The tide of working-class voters that helped deliver the presidency to Republican Donald Trump has been described as the rural revolution.
Economic anxiety, demographic changes and immigration are among the conditions for an uprising that, in Maine, saw dozens of towns that voted for President Barack Obama flip to Trump, a man who repeatedly questioned the president’s citizenship.
In one former mill town, what motivated these voters, and what do they expect from the next president, who has vowed to make America great again?
The logging trucks still roll down Main Street in Madison, but they no longer stop at the log yards that surround Madison Paper Industries. The mill closed in May, forcing 200 people out of good-paying union jobs.
The mill parking lot is mostly empty. The red beacon atop the mill smokestack still flashes, but there’s no smoke. The din of a bustling mill has been replaced by a low hum that has overtaken by a single house sparrow feeding in the weed-choked train tracks.
“Nobody ever thought the mill would go out,” says Freeman Buzzell, 75, a lifelong resident of Madison and owner of Buzzy’s Barber Shop on Main Street for over a half century.
Buzzell learned in barber school to never share his own politics, but he’s heard plenty of views about the presidential election. Lots of people didn’t like Hillary Clinton, and others liked Trump even though some believe he’s “nuts.”
Despite their concerns about Trump, voters here turned out for him, overwhelmingly. This is the same community that four years ago went for Obama over Republican Mitt Romney by nearly 10 points.
This year, Trump defeated Clinton by 20 points.
This flip occurred all over rural Maine — all over the country. Clinton took the state, but not by much. And Trump divided Maine’s four electoral votes for the first time in modern history by casting Clinton as a corrupt Washington insider and by making lots of promises to voters in places like Madison.
“Your jobs will come roaring back under a Trump administration. Your incomes will go up under a Trump administration,” Trump said during one of his five visits to Maine. “Your companies wont be leaving Maine under a Trump administration. Not anymore. They’re not going to be leaving.”
The president-elect has provided few specifics, but his campaign message energized voters in parts of the country that are not experiencing the economic recovery seen elsewhere.
That includes Madison, where the mill closure was a gut punch to a region that has already taken its share.
The median income is nearly $10,000 less here than the rest of the state. Sixty-five percent of the kids in the school district qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. And it’s worse in neighboring Skowhegan, where so many children qualify for free and reduced-price lunch that two years ago, the district qualified for a federal program that gives all students free meals.
“I didn’t want to vote for either one, but I had to pick one, so,” says Madison native Al Quimby.
Quimby gives conflicting answers on whether he voted for Trump, later explained by his ambivalence about the president-elect.
“That pre-election rhetoric by that joker. I mean, he really made me sick, listening to him,” he says.
Quimby’s unease about Trump is apparently shared by other Americans, even among those who supported him.
According to exit polls conducted by Cook Political Report, 15 percent of the 60 percent who viewed him unfavorably voted for him anyway. Another 60 percent said Trump was unqualified, but 18 percent of those same people voted for him.
Now, voters like Quimby are hoping for the best. Without the mill, or a new major employer, the town has little to offer its young people, he says.
He compared Trump to President Ronald Reagan, who also rode a populist wave to become president in 1980 despite worries that he was unprepared and unfit to lead the country.
“He was a B western moviemaker, but he surrounded himself with people who knew politics. And I thought he did a pretty decent job,” Quimby says.
Ellen Hurd, another Madison native, expressed the same hope. She’s optimistic about Trump, adding that the country needs a big change.
“I think he’s surrounding himself with good men, good, moral men. And I think they will help to guide him, you know. I just kind of think it will turn out better than people think,” she says.
Not everyone in Madison is willing to talk about the election. The manager at the True Value hardware store says he doesn’t want interviews outside the store — people get too upset, he says.
His assistant suggests doing interviews outside the local county sheriff’s office if I “feel uncomfortable” talking to Trump supporters — a not-so-subtle reference to the feeling among some Trump voters that the press is the enemy, a belief repeatedly stoked by the president-elect.
On Main Street, two women climb into an SUV plastered with Trump stickers. They don’t want to talk on tape, but the say they’re from Rumford, a mill town that delivered Obama a 28 point victory four years ago.
This year, Trump beat Clinton there by 10 points.
Rumford, one of the women says, has been “Trump-ified.”
Democrats are struggling to reconcile the fact that some Trump voters were once firmly behind Obama. But incoming state Senate minority leader Troy Jackson, a Democrat, says he gets it.
“I want somebody to fight for me,” he says. “I don’t want to be left behind. I don’t want to be irrelevant. My life matters as much as a Wall Street banker.”
Jackson is a logger from Allagash, a small town in Aroostook County that went for Obama, and this time backed Trump.
But those same Allagash voters also picked Jackson, who has previously used his position to fight for American-made products and against the use of Canadian loggers for Maine jobs.
Still, Jackson thinks Trump has overpromised his way to the White House.
"They’re not afraid to tell people things that maybe in the end they’re not actually going to deliver on,” he says.
Buzzell says some of his customers are worried about that, and also that Trump could do more harm than good. But for many in this struggling former mill town, gambling on the future felt better than settling for the status quo.
