https://www.yahoo.com/news/america-vanishing-trump-insist-were-115731851.html
The New York Times
Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated.
FILE - Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Wilkes-Barre,
Pa., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2022. The Trump Organization is going on trial
accused of helping some top executives avoid income taxes on
compensation they got in addition to their salaries, like rent-free
apartments and luxury cars. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File) (ASSOCIATED
PRESS)
Michael H. Keller and David D. Kirkpatrick
Mon, October 24, 2022 at 4:57 AM
When Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas voted last year to reject Donald Trump’s
electoral defeat, many of his constituents back home in Fort Bend County
were thrilled.
Like the former president, they have been unhappy with the changes
unfolding around them. Crime and sprawl from Houston, the big city next
door, have been spilling over into their once bucolic towns. (“Build a
wall,” Nehls likes to say, and make Houston pay.) The county in recent
years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former
white majority has fallen to just 30% of the population.
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Don Demel, a 61-year-old salesman who turned out last month to pick up a
signed copy of a book by Nehls about the supposedly stolen election,
said his parents had raised him “colorblind.” But the reason for the
discontent was clear: Other white people in Fort Bend “did not like
certain people coming here,” he said. “It’s race. They are old-school.”
A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the
congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to
challenge Trump’s defeat, a New York Times analysis found — a pattern
political scientists say shows how white fear of losing status shaped
the movement to keep him in power.
The portion of white residents dropped about 35% more over the past
three decades in those districts than in territory represented by other
Republicans, the analysis found, and constituents also lagged behind in
income and education. Rates of so-called deaths of despair, such as
suicide, drug overdose and alcohol-related liver failure, were notably
higher as well.
Although overshadowed by the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the
House vote that day was the most consequential of Trump’s ploys to
overturn the election. It cast doubt on the central ritual of American
democracy, galvanized the party’s grassroots around the myth of a stolen
victory and set a precedent that legal experts — and some Republican
lawmakers — warn could perpetually embroil Congress in choosing a president.
To understand the social forces converging in that historic vote —
objecting to the Electoral College count — the Times examined the
constituencies of the lawmakers who joined the effort, analyzing census
and other data from congressional districts and interviewing scores of
residents and local officials. The Times previously revealed the
back-room maneuvers inside the House, including convincing lawmakers
that they could reject the results without explicitly endorsing Trump’s
outlandish fraud claims.
Many of the 139 objectors, including Nehls, said they were driven in
part by the demands of their voters. “You sent me to Congress to fight
for President Trump and election integrity,” Nehls wrote in a tweet on
Jan. 5, 2021, “and that’s exactly what I am doing.” At a Republican
caucus meeting a few days later, Rep. Bill Johnson, from an Ohio
district stretching into Appalachia, told colleagues that his
constituents would “go ballistic” with “raging fire” if he broke with
Trump, according to a recording.
Certain districts primarily reflect either the racial or socioeconomic
characteristics. But the typical objector district shows both — a fact
demographers said was striking.
Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white
voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority
majority, said Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at George Mason
University who studies the attitudes of those voters.
“A lot of white Americans who are really threatened are willing to
reject democratic norms,” she said, “because they see it as a way to
protect their status.”
That may help explain why the dispute over Trump’s defeat has emerged at
this moment in history, with economic inequality reaching new heights
and the white population of the United States expected within about two
decades to lose its majority.
Many of the objectors’ districts started with a significantly larger
Black minority, or had a rapid increase in the Hispanic population,
making the decline in the white population more pronounced.
Of the 12 Republican-held districts that swung to minority white —
almost all in California and Texas — 10 were represented by objectors.
The most significant drops occurred in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs and
California desert towns, where the white percentage fell by more than
one-third.
Lawmakers who objected were also overrepresented among the 70
Republican-held districts with the lowest percentages of college
graduates. In one case — the southeast Kentucky district of Hal Rogers,
currently the longest-serving House member — about 14% of residents had
four-year degrees, less than half the average in the districts of
Republicans who accepted the election results.
While Nehls’ district exemplifies demographic change, Rep. H. Morgan
Griffith’s in southwest Virginia is among the poorest in the country.
Once dominated by coal, manufacturing and tobacco, the area’s economic
base eroded with competition from new energy sources and foreign
importers. Doctors prescribed opioids to injured laborers and an
epidemic of addiction soon followed.
Residents, roughly 90% of them white, gripe that the educated elites of
the Northern Virginia suburbs think that “the state stops at Roanoke.”
They take umbrage at what they consider condescension from outsiders who
view their communities as poverty-stricken, and they bemoan “Ph.D
pollution” from the big local university, Virginia Tech. After a long
history of broken government promises, many said in interviews they had
lost faith in the political process and public institutions — in almost
everyone but Trump, who they said championed their cause.
In a bustling clinic called the Health Wagon in Griffith’s district,
Paula Hill-Collins sees low-income and uninsured patients with maladies
from tooth decay to heart conditions and diabetes.
