Black voters worry about presidency

MARION — As a poll worker on Election Day in November, Tara Dyer saw the Donald Trump handwriting on the wall before most people.

The voter turnout overall was lighter than the previous presidential election in 2012, when Barack Obama won Marion County. And there was a noticeable lack of black voters, said Dyer, who is black.

Another troubling sign, Dyer said, were Trump poll

“watchers” who challenged voters. When people were allowed to stand inside out of the rain while waiting to vote, Trump supporters complained to poll workers that that invaded the privacy of those voting.

“This election brought out a whole bunch of ugliness to me,” said Dyer, who retired after 35 years teaching in Marion schools. “I truly saw what people said they were and what they turned out to be.”

The 2016 election saw Marion — the city that once made steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal, built the two crawler-transporters that carry NASA spacecraft and rockets to launch pads, and still has the world’s largest clothes-dryer plant — undergo a political transformation. Democrat

Barack Obama won the city by 11 points in 2012, but Republican Trump captured it by 18 points on Nov. 8. He prevailed in 29 of 31 city precincts, including one he won with 66 percent of the vote. Trump’s dominance was nearly complete in Marion County overall, where he won 63 of 65 precincts, winning nearly 8 of 10 votes in two of those.

Trump also flipped Ohio, as tens of thousands of voters switched last year after supporting Obama. Trump won Ohio by about 8 percent over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Marion County has about 66,000 residents, with roughly 36,000 in the city. Once a manufacturing powerhouse, Marion’s economy faltered in the 1980s as jobs began hemorrhaging, with many going overseas. Economic upheaval in Marion, like in many other cities in Ohio, triggered unemployment and social changes, poverty, crime

and drug abuse. Many voters became disenchanted with the status quo offered by both political parties.

As one Marion County Democratic official said, that left the vote to “angry white men” to drive the election totals. The county has a black population of about 6.6 percent.

Many Trump supporters remain firmly in his camp after his first six months in office, including Marion County Commissioner Ken Stiverson, the former Marion County GOP chairman. “People wanted something done,” Stiverson said recently. “America’s been sliding. We’ve lost credibility.”

But many in Marion’s minority community are worried about the future, according to interviews by The Dispatch. Most said the black community didn’t support Clinton and, by default, ended up helping elect

Trump by not voting. Many people registered to vote simply didn’t show up. Now, worry is setting in. “A lot of people are living in fear of their health care, of losing Planned Parenthood, of climate change,” said Annie Lenoir, a former Head Start teacher. “People that voted for Trump thought he would change after he got in the White House.”

“But I don’t like the way he has performed as president,” she said. “I don’t like how he belittled people and divided the country. I was born going to a colored bathroom, white-only water fountains. That’s division.”

“I would vote to have him impeached in a heartbeat,” Lenoir said.

Linda Sims, a retired interior designer and factory worker who has a weekly radio talk show called A Voice of the People, said people in the black community in Marion feel Trump is trying to erase the legacy of the country’s first black president.

“I think that was the agenda,” she said. “After the election, people just assumed we’re back as usual. ... But we still have hope, as we always have.”

Dyer, the retired school teacher, sat on a park bench at the intersection of Main and Church streets in Marion and discussed the future of the community under the Trump administration. She worries about the future for her four children and five grandchildren.

“I don’t think it’s fair for the American people to be sitting on the edge of their seats about health care,” she said. “I’m afraid for our nation and how people are viewing us internationally.”

“I think America was already great,” Dyer said.