Once-liberal bastion votes red

The winds from the Trump Train pushed Chattooga County’s sole commissioner to an easy re-election victory Tuesday night.

Republican Jason Winters defeated Democrat Jimmy Holbrook with about 62 percent of the 8,092 votes cast. The victory came after supporters of the two parties flocked to the polls in equal measures during their primary elections in May.

The biggest difference this week? Excitement about the real estate mogul and reality star atop the presidential ticket — just like in many other rural swaths of the United States on Tuesday. About four times as many people showed up to vote in Chattooga County this week as they did in May.

And of those people at the polls, four out of five voted for Donald Trump.

Holbrook believes many people stayed with the party line, from the top down.

“There was a trust issue with [Hillary] Clinton that she couldn’t overcome in rural areas,” he said Wednesday afternoon, as he plucked his campaign signs off of roadsides.

In Chattooga County, Trump’s and Winters’ victories mark a couple of changes. First, they are the final nails in the coffin of the county’s Democratic stronghold, which once represented a small beacon of blue in northwest Georgia’s sea of red. Also, the election was representative of a national trend: Rural voters supported Trump more than they did Mitt Romney in 2012, a key reason why a Republican is returning to the White House.

“The rural county really did just show up for him, all across the country,” said Spencer Hogg,

the county GOP party’s chairman. “Chattooga as a whole has been experiencing a breakdown of the old Democratic control, some of the dynasty- style politics.”

In 1996, as surrounding counties were becoming darker and darker red, Chattooga County still supported Bill Clinton over Bob Dole in the presidential election, 47-40 percent. Likewise, Democrats dominated local politics.

Tim Shiflett, 61, said liberal leaders on the state level asked him to launch a Democratic association around that same time. As Republicans took control of other counties, he said, the state leaders saw this area as a lighthouse.

It helped that they had a couple of strong local Democratic leaders, like Georgia Emergency Management Director James McConnell and defense attorney Bobby Lee Cook.

Shiflett said he and other local Democrats aggressively recruited strong local candidates. They also organized Jefferson-Jackson dinners featuring speakers like Sen. Max Cleland, Gov. Roy Barnes and civil rights leader John Lewis. The events drew big crowds and local headlines.

“We were able to put off the inevitable,” Shiflett said Wednesday.

In 2003, Georgia voters elected Sonny Perdue, the state’s first Republican governor since the Reconstruction Era. Likewise, Chattooga County’s support for Republican presidential candidates ticked higher and higher north of 50 percent.

Democrats still dominated local races though, controlled mostly by older voters. But Hogg, 20, said his generation came up at a time when it was normal for students to openly support the GOP presidential nominees — a far cry from the days of Jimmy Carter.

Hogg’s generation grew up. They remained Republican. They organized a strong party, recruited candidates. And, he said, state legislators came through: Rep. Eddie Lumsden and Sen. Jeff Mullis attended party meetings and supported local candidates.

Winters himself began as a liberal, winning elections on the Democratic ticket in 2008 and 2012. In 2014, though, he became a Republican after the Democratic Party kicked him out. Shiflett, at the time the chair of the Democratic Party, said Winters violated bylaws by putting up campaign signs for Mullis and endorsing Gov. Nathan Deal, who was pitted that year against Jimmy Carter’s Democratic grandson, Jason.

Winters did not return multiple calls seeking comment Wednesday. And Shiflett said he had heard that Winters had already planned to join the Republicans before the Democratic Party officers voted him out of their group.

He could not have picked a better time to switch loyalties.

The county had supported Republican presidential nominees since 2000, first mildly with George W. Bush, then slightly stronger for Barack Obama’s opponents. But this year, the vote poured through. Seventy-eight percent of Chattooga County voters picked Trump — up from 69 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012.

A similar increase occurred in rural communities in key swing states that handed the election to Trump over Hillary Clinton on Tuesday. NBC News reported that exit polls in rural communities suggest Trump received a 4 percent bump compared to Romney in Michigan, a 10 percent bump in Wisconsin and a 12 percent bump in Pennsylvania.

Pundits throughout the

country are trying to figure out exactly how this happened, what policies of Trump’s resonated so strongly.

Hogg has a simple theory: People in places like Chattooga County like the way Trump talks. Sure, he’s a northeastern businessman, like Romney was. But he speaks like your friend at the restaurant — passionate, kind of funny, not stuck in the weeds of policy. (And racist, xenophobic and sexist, his critics say.)

“He didn’t try to blow anyone away with 59-point economic plans, which Romney did,” Hogg said. “He spoke the language of the common people.”

Hogg said some of his older friends had the opportunity to vote for the first time in 2012. They skipped the polls, saying they didn’t really like Romney.

Holbrook, meanwhile, will go back to running a local radio station. He preached plans to improve the county: setting aside money to eventually build a new jail, cutting a couple of positions so county workers could have benefits again, broadcasting monthly commissioners’ meetings on TV and pushing for a vote for a board of commissioners, like Walker County Republicans have done.

He believes Trump took advantage of a country more polarized than it was in 2008 or 2012. Asked why this effect took hold of his neighbors, Holbrook took a breath Wednesday.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I might be able to give you a better answer if I weren’t going on two hours of sleep.”

“Chattooga as a whole has been experiencing a breakdown of the old Democratic control, some of the dynasty-style politics.” — SPENCER HOGG, CHATTOOGA COUNTY GOP CHAIRMAN