As a New Hampshire state legislator in an influential Republican town, Fred Doucette was courted by multiple Republican presidential candidates in early 2015. He chose Donald Trump.
It was a decision that people he looked up to and respected told him not to make, he told CNN.
“It’s been a long hard road, many hours, a lot of states, a lot of hours, but it’s all going to pay off because he is going to affect change,” Doucette told CNN on Election Day hours before the polls closed.
As Trump’s campaign co-chair in the first in the nation primary state Doucette often found himself defending Trump’s controversial comments, but his support never wavered.
“He’s gotten in trouble how many times over the past year-and-a-half for speaking from the gut? Speaking the truth,” Doucette said. “I believed what he had to say for what it was, the truth.”
Doucette spent Election Day jumping between New Hampshire field offices, polling sites, and even monitoring his own re-election as state representative.
After polls closed he caught an evening flight to New York City where he hoped to see Trump claim the presidency.
Doucette felt certain that there were many voters who weren’t public about their support for Trump, and that it would all show up in the election results.
But in the early hours of Wednesday morning on November 9, as Trump’s victory party attendees spilled out onto New York City sidewalks, Doucette was in shock.
“To see that finally we crossed that finish line is something that I’m still processing right now and it’s going to take me a while to process it. It’s what, four in the morning right now? And it’s just hit, it’s just hit home.”