Tracie Lammers was a lifelong Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries and then voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012.

By the 2016 presidential campaign, her faith in Clinton and the Democratic Party had eroded. She didn’t like the way Clinton responded to the Benghazi inquiry and felt that the Democratic Party was out of touch with the needs of middle-class Americans. So she changed her party affiliation to Republican and eventually supported Donald Trump.

Tracie Lammers was a lifelong Democrat until the 2016 presidential election, when she switched to the Republican Party and voted for Donald Trump. Staff photo by Gregory Rec

As a small-business owner, she liked his platform of overhauling health care and reforming the tax code. Lammers and her husband, Eric, own and operate Krack Media, a Web design and social media strategy company.

“Obamacare is a real issue for us,” she says. “Health care for us was costing almost $900 a month.” In 2014, she and her husband dropped their coverage through the Affordable Care Act and opted to pay the penalty instead. “It was more cost-effective for us to pay the penalty and then pay for the doctors’ visits as we go rather than shelling out that much every year.”

Lammers says she thinks Trump and the Republican Party will eventually pass health care and tax reforms. She is also glad that he has begun to tone down his rhetoric and brashness.

“I think it’s been a real learning curve for him,” she says. “He’s learning diplomacy in small increments. I’m hoping that over these 100 days he’s learned some things and maybe he’ll have surrounded himself with some better advisers.”

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