Resisting Trump in brightred state

EDMOND, OKLA.» Vicki Toombs was watching the returns on election night 2016 when her phone buzzed — a text from her 22-year-old son, Beau, in Chicago. Beau, who is gay, was afraid that the new administration would end the Affordable Care Act and with it the insurance he and his friends used to pay for the drugs that protected them from HIV and AIDS.

“I just felt the bottom drop out of my world,” said Toombs, 61. She felt she had failed her son, as if Donald Trump’s election was somehow her fault. She had to do something.

So, in one of the reddest cities in one of the reddest states in the union, Toombs sought out “The Resistance.”

It wasn’t as easy as it might be in places such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where multitudes of college-educated, predominantly white women have joined a rolling boil of activism since Trump’s election. The Democratic party and liberals are plentiful on the coasts, but light on the ground in swathes of the country that hold the majority of electoral votes and congressional seats.

But even in Edmond, Okla., Toombs has found her sisters-in-arms. And it’s the reach of anti-trump forces into red states such as Oklahoma that gives Democrats hopes of a national resurgence, though no one suggests that the heartland will change its political allegiance on a dime.

Regardless, the act of local liberals emerging from their shells has the potential to subtly change the dynamics in places such as Edmond.

“It’s been a revelation,” Toombs said of joining a group of more than 300 Democratic women in Edmond, a place she believed housed only a couple of other members of her political tribe. “We’re excited and also apprehensive thinking of what the fall’s going to be like. I hold my breath, hoping we created enough energy.”

These days, Toombs texts her son excitedly to tell him about how she and her fellow activists have made calls and knocked doors for Democratic candidates running for special elections and helped win four of five legislative seats. How they have supported thousands of teachers who marched on the state capitol and won additional education funding from the Gop-controlled state legislature and Republican governor. How they helped recruit candidates for every possible office in November, from their local city council to state legislative seats where Republicans usually garner double the votes of Democrats.

In states such as Oklahoma, activists often say they came “out of the closet” when they started wearing their political affiliations on their sleeves after years of hiding them to avoid conflict. Still, they blanch at the term “The Resistance” and try to avoid mentioning Trump, knowing the key to swaying their neighbors is finding common ground on local issues rather than rehashing divisive national debates.

“I don’t necessarily think minds have been changed on Donald Trump and we don’t encourage our candidates to talk about national politics,” said Anna Langthorn, chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party.

The emphasis on local issues makes particular sense in Oklahoma, which has seen mounting dissatisfaction over the low-tax, smallgovernment approach of the current GOP administration. About 20 percent of schools in the state are only open four days a week and Republicans this year had to raise some taxes to patch a hole created in part when the state’s leaders slashed levies on the oil and gas firms that dominate Oklahoma’s economy.

Activists and the Democratic party they’re hoping to rejuvenate have their work cut out for them in Oklahoma, which Trump won with 65 percent of the vote in 2016. But even though Democrats are clearly outnumbered in Oklahoma and in other red states — and even though they know they face long odds — they believe intensity is a great leveler.

“It only takes a couple of hundred people to elect your state representative,” Langthorn said.

Jeremy Pressman, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut, has kept track of demonstrations since Trump’s inauguration with another colleague. They totaled 6,700 in 2017 alone, involving 6 million people or more, not just in liberal cities but in small towns in red states such as Alaska, Michigan and, of course, Oklahoma.

“We’re so used to seeing these maps every four years of us divided in red and blue, but these protests tend to make a counterpoint — in every red there’s blue and in every blue, red,” Pressman said.

But closeted as they are — and dispersed as they are — would-be activists sometimes find it hard to connect.

Sherry Wallis, an information technology consultant who lives in the same county as Axtell, could barely handle the political isolation in 2016. “I was feeling very alone,” she said. “A lot of childhood friends I had and new colleagues I met, I don’t talk to anymore.”

Then she heard about a bus that would travel for 24 hours from Oklahoma to Washington DC for the initial Women’s March and she leapt at the chance. “It’s something I wouldn’t trade for the world,” Wallis said of the trip, which connected her with a new array of activist friends across the state. She thinks little of driving four hours to go to a meeting of activists.