Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
A presidential bellwether is still waiting to start winning under Trump
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Nobody is tired of winning here.
Not at the Crossroads Cafe, where regulars pick at politics over breakfast. Not at the Rotary Club, where the meeting dutifully opens with the invocation, Pledge of Allegiance and fourway test for ethical behavior. Not at the Indiana Theater, a grand venue where thousands crammed in on May 1, 2016, to see Donald Trump, the candidate who vowed to win so much that Americans would become weary of it.
Here in Vigo County, that disappointment carries extra weight — and perhaps a warning sign for the president. For more than a century, its voters have been almost unerring in choosing the winning presidential candidate, and last year they broke convincingly for Trump.
But now, the president’s grip on voters here seems shaky.
“Winning? I don’t get a sense that we are winning,” said Bart Colwell, president of the Terre Haute Savings Bank, who described himself as a Republican but declined to say whom he voted for in November. “I think his tone is pretty negative. His tone would not be a tone that most people in leadership would use.”
Even as many voters here say they like Trump’s policies on tax cuts and reducing the size of government, the relentlessly combative approach that served him well during the campaign has become a source of deep discontent.
“He can’t keep his mouth shut,” said Jim Hunter, an insurance agent who voted for Trump. “He is berating his own party. He needs every Republican vote on taxes. I wish that Twitter stuff would all just stop. I don’t even like to see him on TV.” He added, “I would have serious reservations about voting for him again.”
His breakfast companion at the Crossroads Cafe, Bob Murray, a retired accountant, questioned the president’s claim to a long list of accomplishments. “Tell me what he’s won? He won on the Supreme Court nominee, but he hasn’t won on anything else.”
For decades, Vigo County has provided an unlikely place to gauge the center of U.S. politics, where voters are persuadable from one election to the next. Its political fluidity is so great that it voted for Barack Obama in 2008 by a slightly greater margin than it did for Trump eight years later.
“What does the bellwether idea tell us?” said Craig McKee, a lawyer and lifelong resident of the county. “It tells us that the moods here, somehow, get caught up in the rhythm and Gulf Stream of American politics.”
Vigo almost always gets it right, having voted against the winning presidential candidate only twice in more than a century — picking Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and William Jennings Bryan in 1908.
Still, the county has no particular attributes to suggest it represents the center of U.S. political thought, certainly not in the 21st century. Like its marketing as the “Crossroads of America” — for the intersection of two major highways built before the interstate system — its demographics and industry seem like relics of the Eisenhower era.
Its economy is struggling. City finances are a mess. Markers of misery — lower family income, higher rates of smoking and obesity, surging opioid use — are many. Its 108,000 residents are much whiter than the nation as a whole, and its demographics are changing only to the degree that the population is skewing older and less educated. It has benefited from government programs, like disability payments and a stimulus grant under the Obama administration that delivered a flood control project, but people here rail against Washington.
“It seems more like it’s an amalgam rather than it is a perfect picture of what you expect for a bellwether county,” said Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. “But obviously, they somehow seem to land in the right place where America lands as a whole.”
The headquarters of Clabber Girl, the baking powder company, is a point of civic pride, along with Indiana State University, which has rising enrollment, and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, a highly regarded science and engineering college. One old factory is being converted into lofts. But several people, when asked about the state of things, simply responded with a wince.
Vigo County is a place known more for its past than its future. The grave site of Eugene V. Debs, a native son and socialist who championed workers’ rights but was imprisoned for protesting World War I, is showered with coins and a faded political button that says “Veterans for Peace.” The statue of Larry Bird, who played at Indiana State, marks the peak of the school’s basketball program, almost 40 years ago. Anaconda no longer makes steel here, and the Columbia Record Club long ago stopped operations, along with several other manufacturers, like the Root Glass Co., which invented the green Coke bottle.
For Trump, the challenge in a place like Vigo is not to solidify his base, which remains strongly behind him, but rather to keep the support of swing voters and Republicans who were reluctant to back him. National polls have found that Trump voters who had supported Obama in previous elections have now soured on the president at higher rates than other Trump voters.
“I think we have a broad cross section of what the country is made up of, that’s kind of in the middle,” said Don Scott, an insurance agent. “When the country gets frustrated, we get frustrated.”
A Republican, Scott said he had voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson, over Trump. And what does he think now? “It’s what I expected,” Scott said. “He’s crazy.”
At the Rotary Club meeting, Stephanie Welsh described the president as a “blustery, vain politician who is neither a Republican or a Democrat.” She voted for Trump because of his management experience, and has not given up on him but would like him to be less confrontational.
“I think when he has worked at being more civil, I appreciate it,” she said.
Trump’s appeal here had been evident on the Sunday before the Indiana primary last year when Rob Lundstrom, owner of the Indiana Theater, saw people lining up before 6 a.m. for a Trump campaign rally. He said more than 3,000 people packed into the seating area before fire marshals cut off entry, leaving over 1,000 more standing outside.
Now that Trump is nine months into his term, Lundstrom can sense a waning of the enthusiasm, particularly because of Trump’s attack-mode approach to the presidency. “That’s a dysfunction even an operating business couldn’t have,” Lundstrom said. “I think flexibility and collaboration is what is needed.”
As for the winning, he said: “I think it’s still in the first quarter. Winning is a relative term.”
Every four years, Vigo’s predictive status is put to the test, and with its lack of diversity and treadmill economy, its bellwether status may be waning. Its record already faced a close call in 2012, when Obama won the county by only a few hundred votes.
Will its role as a bellwether continue? “Maybe not,” McKee said. “But I’ll concede that only after we miss a couple of elections. My fellow citizens surprise me, and sometimes I wonder whether I know them any more.”