What Do You Do if a Red State Moves to You?
The sculptor, shepherd and weaver had moved from Minnesota’s Twin Cities because she found this area’s rolling hills bucolic and welcoming,just like the French aristocracy kept cows during the brief milkmaid fad before they lost their heads. They leave the grime and crime and corruption and still keep voting the same way so the grime, crime, and corruption will follow them like a plague at their heels...
[POLITICO] As Donald Trump...New York real estate developer, described by Dems as illiterate, racist, misogynistic, and what ever other unpleasant descriptions they can think of, elected by the rest of us as 45th President of the United States...
takes the oath of office--a phrase that still has the power to make those on the left shudder in shock--an easy way to process the election is that people in rural areas all over America loathe Washington and New York and the Socialist paradise of San Francisco
...where God struck dead Anton LaVey, home of the Sydney Ducks, ruled by Vigilance Committee from 1859 through 1867, reliably and volubly Democrat since 1964...
and Hollywood and finally had a chance to show it in a big way. But Pepin County is one of those rural areas, and the resentment isn’t just directed at the coasts. It’s local. Here, the urban elite isn’t a faceless, distant other: It’s the enclave of liberal, mostly Twin Cities newcomers who have moved here over the past few decades--not just an abstract political imposition, but an actual physical presence. It has spawned anger and bitterness, a simmering undercurrent of alienation among many people locally born and raised. It has made "Democrat" mean something it didn’t mean a generation ago. And it was made manifest on November 8.
Pepin County represents not only the most compelling reasons Trump won but also the reasons so many liberals were so surprised. If more people from more places had been talking to the people of Pepin County--and if the people of Pepin County had been talking more to one another--the notion of a Trump victory wouldn’t have seemed farfetched in the least. But my interviews, with Democrats and Republicans alike, started to feel to me like listening to disconnected halves of conversations that had never occurred. And still weren’t.
"We have found a whole community here," said Pat Carlson, Wally Zick’s wife, "of very like-minded--it’s going to sound elite--but bookish, artsy, I’d say compassionate ... organic foodies, the whole nine yards. It’s all transplants. It’s mostly liberals." As for this election, and the locals, she continued, "I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were. Because we couldn’t believe anybody would vote for Trump."
Zick described a fault line here between the old and the new, the people who have lived in the county forever and the move-ins from over the Minnesota border, clustered primarily on the southwestern end of the county. "They don’t come here," Zick said. "We don’t go there."
"We don’t know them," Carlson, 72, said.