The neighbourhood where Catherine Bossi lives is the kind of American suburb that's hard to describe without it sounding like a cliché.
Located just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, the lawns are green and manicured. The trees are big and leafy. The houses are charming and well-kept, uniform without being too bland.
In a year when the visual narrative coming out of America has been dominated by refrigerator trucks for COVID-19 victims and police marching through cities with riot gear, the view that a majority of Americans see when they walk outside looks a lot closer to Catherine's.
It looks stable, safe, maybe even symbolic of the status quo.
And yet when it comes to the most politically heated election of our lifetime, it's places like this that are the subject of narratives and headlines about what's driving the most change.
It's people like Catherine — white suburban women.
"I voted for Donald Trump in 2016. I was hoping that maybe the politicians would come together and get things done with somebody that wasn't a politician," she explains from the yard of a big, corner house.
"I regret that decision. I speak about it almost every day."
Suburban women are a key target this election cycle
The term "suburb" lacks a consistent definition in the US, and in pundit-speak, it often gets confused or morphed with white, college-educated, middle-class voters.
But taken at its broadest, geographic definition, it captures the living situation for more Americans than "urban" and "rural" nearly combined.
And it serves as a more reliable bellwether for presidential races than "urban" and "rural", too. Traditionally, this is where the campaigns fight hardest and spend most.
Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by five percentage points in the suburbs in 2016. Now, four years later, the polls show Trump trailing rival Joe Biden by as much as 10 points.
According to one analysis from FiveThirtyEight, non-white voters in the suburbs overwhelmingly support Biden (including 83 per cent of Black, 69 per cent of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 57 per cent of Hispanic voters).
White suburban men are still backing Trump 57 per cent compared to the 41 per cent who say they are voting for Biden.
So the math is that white women are driving the drastic swing in the suburbs — they support Biden 54 per cent compared to 45 per cent for Trump.
Part of the reason for all the attention on the demographic is that Trump didn't win a majority of suburban women in 2016.
Clinton's victory was surprisingly narrow — 52 per cent, while polling showed suburban women disapproved of Trump by as much as 70 per cent — and that quickly emerged as one of the top reasons why so many pundits made the wrong prediction for the election outcome.
There's still not a consistent narrative on what happened.
A blip in exit polling data led the US media to assert, for nearly two years, that Trump won over 52 per cent of white women voters.
Then Trump morphed that statistic to imply he won with 52 per cent of women overall.
If you ask the Trump campaign, the victory was a result of the so-called "shy voter": sizable numbers of white suburban women who supported Trump but told pollsters a different story.
But if you ask people like Catherine — who openly voted for Trump — it's more about a dislike for Clinton.
It was a reluctant "lesser of two evils" choice made close to election day.
Trump's strategy on how to get them back is clear
Trump has made suburban voters — particularly suburban women — a key target of his campaign ever since George Floyd's killing sparked violent unrest in cities.
He's replaced his 2016 catchphrase, "build the wall," with "law and order", but the threat he's peddling remains more or less the same.
Even though life for most Americans looks and feels safe, in Trump's telling, the danger is just around the corner — the bottom could fall out at any moment, and a group of strangers is actively trying to take good things away from you.
The safest place to go is not forward but to retreat backwards. It's to "Make America Great Again".
So maybe it's no coincidence that when Trump tries to appeal to white suburban women, he frames them in similarly retro terms.
He calls them "housewives", even though more women work than men (or did before the pandemic hit at least), and he implies that they're in need of saving (by him).
In July, he tweeted to the so-called Suburban Housewives, warning "Joe Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream".
In August, he penned an op-ed saying the Democrats plan to "remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern", and that "anyone who dares tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist".
And in a campaign rally earlier this month, he dropped all pretence and just pleaded with the voting block:
"Can I ask you to do me a favor, suburban women? Will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?"
Trump's rhetoric may be his biggest downfall
But that's the thing about Trump. No matter what he does, Catherine just can't bring herself to like him.
She still considers herself a conservative, or at least a moderate. She doesn't agree with Biden's liberal policies.
But the more Trump embraces abrasive rhetoric and divisive terms, the less Catherine can stomach him.
"I just can't deal with people that have no compassion for others," she said.
"Just the negativity that comes out of his mouth. His rudeness, his narcissism … his hatred, his making fun of people, his treatment of women."
She made up her mind to vote Democratic before the "law and order" rhetoric came on to the stage.
It was well before she decided to take a leave of absence from her job as a flight attendant in hopes that it meant one less co-worker would be made redundant during coronavirus's economic devastation.
It was even before she lost her husband, who was in a nursing home and died so quickly after experiencing COVID-19 symptoms that they never even tested him.
