McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Nov. 3 election is fast approaching at a moment when some Republican voters, frustrated by ever-rising prices, could turn on their party.
Cindy Banda, a Texan and three-time supporter of President Donald Trump, is one of them.
For Banda, 46, her political shift began after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
For more than a year, through a mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiation treatment, the single mother with six children in her care had to stop working even as her medical debt rose beyond $25,000.
The experience forced her into a grueling day-to-day financial scramble.
Her goal? “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable."
To do that costs roughly $7,000 a month, exacerbated the rising tide of other costs, chief among them gas and groceries.
Banda tries not to dwell on death and debt because, she says, “it'll consume you."
She smothers those thoughts beneath her bubbly demeanor and avoids being alone. But that truce, between her insistence on positivity and the fears that it covers, is brittle.
Certain thoughts still arrive uninvited. Banda’s late sister, Melissa, didn't have life insurance when she was killed. Banda, who cares for Melissa's three children in addition to three of her own, makes sure it’s a payment she never misses.
“Sometimes I think, and I shouldn’t think like this, but I’m worth more gone than here,” she said one day, her eyes red and welling beneath her blue eyeliner.
“Obviously, the goal is not that, the goal is to beat it,” she continued, “to keep the house and keep the cars.”
And so far she has, the generosity of others helping keep her just beyond the reach of each month’s tide of bills.
That's included financial help from the father of her 9-year-old, as well as Banda's own father. Her high school classmates fundraised by selling food from a roadside tent. Two GoFundMe fundraisers raised near $30,000.
Still, the months of uncertainty took their own sleepless toll, and she recently returned to work selling internet services to businesses door to door, just before the midterms.
A lifelong Christian, Banda had voted her anti-abortion stance in past elections.
She voted for Trump in each of his campaigns, but two years into his second term, she has found no respite from high prices.
So when James Talarico, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, visited one of Banda’s fundraisers — speaking about his diabetes and his work in the Statehouse to lower the price of insulin — it moved her.
Talarico supports a law guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, which Banda has voted against for years. But after she slid into debt to stay alive, Banda’s anti-abortion concerns have been superseded by costs.
“Because it’s what I’m living,” she said. “I’m living it.”
Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico.
“Never voted Democrat before today!!” she wrote in a text with blue heart emoji.
