In the center of the country, there’s a place that’s home to what is likely the world’s only President Donald J. Trump Highway. But don’t go looking for Trump flags there, because you’ll have a hard time finding any.
Between now and November, the future of our nation will probably be determined by a thin sliver of undecided voters. But this is a big country, where there is considerable nuance to how voters choose which candidates to support. As a historian who believes that this summer will be a pivotal one in the future of American life, I’m interested in how communities that are rarely in the media spotlight are thinking about that future. Two weeks ago, I traveled to one such place.
By almost any measure, Cimarron County is “out there.” Situated at the very tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle, and sharing borders with Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, it is both rural and remote. Here, fields of winter wheat and milo ripen beneath an impossibly vast, Dutch blue sky. Outside of Boise City, the county seat, the only substantial trees are those that surround isolated farmhouses, dark green islands floating on a golden ocean. Wind and sun are near constant.
So is religion. “Are you a Christian?” I was asked at the start of one interview. In Boise City, pop. 1,166, there are nine churches and one bar, while a hand-colored poster of a cross, labeled “You said give you a sign, so I gave you a sign — God,” adorns the hallway of the high school. Cimarron County does not live in some 1950s time warp. The local Girl Scout troop just built a pickleball court, I saw Thai spices at Moore’s Food Pride, The Boise City News is on Facebook and fentanyl has made an unwelcome appearance.
Still, Cimarron County is singular for other reasons. Oklahoma is the reddest of the red states. It is the only state where Barack Obama did not carry a single county in either of his presidential races, while Donald Trump carried every county in both of his. In 2020, Mr. Trump won Oklahoma by a whopping 33 points. That accomplishment paled, however, compared to his electoral prowess in Cimarron County, where he won 92 percent of the vote. Out of 1,054 votes cast in the last presidential election, Joe Biden won 70.
“I don’t watch Fox News — I thought they went way too liberal during the last election.” The speaker was Clint Twombly, a former Border Patrol agent who is running for sheriff. Standing inside the cinder-block building where the Boise City Rotary Club meets every Wednesday at noon, Mr. Twombly delivered his first ever campaign speech.
Like most of the locals I talked with, he dismissed any concerns over global warming. Instead, he said, climate change is all about “somebody trying to sell a book and make money, rather than anything to do with science.” As for the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he said that “all in all, it seemed to me fairly innocuous.” Mr. Twombly was unaware that any police officers had died after the attack.
That said, you won’t find much adoration for Donald J. Trump here. Despite the presence of the highway named in his honor — “Nobody else wanted it,” Jody Risley, who runs the Cimarron Heritage Center, told me — unease about the character of the former president, even before his felony conviction, lingers. “He’s not a good person,” Mr. Twombly said. “He’s not somebody I want at the dinner table.”
But voting for the Democratic alternative is unthinkable. The last Democrat to carry Cimarron County was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Before that it was Harry Truman. Cimarron is no anomaly. There’s a 1,400-mile column of rural counties along the western Great Plains, stretching from the Canadian border to Mexico, where (apart from a few counties dominated by Native reservations) voting Republican is a way of life. If you ask Cimarron County locals what it would take for them to vote Democratic, you get platitudes about passing too many laws, or not enforcing the ones we have.
Only there’s also an uneasiness in their response. If you query residents on what best defines them, the most common answer is independence. “I like the independence,” David Odell, who operates a machine shop in Boise City, told me.
There’s considerable truth here. Many who live in the panhandle today are the descendants those who stuck it out through the horrible Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, a population that had to rely upon their own talents and ingenuity. That mind-set is alive and well today.
Yet there’s also a cooperative, looking-out-for-for-your-neighbor spirit here that’s deep, genuine and anything but self-centered. When grass fires broke out in New Mexico in 2019, Boise City residents, on their own initiative, rushed pallets of Gatorade and bottled water, as well as clean socks and snacks, to the fire crews, Mr. Odell told me.
The people of Cimarron County are less independent than they may profess to be for another reason as well: The big farms and ranches that fuel the county’s economy depend on federal subsidies. “In Cimarron County, without the assistance of federal programs,” Mr. Odell said, “these big farms would evaporate.” Dollars paid by American taxpayers, as well as precious water pumped from the Ogallala aquifer, are what keep the farms and ranches, and everything else, in business.
These days, a kind of radicalism is also in the news.
In April, five Cimarron County residents were charged in the brutal killings of two Kansas women stemming from a child custody dispute. All of them, it’s been noted, held strong anti-government beliefs, and had filed so many legal petitions at the courthouse in Boise City that the court clerk had been instructed simply to throw them away. There was one other detail: The woman accused of being the ringleader of the group, Tifany Adams, was elected chair of the Cimarron County Republican Party last year.
“They radicalized each other” is what Ron Kincannon, former judge and third-generation Cimarron County resident, told me, saying they saw themselves as victims of government oppression. This kind of thinking, he added, “has been here for a long time.”
And for some of the locals, that connection has prompted some not entirely comfortable reflection. “How would I describe them?” Mr. Odell was asked about those charged in the killings. “They were on the fringes of church life, the fringes of political life, but in some ways not that different from the rest of us.”
Still, introspection doesn’t necessarily lead to change, at least at the ballot box. In Cimarron County, the wind still blows, the wheat ripens, and, come November, Joe Biden won’t have a prayer.
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