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President Donald Trump is losing to former Vice President Joe Biden by more than 10 percentage points in both the Real Clear Politics and FiveThirtyEight national polling averages. This historically large margin suggests that something amazing has happened: Even in our hyperpolarized political environment, a meaningful number of voters have changed their minds about Trump.

Equally amazing: The majority of 2016 Trump voters—despite a mismanaged pandemic, widespread economic fallout, a racial crisis exacerbated by divisive rhetoric, and a debate meltdown—plan to back Trump a second time.

What makes one voter who supported Trump in 2016 decide to support Biden? And what makes another voter—even one who thinks things are going badly—stick around?

In the simplest, broadest terms, those who are abandoning Trump are doing so because they place most of the blame for the state of the country on the president. Those who are sticking with him, despite their expressions of discomfort with him personally, are driven by an even deeper scorn for the president’s detractors.

Since 2018, I’ve conducted roughly 50 focus groups with Trump voters who rate the president as doing a “very bad job” or a “somewhat bad job,” to understand the shifting dynamics within my own political party. (I’m a lifelong Republican.) In 2020, I narrowed my research primarily to white women in swing states who give him the lowest performance grade.

These women generally loathe Trump. When I ask why they rate him as doing a bad job, they rarely pull their punches. He’s a “narcissist,” “bully,” and “racist”; he’s “unprofessional” and “embarrassing” as well. They are dismayed by the chaos, the tweeting, his general nastiness and divisiveness. They thought that the bombastic showman they saw on the campaign trail in 2016 was an act and that Trump would rise to the dignity of the presidency. They agree—with a mixture of horror and bemusement—that such a transformation never took place.

Anyone watching this part of one of my focus groups would assume that virtually none of these women would vote for Trump again. But when I ask who they plan to vote for in November, the results are mixed. Typically, some are voting for, or leaning toward, Biden; some are voting for, or leaning toward, Trump; and many are still undecided.

Some of the women who are definitely voting for Biden had immediate buyer’s remorse after voting for Trump in 2016. One of them memorably told me that she “would vote for a dog over Donald Trump.” Many women who fall into this category say that if they had it to do over, knowing what they know now, they would have voted for Hillary Clinton.

But most of these women say their thinking evolved over time as they weighed the foibles of the president against sins of the elites, whom they viscerally distrust. For instance, during the focus groups I convened throughout Trump’s impeachment, few of the women had anything nice to say about Trump’s actions. But their real contempt was reserved for Democrats and “the media,” whom they viewed as unnecessarily adversarial to Trump. And the plain fact is that they were unwilling to give much weight to an argument about the rule of law and abuse of power, because it didn’t have a visible impact on their lives.

But the pandemic has. In fact, it has created a noticeable shift in support away from Trump and toward Biden.