Some in red states turning

‘We’re excited and also apprehensive’

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 that she’d 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, Toombs sought out the Resistance.

It wasn’t as easy as it might be in places such as New York, Los Angeles and Washington, where multitudes of collegeeducated, 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, 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.

“It’s been a revelation,” Toombs said of joining a group of more than 300 Democratic women in Edmond. “We’re excited and also apprehensive thinking of what the fall’s going to be like.”

These days, Toombs texts her son 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 supported thousands of teachers who marched on the state capitol and won additional education funding from the GOP-controlled Legislature and Republican governor.

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, not just in liberal cities but in small towns in red states such as Alaska, Michigan and Oklahoma.

Still, it’s the same people who form the core of the movement — collegeeducated women, typically middle-aged or older.

Even at the recent March for Our Lives in Washington, organized by the teenage survivors of the Parkland school shooting, the median age was 49, according to surveys conducted by Dana Fisher, a University of Maryland sociology professor.

Sue Ogrocki / Associated Press Vicki Toombs (left) handles the timing of speakers at a Democratic Congressional Forum in Edmond, Okla., on May 10. Toombs, 61, said she felt she had to do something after Donald Trump was elected.