Go looking for Donald Trump’s Kentucky, and you might find yourself on Terry Wright’s front porch.
Wright, 59, a registered Democrat, grew up in the working-class Portland neighborhood, where worn shotgun houses line historic streets near the Ohio River. As a young man, his high school degree was enough for factory jobs. He made a decent living painting bridges and factories. He raised two sons, rode his Harley and bought American.
But he didn’t like the changes that unfolded over time. Good-paying factory work dried up and moved overseas. Neighborhood blight, welfare and drugs increased. He worried about illegal immigrants taking jobs. He disliked President Barack Obama. It began to feel like his corner of America, where 42 percent live in poverty, was being left behind.
When Trump vowed to “make America great” again, Wright was sold. Trump’s inconsistent opinions and comments about Muslims, Mexicans and women that offended many didn’t deter him. “He’s going to make America America again,” he said, pointing to a Trump sign stuck in his chain-link fence last week.
Walter Morgan lives in Trump’s Kentucky, too — 200 miles away on the other side of the state near Hyden, a tiny town tucked into the hills of the state’s troubled Appalachian coal fields.
Since 2012, the 40-year-old coal miner watched more than half the coal jobs in Eastern Kentucky go up in smoke, the impact rippling throughout the economy. His hourly pay dropped from $21 to $16 before he was finally laid off, too. While it’s the result of competition from natural gas, increasingly expensive-to-reach coal seams and environmental regulations, politicians put the blame squarely on what they called Obama’s “war on coal.”
Morgan tried to get work, but could only find fast-food jobs paying $7 an hour. This summer, he interviewed with a coal company in Alabama, ready to pack up and leave. But the call never came. His unemployment ran out, and he’s had to sell off his TV and other belongings. Now he can’t afford to move.
“Hopefully Trump will get in here and get things up and running,” Morgan said.
Despite inconsistent positions and controversies that have divided Republicans and pushed some battleground states toward Hillary Clinton as the election nears, Trump still has a nearly 98 percent chance of winning Kentucky’s eight electoral votes, according to Nate Silver’s Five-Thirty-Eight blog, which bases its prediction on polls and historical data. It projects Trump’s share of votes on Nov. 8 at 53 percent, compared to 40 percent for Clinton.
But not all of Trump’s outsized support in Kentucky — a reliably red state apart from voting for Bill Clinton in the 1990s — fits neatly into the narrative about discontented voters in poor white areas such as Appalachia.
In fact, some national exit polling during the primaries found that Trump voters on average earned more than the average median household income for non-Hispanic whites. That includes supporters like Ken O’Neil, a financial planner who lives in Middletown but doesn’t have a sign in his yard for fear of vandalism.
“When Trump came out, I said the country is so sick of the typical politician … I said, ‘I bet he’ll win it,’ ” he said.
At a Fern Creek strip mall shop that serves as a homemade Trump campaign office and headquarters of the “Young Professionals for Trump,” suburban insurance agent Jeff Klusmeier wore a Trump T-shirt and hat as he pasted addresses on mailers and a young community college student made calls to voters.
Trump, Klusmeier said, represents middle America. While unemployment has fallen under 5 percent statewide, it varies widely by county. Many believe Trump’s business background will boost jobs or rein in outsourcing. And others embrace Trump because they are in the “anybody-but-Hillary” camp or believe he will support traditional conservative positions, such as tightening immigration and placing a conservative justice on the Supreme Court.
As Klusmeier spoke, the office television played cable news showing Trump’s latest controversy – the New York Times had reported that he’d made unwanted advances toward several women, and he was lashing out at a rally at the media and Republican leaders who were abandoning him.
A retired couple came in looking to buy a yard sign. Helping them was volunteer Evan Wright, 19, a University of Louisville student who helped start a “Millennials for Trump” group. He said his Trump bumper sticker has drawn the ire of some fellow students on campus. “I’ve gotten threatening notes left on my car. One note said, ‘F-you, you racist pig,’” he said.
At a time of national racial turmoil over police shootings, the resulting Black Lives Matter movement and an increasingly diverse population, Trump supporters are quick to deny that their candidate is tapping into a vein of racism, xenophobia or sexism.
The Pew Research Center found in April that Republicans who thought that a non-white majority in the U.S. would be bad for the country also had favorable views of Trump.
