Nancy's Notes

Some research is conducted in laboratories. Some in boardrooms. And then there is the kind conducted from a lounge chair beside the ocean in Mexico, notebook in one hand, listening while the world talks when it thinks no one is studying it. The tide rolls in, the tide rolls out, and along the shoreline patterns form, shift, and sometimes disappear altogether. Over time, even the most unscientific observer begins to notice movement.

Over the past eighteen months, and more specifically across five separate visits to Mexico, through a series of entirely informal and definitely non-scientific conversations, I found myself repeatedly asking the same three simple questions. How do you feel about your president right now? Do you think your president thinks about Canada, and if so, how? And finally, what comes to mind when you think about Canada today? Not exactly Ipsos-level methodology, but surprisingly effective somewhere between the second coffee and sunset.

The conversations spanned five touch points. June 2024, October 2024, June 2025, October 2025, and now February 2026. The demographic was never intentionally selected, yet remarkably consistent. Predominantly age fifty-five plus, roughly sixty-five percent Caucasian, twenty percent Latino, fifteen percent Black. Mostly Canadian and American, with a scattering of Europeans who wandered into conversational orbit, often unintentionally becoming part of the “study.” Not a perfect sample, not even close, but a consistent one. And consistency, even poolside, tells a story.

What emerged was not statistics, but stages. Emotional and perceptual stages. Something between disbelief, adjustment, and political whiplash. Like footprints in the sand, each stage left a trace of where people stood at that moment in time.

Let us call them the Five and a Half Stages of Political Reality.

Stage One: The Comfortable Dismissal (June 2024)
Concern existed, but belief did not. People spoke about political upheaval the way one speaks about a distant storm over the horizon. Interesting, perhaps troubling, but surely not coming this way. Canadians continued buying winter escapes in Arizona and Florida. Americans spoke in hypotheticals. Nothing felt imminent. Nothing felt irreversible.

Stage Two: The Nervous Chuckle (October 2024)
The numbers tightened, and the tone shifted. Jokes became thinner, laughter shorter. Surely, people said, this could not actually happen. Surely the system would hold. Canadians still travelled south, though conversations carried a new edge. Americans began speaking less in hypotheticals and more in probabilities, though still wrapped in disbelief. Trump wouldn’t be that bad.

Stage Three: The Quiet Realization (June 2025)
The hypothetical became reality. The tone did not explode. It sank. This was not outrage. Canadians began saying, I will still go to the U.S. for now, but perhaps not forever. Americans spoke more cautiously, often lowering their voices, as if the political climate had become something navigated rather than debated. Geography began to matter. Border states sounded different from southern states. Urban voices differed from rural ones. Certainty was fading.

Stage Four: The Settled Shock (October 2025)
Realization hardened into acceptance, though not comfort. Canadians who once said they would “wait and see” began saying they would “wait, but not invest.” Some stopped travelling south. Some quietly sold property. Not dramatically or angrily but rather decisively. Among Americans, something unexpected appeared. Fatigue. Not necessarily political opposition, but exhaustion. The emotional volume dropped, yet the weight increased. Even casual conversations began sounding less like debate and more like reflection.

Stage Five: The Reflective Discontent (February 2026)
And now we arrive at the present, sitting beside an ocean that keeps rewriting the shoreline. Across conversations among travellers who vote, who pay attention, who historically leaned conservative, one pattern stands out. Contentment is rare. Pride sounds quieter. Uncertainty sounds louder. Vermont does not sound like Wisconsin. Wisconsin does not sound like Texas. Yet across geography, a shared unease hums beneath the surface.

Three distinct lenses emerged. A Canadian lens, reflecting reaction and changing cross-border behaviour. A European lens, observing from a distance with growing disbelief. And an American lens, revealing not just opinion, but something resembling evolving voter intention and emotional reassessment. This was never polling, but it was unmistakably movement.

Among Canadians, there is a clear alignment with our current national leadership and a growing discomfort with the direction of American leadership. What began as watchful patience has, for many, turned into quiet decision. Fewer winter homes, fewer long stays and fewer dollars flowing south. It’s still not loud nor dramatic. But it is deliberate.

Europeans observe from a distance, no longer trying to interpret, no longer trying to persuade. They watch, they shake their heads, and they move on, often with the calm certainty of people who have already made up their minds.

But it is the American conversations that feel most significant.

From Vermont to Wisconsin to Texas, across geography and ideology, something deeper is shifting. Not slogans. Not outrage. Recognition. A quiet understanding that this is not the country they imagined for themselves. A desire, sometimes whispered, to return to something steadier, something recognizable, something that once allowed them to celebrate their nation rather than explain it.

And perhaps that is the unwritten stage now forming. Not denial, shock or fatigue. Something closer to rediscovery.

The tide is still moving, quietly reshaping the shoreline one small shift at a time. Old footprints fade, new ones press forward, and without announcement the path begins to turn. Across conversations, across geography, across doubt and fatigue, something unmistakable is happening. More Americans are no longer standing still, no longer looking backward, but beginning to choose where they want their country to go next. The direction has changed and this time, they know it.