Growing up in North Carolina, I saw plenty of arguments on both sides of the aisle. I went to an extreme Catholic homeschool group during my high school years, where we were taught to be single-issue voters about abortion. (This was a place that forced all students to attend the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., and anyone who didn't go had to write a 10-page paper.)In that circle, the "issue of life" was the trump card in all presidential elections — and in my experience, that only refers to the "life" of the fetus, not the lives of, say, the homeless, or the sick, or of U.S. soldiers. I still know people in North Carolina who are of this mindset.To New York liberals, that might be alarming — and before this week, I still believed that those people, too, could be won over by the Democrats this year. Tim Kaine is personally opposed to abortion , and Donald Trump has a conflicting history on the issue.But despite Trump's uneven statements about abortion over the years, the issue was a factor for plenty of voters I know this election. Trump said on the campaign trail that he'd end funding to Planned Parenthood if it kept providing abortion services. And in March, Mike Pence, his pick for vice president, signed an Indiana bill that would prohibit abortions based on fetal abnormalities, including disabilities like Down syndrome.Even with the campaign's focus on abortion, I had hope these single-issue voters could be swayed. If the idea were to vote Republican because of what they feel are Christian values about abortion, surely, in this election, the Christian call to love all people would surpass that?I understood why some Republicans I knew back home are fiscal conservatives, why some of them voted for Mitt Romney. I respect that decision (and the fact that it's more nuanced than being a single-issue anti-abortion voter). But to me, a vote for Donald Trump is different from a vote for Republican candidates of years past. (Romney didn't propose excluding entire groups of people from the United States , for example.)Not everyone I know back home was pro-Trump, of course. For every conservative voter I knew in high school, I met a political polar opposite in college, at the predominantly liberal University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This is a campus that recently renamed a campus building that originally bore the name of a man connected to the Ku Klux Klan. The first time I was old enough to vote in a presidential election was for Obama's second term, and I voted on campus. Obama didn't win the state, but my peers and I were thrilled about his overall victory.