Saturday, December 5, 2015

Donald Trump enjoys diverse coalition of support in America's bellwether Vigo County, Indiana-Politico

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"I can tell you one thing: Terre Haute citizens are anything but poorly informed....The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters."

12/4/15, "Trump County, USA," Politico, Adam Wren

"America’s most reliable bellwether county has fallen for the wild man from New York."

"The most accurate pundits in the history of American presidential politics reside far from the Beltway, on a 403-square mile patch of land along the western border of Indiana. At the intersections of U.S. Highways 40 and 41, and off Interstate 70, you find yourself in Vigo County, with its 108,000 residents and its ho-hum county seat, Terre Haute, situated along the Wabash River. Terre Haute is the land of Clabber Girl Baking Powder—and its citizens call it the “Crossroads of America.”...

And, in nearly every presidential election since 1888, voters here in this blue-collar county have selected the winning candidate, missing only twice: Once, in 1908, when they opted for Williams Jennings Bryan instead of William Howard Taft, and again in 1952, when they chose Adlai Stevenson rather than Dwight D. Eisenhower....

When I spent two days traveling around its gathering places and watering holes, I discovered that, while the county’s Democrats have, for their part, coalesced around Clinton, its Republicans mostly wanted to talk about just one candidate: Donald Trump

In America’s most prophetic county seat, Trump enjoys a diverse coalition of support, from the 17-year-old punk high school student on the eve of his first election to the 81-year-old Kennedy voter to the kind of folks who will reshuffle their Thursday night plans to attend a county GOP “Politics and Pies” event. Coastal pundits might lament Trump’s appeal to the “low information voter”—but I can tell you one thing: Terre Haute citizens are anything but poorly informed.

And if Trump can make it here—in this hollowed-out county of swing voters, union halls, three universities and a knot of CSX railroad lines, where voters seem to have a knack for predicting unpredictable electionshe can make it anywhere....

Another thing that makes Vigo County unique is its apparent number of swing voters. Of its 76,981 registered voters, according to data from the Vigo County Voter Registration Office, 30,290 are Democrats, and 10,280 are Republican. And an eyebrow-raising 40,570 are unaffiliated or have never voted or only vote in generals....

The people gathered at Grand Traverse weren’t the political neophytes and gadflies often chalked up as Trump voters. They were the kind of people who scuttled their Thursday night plans to come to a two-hour event organized by a low-key Republican county chairman. And if the Republican primary were held on this evening, and limited to Politics and Pies attendees, Trump would win, and handily."...






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