Brekke Wagoner looks out the windows of her home in North Carolina and sees disaster coming.
Not immediately, but someday, as hurricanes and other storms supercharged by climate change barrel up the Eastern Seaboard, drenching neighborhoods, knocking out power and destroying roads.
But it’s not the storms she worries about, not exactly. Instead, she worries that an incompetent federal government run by someone like current Republican front-runner and former President Donald Trump will botch the humanitarian response to a predictable disaster.
She’s one of a growing number of people on both sides of the political divide who are preparing for the possibility of a disastrous collapse of society after the 2024 election.
Wagoner, 39, represents a relatively small but growing segment of Americans who consider themselves “preppers” ‒ people prepared to survive without government assistance during disasters. Those disasters could encompass anything from a major storm to widespread looting sparked by election anger.
In the past 12 months, 39% of millennials and 40% of Gen Zers reported having spent money on prepping, according to Finder.com, which has collected similar data since at least 2017.
Overall, almost 30% of Americans surveyed reported taking some steps toward emergency preparedness last year, up from about 25% in 2017, according to the annual Finder survey.
“On the left, you have people afraid (Trump’s) going to declare himself dictator of the United States and people on the left are going to end up as targets in some sort of authoritarian system,” said prepping expert and author Brad Garrett.
“On the right, it’s general malaise and a fear of society unraveling. They point to these smash-and-grab robberies, riots and protests.”
One expert consulted by USA TODAY said a failure or perceived failure of government is almost always the trigger for people to begin prepping. He said the number of younger, more liberal people prepping indicates a loss of trust in government.
“That’s the impetus for all the preppers I’ve ever dealt with: They saw something and felt the government could not or would not help,” said Chad Huddleston of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a professor and anthropologist who has studied the prepping community extensively.
Huddleston said it’s important to distinguish between the large numbers of people who consider being prepared for emergencies their civic and family responsibility and those who are, sometimes eagerly, awaiting societal collapse.
But he said the number of people deliberately preparing for a crisis tied to a Trump-Biden election is growing.