ‘oh you’ve finally gone fully left.'”
On 1 May 2022, Craig Blessing, his wife Briana, their two toddler sons, and two dogs arrived at their new home in Orlando, Florida, after moving 2,000 miles from the West Coast.
Just three days before, Briana, a perfusionist, had lost her job at a southern California hospital over her refusal to get a booster of the Covid-19 vaccine. The first vaccine had left her with “bad complications”, said Craig, 44.
They could have stayed in California “jobless, homeless”, he said, or try somewhere else.
So they packed up their things and moved more than 2,000 miles to the opposite coast.
When he moved to California in 2014, Craig had mostly left his politics at the door. And that had worked fine for Craig, who described himself as a fiscal conservative who had cheered the election of Democrat Bill Clinton as a kid.
“After he was done with his eight years, I was excited at the possibility of Hillary running right after him,” he said.
Trump clears the barriers
But Craig started paying closer attention once Donald Trump was elected. He liked Trump’s work at the border, his tax cuts, and how healthy the economy seemed to be.
At the same time, he was becoming increasingly frustrated by California’s leaders, by their liberal policies on the border and crime, and by the “government overreach” that coloured the state’s pandemic response.
By the time Briana was fired, Craig had reached his breaking point. “I’m just like, man, these people really want to control our lives.”
And he had shed his political agnosticism. “There’s no way my vote could be swayed away from Trump,” he said.
Where they grew up, in conservative Christian households in the US South, friends Melissa Alexander and Mary Joyce’s party affiliations were taken as a given.
“It was almost like a bad word to say Democrat in my house,” said Mary, 41. “It was a big deal. You were a conservative. You worked hard, you didn’t get handouts from anybody, you stood with your family and you had faith in God.”
With time, those inherited political ties began to fray. When Trump became the Republican standard bearer, Melissa and Mary became further estranged from their party.
They were both uncomfortable with Trump’s “disrespectful” rhetoric and his derisive comments about women, they said.
Then last spring, a mass shooting at their children’s primary school in Nashville, Tennessee, undermined any remaining party loyalty.
Mary’s daughter and Melissa’s son survived but three of their classmates and three staff members were killed.
“I became a single-issue voter on March 27th,” Melissa said. “Safer regulations around firearms.”
But their lobbying of the Republican-run Tennessee legislature for modest gun reform like background checks and safe storage laws came to nothing.
“It makes you think – man, how sacred is a weapon in the United States?” Mary said.
“How can this object have more freedom and privileges than the actual children?”
Neither will be voting for Trump, citing his silence on gun control and a comment he made in January after another school shooting that “we have to get over it”.
“That sent me over the edge,” Melissa said. “The survivor community lives with this every single day of their lives. We don’t get over it.”
Ric Morris, a Spanish professor and evangelical Christian, is deeply conservative. He is also gay.
“I know it’s an unusual combination,” he said. “I think there are more places at the conservative table than there are at the progressive table.”
Those rightward leanings saw him vote “begrudgingly” for Donald Trump in 2020. But he won’t vote for him again, saying Trump was showing signs of cognitive decline.
“He’s definitely not in his right mind,” Ric said.
After the presidential debate in September, Ric was convinced to cast his ballot for Trump’s opponent.
“I was pleasantly surprised by how coherent and how cogent Kamala Harris was,” he said. “Trump was sort of a one-note song.”
But Ric’s belief in Harris was undone by another moment last month. While talking about abortion rights at a rally in Wisconsin, Harris was interrupted by hecklers shouting “Jesus is Lord”.
It is unclear what Harris heard, but she replied by telling the protesters that they were “at the wrong rally”.
I think her true colours came through in that incident
The exchange stung Ric, who saw it as “hostility” towards Christians who see social issues, like abortion, differently than her.
He will now not be voting at all. “I will wait for a better choice in 2028.”
Arthur Beauford, from Augusta, Georgia, enlisted with the Marines Corps at 19.
He joined “out of an insecurity”, he said, “to prove to myself that I could do it”. And in the nine years that followed – four with the Marines and another five in school – he didn’t vote in a single presidential election.
“I had my attention focused elsewhere,” said Arthur.
Arthur’s review of Trump’s first term was mixed and left him unsure what way he was going to vote this time around, if at all.
He liked what Trump had done about illegal immigration and thought he gave the US a strong presence on the world stage. But he also “degraded” the office, Arthur said.
You can trust him to be who he is.
“He lacks etiquette, he lacks political tact, he doesn’t take responsibility for his actions.
But his mind was made up the moment Harris announced her candidacy on 21 July.
“It’s mostly her inauthenticity,” he said. “There just seems to be so much misalignment between what she says she is, and what she actually is.”
Harris, like Arthur, is a Baptist. “But people who are Baptist Christians don’t support abortion… there’s just something deeply disingenuous about that.”
Instead he will vote for Trump, because for all of his faults, you can believe him, Arthur said.
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022 and rescinded the nationwide right to abortion, Kat Green, 29, burst into tears.
Her home state of Kentucky had a so-called trigger ban in place, meaning a near-total abortion ban came immediately into effect.
“I sat back and reflected, like, this is so dangerous… I just lost all of these rights,” she said. “I hadn’t thought much about it until Roe was overturned.”
By then Kat, had already moved away from her Catholic school teachings on abortion.
“I was always taught that it was murder. No matter what, it’s murder,” she said.
But that day in June was a political awakening.
Later that year, she volunteered with a pro-choice advocacy group in Kentucky, working to defeat an anti-abortion ballot initiative.
The stakes are so incredibly high for women
Then, this past April, she suffered a miscarriage.
Kat said she was “lucky” that her doctor gave her the option of a “D&E” – dilation and evacuation – a common method of abortion that is also used in the case of a miscarriage. D&Es, like all other methods, are mostly prohibited in the state.
It scared her to think of all the women who were not given that option. And it strengthened her resolve to vote for Harris, who has promised to protect reproductive rights.
“The stakes are so incredibly high for women,” she said. “This is the right side to be on.”
