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The Great Scramble
Shelle Lichti sits behind the wheel of her truck, The Rainbow Rider, on December 10, 2023 in Joliet, IL. Lichti voted for Trump, then Biden, and now isn’t sure. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The Free Press)
Democrats and Republicans have switched sides—and nearly half of voters now call themselves independent. Peter Savodnik meets the politically homeless.
By Peter Savodnik
01.08.24 — U.S. Politics
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In 2016, Shelle Lichti voted for Donald Trump. She got tons of blowback from other gay people who thought she’d betrayed them.

She was 45 at the time, and she’d been doing things her own way since she was 11, since she was adopted by the big Mennonite family in Missouri, and ran away, and came out, and became a trucker, hauling beef and pork across the A…

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Peter Savodnik

Peter Savodnik is senior editor at The Free Press. Previously, he wrote for Vanity Fair, as well as GQ, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Wired, and other venues—reporting from the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, South Asia, and across the United States. His book, The Interloper: Lee Harvey Oswald Inside the Soviet Union, was published in 2013.

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