‘Disneyland for Old People’ is a must-win town for Trump

The streets are spotless, the lawns are freshly cut and the only traffic consists of thousands of golf buggies cruising along specially built lanes. On Lake Sumter Landing, a town square built in a quaint New England style, loudspeakers blare easy listening tunes on to the streets. The restaurant menus are printed in large fonts and some of the shops have rocking chairs on their terraces.

Welcome to The Villages, the biggest retirement community in the United States. Or, as it's unofficially known, Disneyland for Old People.

Spanning an area the size of Manhattan, this sprawling town in central Florida is home to more than 100,000 pensioners, drawn from all corners of the country by a very particular vision of the ideal retirement in the sun. It is an entirely self-contained enclave, offering residents all the shops, banks, restaurants, health centres and services they could need.

There are 51 golf courses, dozens of swimming pools and tennis courts and more than 3,000 clubs or interest groups that residents are free to join. “America’s friendliest hometown,” say the signs on every second lamp-post. Thanks to its gates and extensive CCTV network, it is also one of the most secure.

The town square feels like a Potemkin settlement. Historical plaques, complete with black-and-white photographs of its townspeople down the centuries, trace its history through the Civil War and recount its tragic brushes with epidemic and disaster. It is all fiction – an elaborately spun story that everyone is in on.

The rather more prosaic truth is that, in the 1960s, the Michigan businessman Harold Schwartz took advantage of Florida's land boom and snapped up huge parcels of grassland. He and a business partner initially opened a trailer park for retirees, but a massive expansion overseen by Schwartz's son Gary Morse paved the way for the town that became The Villages.

Today, the community is one of the key pieces in Florida's complex political jigsaw. The state is a microcosm of a country that is at once growing older and more ethnically diverse. If Miami represents the changing social complexion of the state and the country at large, then The Villages is emblematic of its ageing. And because over-65s are more likely than any other age group to vote – and vote Republican – the town is a vital plank of Donald Trump's strategy for victory in the biggest battleground state on the map.

In 2012, Mitt Romney took 67 per cent of the vote in Sumter County, in which The Villages is by far the most populous town. If Trump is to have a chance of winning, he must equal that at least.

"We're seeing very strong support for Donald Trump here in The Villages," says John Calandro, chairman of the Sumter County Republican Party and a resident for the past eight years.

Sitting in the local party office, where volunteers are setting up for the day, Calandro explains that Trump’s message has resonated with a community that feels “a tremendous amount of frustration, disappointment, even some levels of anger” over the country’s direction. Having spent most of his career in management in the car industry in Michigan, Calandro laments the loss of manufacturing jobs and the rise of a generation of young people who can’t find work that matches their qualification levels.

“Fewer and fewer people of the younger generation are working, and more and more of us are expecting to have them pay into our social security and Medicare,” he says.

Calandro, a Vietnam War veteran, is thrilled by life in The Villages. He gets to indulge his love of golf while his wife, an artist, spends a lot of time at painting groups and seminars. Often they come into the square in the evening with some of their new friends and enjoy the nightly entertainment and happy hour. "We love it. It's a great way of life," he says.

In a town like this, Calandro concedes, the direct impact of the election will be minimal. “But we all have kids. We all have grandkids. We have seen the down economy, we have seen the bolstering economy, the Reagan-era economy. We don’t want to be the last generation that did better than our parents.”. At a meeting last week, Calandro asked how many people in the group were concerned about the future of the country for their grandchildren. “It was overwhelming,” he says.

Rules laid down by the management company in The Villages stipulate that yard signs are forbidden, so the local Republican Party has adapted. It sends canvassers to the mail station where residents pick up their post every day and has printed 4,000 specially designed Trump posters for the windscreens of the most popular mode of transport in town: the golf buggy. The vehicles are everywhere – some residents spent up to $25,000 (€22,700) on souped-up models and they have their own designated parking spaces all over town.

On the day I visit, party volunteers have organised a "golf buggy parade" in which dozens of vehicles decorated with Trump signs and the stars-and-stripes form a cavalcade through the town. Residents look on from the tables outside Starbucks as the buggies move slowly and quietly through the square.

One of the most colourful belongs to Donna Hoak, a retiree from Pittsbugh who moved here 11 years ago. "Lock Her Up" says one of her signs, with a pair of handcuffs attached. Another reads "Retire Bonnie and Clyde", a reference to Bill and Hillary Clinton. "Everything deteriorated in the last eight years," says Hoak. "Everything went downhill. I have eight grandkids and I want them to have the same kind of life that I had. Not communism or being like a Third World country."

Asked what issues interest her most, she mentions healthcare for veterans and Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the Mexican border. “We need to quit having open borders and letting people come in here and take jobs.” She likes that Trump is a businessman and thinks he can do for the US what he did for his companies.

“We gotta give him a chance. We know what we’re going to get with Hillary. Besides that, Trump financed his own campaign. He doesn’t have to do this. He could be sitting in the Caribbean somewhere enjoying life, but he loves America, and we need somebody that loves America ’cause we don’t have that now.”

Official figures show that registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by two to one in Sumter County. In these parts, Democrats tend to keep a low profile, says Bill Ralston, who is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, but moved here with his wife Denise three years ago. Bill and Denise admit to being "oddities" in that they have already voted for Clinton. "We believe he's nuts," says Bill of Trump. "To be honest with you, I think Hillary leaves a little to be desired as well."

When the election comes up in conversation, Bill and Denise pretend not to be interested. It’s partly true this year, as they have both been turned off by the nastiness of the campaign. “We didn’t come here to be aggravated. We came to be retired,” says Bill. “Truly, that’s how we feel about it. This country is totally divided. Maybe not in this little enclave here, but in general our country is divided, and each side wants to attack the other side without even listening. I find that very discouraging.”

With that, Denise joins Bill in their red vintage golf buggy and the couple set off for home.