"Even if the circumstances would've been different, I still wouldn't be loving Trump," she said.
"No, I was way, way over him before any of this happened."
The research tells us Catherine's not alone on this.
It's difficult to nail down a specific sentiment for a large voting block, but interview upon interview reveals these women are becoming single-issue voters.
And that issue is Trump's character.
There's also something to be read about the timing of the shift in the fact that white women voted sharply Democratic in the mid-terms.
They turned away from Trump's party when he was in office, working with Congress to take steps on the top policy issues he promised.
Catherine is disappointed Trump has decided to make "law and order" his top policy now. She just doesn't buy it.
"I believe he causes most of the unrest himself," she said.
"It's his policies and the way he speaks that cause the unrest."
'Law and order' does resonate with many
Forty-five kilometres away, in a suburb that's north of Charlotte instead of south, Tricia Sission says Trump's "law and order" messaging is resonating with her neighbours.
She's a longtime resident of the Lake Norman region, the whitest and most reliably Republican slice of the county.
Tricia says it's not that she feels unsafe on her own streets, but it's the proximity to the city that makes her and her neighbours feel a bit uneasy.
"We watch the Charlotte news, so we take notice of what's going on," she said, standing behind the counter of a gun store she owns with her husband.
"There's always a level of concern that it could come into our area."
Sales at their range are up 60 per cent compared to this time last year, though it may be partially because of the fear of food and supply shortages related to the pandemic.
"We're seeing more and more women coming in trying to learn 'what are the procedures?'" she said.
"'What do I need to do?' 'What do I need to do to protect myself?' 'What's the right firearm for me to protect myself and my family?'"
Sylvia Hahn was one of those women.
"It's not one of these things you'll be 100 per cent comfortable with — ever — because you never know what you're going to encounter," she said on the day she tested for her concealed carry permit, which will allow her to carry a disclosed firearm throughout the state.
"But at least I can be prepared if I choose to do so."
She didn't want to discuss politics, stressing that her decision to learn about guns was a personal choice based on "everything that's been going on in the cities".
But in explaining how it felt to pull the trigger, she touched on the same feeling that Trump often implies, however indirectly, is missing from the lives of so many suburban women.
"Powerful," she said. "It feels pretty powerful."
It's not just politics that are changing, it's the suburbs themselves
When Alisa Webb is asked whether she's worried about the suburbs being invaded by Black Lives Matter sympathisers, she can't help but laugh.
"Well, no. They're already in my house," she said.
The resident of Harrisburg, another conservative suburb of Charlotte, is married to a black man and a mum to two bi-racial children.
Whenever the President talks about "law and order", it puts her on edge — makes her feel a little like the best things in her life could be ripped away without warning.
"His message is, basically, 'go rough on them'," she said.
"He's not treating the people police are interacting with as humans. He's saying something that could endanger my husband and my family.
"Trump said, 'I saved your damn suburbs' — from what exactly? The implication there is black and brown people. I think he still views the suburbs as, well, a middle-aged white woman with a family.
"That's not what the suburbs are anymore."
Alisa didn't vote for Trump in 2016 and there's no way she'll vote for him in 2020 — but she did do something in the four-year interim that helps explain why the political tides are shifting.
She moved from a liberal, urban centre — the city of Charlotte — to a conservative, suburban one.
She was motivated by cheaper housing, better schools, bigger yards and safer streets for her daughters.
And she took her political views with her.
Suburban women don't believe crime is an issue in their communities
Millions of Americans across races, religions and political leanings are doing the same thing.
The suburbs are still predominantly white, but they've gone from being 81 per cent white to 65 per cent white in the last three decades.
In the area around Charlotte alone, the Hispanic population increased 36 per cent and the black population increased 24.5 per cent just in the last ten years.
Maybe more telling than the physical change is the mental one.
Polling taken after the unrest shows that an overwhelming majority of suburban women — 84 per cent — said they want to see more racially integrated neighbourhoods.
A majority also supported building low-income housing, saying they didn't think it would impact their property values.
Fewer than 10 per cent said they believed crime was a top issue in their communities.
While the media's cameras were trained on the unrest in cities this summer, a vast majority of the actual protests — 4,000 by some counts — were taking place quietly in the suburbs.
For all of Trump's warning about the changes coming to the suburbs, he may have miscalculated how much change has already arrived.
Fear is a powerful political tool, but it works best when it's abstract and far away.
It's easy to believe an immigrant is stealing jobs if you don't spend a lot of time with immigrants, and it's easy to believe life was better in previous eras if you're from a current one.
It's much harder to believe the suburbs are under siege when you look out your front door, see a place you love to call home, and believe it's only going to get better tomorrow.