Al Cross, a University of Kentucky professor and political writer, noted in a recent column on Trump’s popularity that a March poll showed that 28 percent of males who were likely Democratic primary voters said a woman wasn’t capable of being an effective president. “As in many elections, issues matter a lot less than attitude and cultural affinity,” he wrote.
If the rationales for supporting Trump are varied, many say there is a larger goal involved.
Just ask Robert Berry, a former Marine in Owensboro — on the far western side of the state — who sells car parts on eBay. He voted for Obama in 2008 but was disappointed that the promised sea change didn’t come to fruition. He’s fed up with an establishment that doesn’t serve middle America’s needs.
Trump, he said, represents “the people’s final nuclear option” to blow up that establishment.
“If he can actually fix all the problems he has identified, we win. If he blows the establishment out of their comfort zones, we win,” he said.
Few have been put off by Trump’s earlier comments, from proposals to ban Muslim immigrants to mocking the disabled and calling Mexicans “rapists.” Many have maintained support even after the release of a recent recording in which he bragged about grabbing women’s genitals without permission, which led some top Republicans to drop their support.
“Why in the world we still supporting him after what he said?” said Linda Greenwell, a 67-year-old realtor who lives outside Louisville in Spencer County and twice ran as a Republican for state auditor. “I don’t care if John F. Kennedy slept with women in the White House when his wife was in the other room. I don’t care if Bill Clinton did … I do care about the coal industry in Kentucky.”
Still, she said, if she had a minute alone with Trump she would ask him to “clean it up” and talk more about the issues — such as nuclear weapons and police safety.
Wanda Tudor Adams, of Vine Grove, said Trump has made “stupid comments,” but “I like the honesty, even if he sticks his foot in his mouth, he says what he believes. He’s not a politician.”
Berry said Trump has embarrassed him, too, several times. “You don’t necessarily like the plumber, but you need him,” he said.
In Leitchfield, whose quiet, red-brick downtown sits off a highway in Central Kentucky, Rose Pharris said her family’s sewing factory once employed 550 people making designer clothes. But after the North American Free Trade Agreement, that work was lost to the Dominican Republic. Other work went to China. Today they have 28 employees. She could have a direct stake in his election.
Yet she’s undecided given Trump’s temperament. “We don’t have a lot of good choices right now,” she said.
That wasn’t an issue for the young professionals and some millennials who joined a debate-watching party at a pub in Fern Creek. With his poll numbers slipping — in recent days, multiple women had accused Trump of unwanted sexual advances and inappropriate touching — more than two dozen supporters from millennials to retirees gathered wearing Trump shirts, “Yuge” buttons and “Make America Great” hats.
Sipping beers around a bar television, supporters banged on the table and cheered when Trump argued for positions such as building a wall with Mexico, and they groaned when Clinton spoke. “You liar!” one man yelled out.
Meantime, Trump is bringing at least some first-time voters to the polls.
“I’ve never voted before this year in my life, but I’m going to vote for Trump,” said 62-year-old Terry Carpenter, who lives in a trailer in Clark County, Ind., just across the river from Louisville. Surviving on disability checks and flea market sales, a fan of conservative radio and Confederate flags, he said he likes Trump’s immigration stances and sees him as a way to take a wrecking ball to “too much political correctness.”
As controversies eroded Trump’s place in the polls in other states, supporters pondered what would happen if Trump loses.
Trump has been ramping up suggestions that the results won’t be fair if he loses. “This whole election is being rigged,” Trump said recently. “The whole thing is one big fix. One big ugly lie.”
At a recent rally, some supporters told the news media that they plan to watch polling places for fraud, fueling fears of voter intimidation. And in the last debate, Trump declined to say he would accept the outcome if he loses.
Klusmeier said while “there is going to be a lot of people upset,” he thinks people will accept the election’s results.
Issues of immigration and trade deals might get renewed attention in Congress, he said. What happens with “the remnants of a civil war in the Republican Party,” he said, isn’t clear. But he said even establishment leaders should be warned and expect that the grievances fueling the Trump candidacy won’t go away.
“We have to burn down the establishment,” he said. “The barbarians are at the gate.”
By Chris Kenning
The Courier-Journal
