Demonstrations in Trump country test his hold in rural white areas
Protests over black injustice spread into small-town America
In the lake country 200 miles northwest of Detroit, hundreds danced, prayed and demanded racial justice in Cadillac, a Michigan town that was long home to a neo-Nazi group.
It was not an isolated scene. In eastern Ohio, even more demonstrated in rural Mount Vernon, a town with its own current of racial intolerance, just as others did in Manheim, Pennsylvania, a tiny farming town in Lancaster County, with its small but active Ku Klux Klan presence.
The protest movement over black injustice has quickly spread deep into predominantly white, small-town America, notably throughout parts of the country that delivered the presidency for Donald Trump. Across Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, more than 200 such demonstrations have taken place, many in cities with fewer than 20,000 residents, according to local media, organizers, participants and the online tracking tool CrowdCount.
“That’s what’s so striking, that these protests are taking place in rural places with a white nationalist presence,” said Lynn Tramonte, who grew up near Mount Vernon and monitors Black Lives Matter protests around Ohio.
The protests in these Republican-leaning areas offer a test of the president’s ability to reassemble his older, white voting bloc.
“If President Trump cannot hold onto white, working-class voters in rural, small-town Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio, I don’t know how he wins the election,” said Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “Can you rule out he won’t have that same level of enthusiasm? No, you can’t.”
Trump carried Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes in 2016, with overwhelming support from a patchwork of rural, white counties.
The pattern also played out in Michigan and Wisconsin, where he won by even fewer votes. In Ohio, that coalition propelled him to an easy victory.
Some polls suggest that, while white voters without college degrees are still a strong group for Trump, they could be more open to supporting Joe Biden than they were to supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton four years ago.
George Floyd’s death last month by police in Minneapolis has sparked protests in hundreds of communities in every state, on a scale rarely, if ever, seen before. It is not that Biden will necessarily win rural counties that Trump carried easily, but he may be able to cut into Trump’s margins enough to win those states for the Democrats.
In Cadillac, branch home of the National Socialist Movement, a prominent neo-Nazi group as recently as 2007, black organizers were undeterred in staging their event at a lakeside pavilion even as armed opponents associated with the white nationalist group Michigan Militia parked nearby as a show of force.
Trump won Wexford County, home to Cadillac, with 65% of the vote, similar to neighboring counties in the lightly populated region, where unemployment has run higher than average in Michigan.
In neighboring Grand Traverse County, more than 2,000 packed a shoreline park to hear protest organizer Courtney Wiggins. The 38-year-old black woman listed demands, including that police in the 95% white town of 14,000 end racial profiling, as armed protesters affiliated with the far-right Proud Boys dotted the perimeter.