Since the last election, they have often raised another complaint: the
false claim that Democrats stole Trump’s victory.
“‘Did you see that box of votes that was thrown away? Did you see they
found extra ones?’ This is what we hear from our patients,” said
Hill-Collins, a nurse practitioner who grew up in the town of Coeburn,
population 1,600.
Residents of the area — former coal towns at the southern end of
Appalachia — have felt cheated for generations, she said. “They believe
it because look what’s happened to us,” she said, recalling the
exploitation of her community first by mining interests and more
recently by drugmakers. “That’s fed a culture of suspicion.”
Conditions like diabetes and heart disease overlap so often that health
workers feel lucky when their patients can walk in the door, said Teresa
Owens Tyson, a nurse practitioner at the Health Wagon. “Sometimes they
collapse in the parking lot,” she said.
Although not all are so hard-pressed, the districts of the House
objectors share similar disadvantages. Households there had nearly 10%
less annual income in 2020 than those in other Republican areas. Not
only were college degrees less common, so were high school diplomas.
The GOP’s hold on those districts reflects its shift away from its
former country club image to become the party of those left behind. The
residents of Democratic districts, on average, are better educated and
earn significantly more.
Some residents said that their reasons for questioning the results
should be obvious to anyone: the relatively small size of Biden’s
rallies, the overnight disappearance of Trump’s early lead as more votes
were tallied, the allegations about stuffed ballot drop boxes.
“It’s not a political thing. It’s a we-love-our-country thing,’” said
Alecia Vaught, 46, a homemaker and Republican organizer in
Christiansburg. “You’re either for America or you’re not.”
Griffith, 64, a lawyer and state legislator before joining Congress,
built his career fighting for the lost cause of coal. In the Tea Party
wave of 2010, he defeated a 14-term Democratic incumbent by slamming him
for supporting carbon caps.
When Trump lost in 2020, his claims of a stolen election quickly took
hold in the district. “I’d be pumping gas and people who didn’t even
know me would want to know if I thought the election was stolen,” said
Frank Kilgore, 70, a lawyer-lobbyist and local historian who is an
independent.
“Morgan heard it more and more from his base,” Kilgore added. Local
Republican leaders “said they thought it was stolen, too,” raising the
specter of a primary challenge if Griffith voted to accept the results.
Constituents circulated a petition demanding that he fight Trump’s loss.
Yet Griffith was not among the vocal chorus of House Republicans echoing
Trump. On Jan. 6, 2021, he voted to object citing only changes to
election procedures during the pandemic.
The congressman, who declined to comment for this article, wrote to
constituents after Biden was inaugurated: “It is time to move forward.”
Texas is one of six states where the white population is now outnumbered
by Black, Hispanic and Asian residents. Nehls’ district, which includes
most of Fort Bend County, is part of the reason: It swung from nearly
70% to less than 40% white over the past three decades.
But changing demographics in many places may not yet be reflected at the
polls, because of a larger white share of the voting-age population and
higher turnout levels. Exit polls show that white Texans still made up
60% of the state’s voters in 2020.
The greater Houston area is the center of the state’s transformation and
also a hub of the “stop the steal” movement. True the Vote, the
organization behind some of the loudest accusations of voter fraud, was
founded 12 years ago by a Fort Bend resident who claimed that a
nonprofit was falsely registering voters in Black and Hispanic
neighborhoods in Houston. A cluster of congressmen who actively promoted
Trump’s election denial come from the area. Next month, another
Republican who calls the election stolen is expected to replace an
incumbent who accepted the Biden victory and did not seek reelection.
Many Fort Bend-area Republicans say their doubts about the 2020 results
have nothing to do with race.
“I think it has more to do with polarization than it does with racial or
demographic issues,” said Jacey Jetton, 39, a Texas state legislator and
former GOP county chairman. “We are so divided now,” he added, that no
one can accept that their opponents “believe what they believe.”
Some Fort Bend Democrats said they saw an obvious connection between the
declining white share of the population and the refusal by Nehls and his
supporters to accept Trump’s defeat.
“It is a power grab by white Republicans,” said K.P. George, a Democrat
born in India who was elected in 2018 as the county’s top executive, the
first nonwhite person to hold the office.
Nehls, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, served as the
county sheriff for eight years before running for Congress in 2020. His
seat appears safe this year because the Republican-controlled state
Legislature redrew the boundaries of his district to include more
predominantly white and solidly Republican terrain outside Fort Bend
County. Whites now make up a majority of the eligible voters in the
district.
Nehls said election fraud was the only thing that could stop “the
greatest leader of my lifetime” from returning to the Oval Office in 2024.
“In a fair election, you can’t beat Donald Trump!” Nehls said, posing
for photographs in front of a life-size photo of the former president.
He saw no fear of demographic change among his supporters, he said.
“These people aren’t against brown or Black people. They just don’t like
the way Democrats are running the country.”