HOLLIS, New Hampshire—Charles Dean finds a seat in the back row of the stackable chairs set in the Alpine Grove Event Center.

He’s here to listen to Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley speak. More than that, he’s come hoping to find something he hasn’t seen for a long time … hope.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever done this,” Dean, 82, tells me after we shake hands.

The event center’s sound system blasts songs designed to energize the crowd before the candidate arrives for the 9 a.m. meet-and-greet. Blake Shelton’s “God’s Country” slips into the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” the mishmash of musical styles and moral messaging serving as a kind of symbolic homage to the dissonance in American life these days.

It is that dissonance that disconcerts Dean.

“We are too divided,” he says, shaking his head. “The whole country is divided.”

He has been, he explains, an independent his whole voting life, albeit one that leaned more toward Republicans than Democrats. He voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then for Joe Biden in 2020, praying each vote would pull Americans closer so they could begin facing the nation’s problems together.

He’s traveled through the snow and cold from his home in Nashua to give Haley a hearing. He wants to like her. He wants to be impressed by her, to believe that she has the character and the strength to lead.

“I’ve had a good life,” Deans says, then gives me the condensed version of his biography.

He lived much of his life in Boston. He has an accounting background and ascended comfortably in business.

When he retired, he and his wife moved to Florida. They came back to New England when she developed dementia. She since has died.

He stays now in the cold north because of family.

“I’ve got three kids, seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren,” he says, smiling.

He notes that the room in which we sit, the room where he waits to see if Haley could be the president he hopes for, is where one of his granddaughters got married. He worries that his children, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren won’t be able to build “good lives” like his because they won’t have the opportunities he did.

He wanted, he says, to see both Trump and Biden succeed. Biden disappointed him by not finding more common ground.

Trump disturbs him. The former president’s legal troubles distress him, and the way Trump has treated women offends him, because they show a lack of character.

“A president is supposed to think about the country, not just himself,” Dean says.

He can’t bring himself to vote for Trump again and he isn’t sure he wants to vote for Biden.

When she comes to the small stage as the sound system pounds out Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” Dean locks in, eager to listen.

Her speech is a greatest-hits medley, a series of assertions designed to stroke her audience. She pounds away at the national debt, noting that $8 trillion of the $34 trillion Americans owe was racked up during Trump’s presidency. She says the solution to getting the debt down is to shift more of the load to the states. How the states will fund delivering services the federal government now does she does not say.

She calls for an expanded school-choice program and for parental vetoes of any classroom curricula. She demands better care for veterans. She pledges to stand tough against Russia, China and Iran. She vows to shut both the northern and southern borders.

Most significantly, she lumps Biden and Trump together as agents of dysfunction, a linking that is bound to get under the skin of both men.

After she finished, I ask Dean what he thought.

“Good and bad,” he says.

He liked, he explains, that she seemed to focus on what the country needs and not just what she wants. But he wonders if she’ll be able to do any of the things she promised she would.

I ask him how he’s going to cast his ballot in the New Hampshire primary.

“She’s got my vote on Tuesday,” he says. “I still need to think about it after that.”

Then, he shakes my hand and heads back into the cold, one more American trying to find his way home in a country he thinks has lost its way.