The real reasons Eastern Washington voted for Trump
Dennis Chamberlain knows what I want to ask. Chamberlain is a lean 53-year-old who’s lived in rural parts of the Northwest for most of his life — first on the edges of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, now beneath the big skies of central Washington. He’s settled here in Ritzville, a town of fewer than 2,000 souls that survives on the paychecks of farmers and the tens of thousands of drivers who stop here on their way to Spokane or Seattle or somewhere — anywhere — else along I-90 or Highway 395.
Chamberlain wears a cowboy hat and a black vest as he staffs the counter of his downtown shop, Uniquely Washington, which trades in knick-knacks, booze and a bit of bulk candy and smells like an old-time saloon thanks to the distillery next door. When he’s not here, Chamberlain’s also a Ritzville city councilman.
But a week and a half after the election, Chamberlain is sure I’m not here to talk about all that. After all, I’m from the other side of that Iron Curtain, the Cascade Mountains. And from what folks over here have heard, we’ve been tearing ourselves apart.
In a subtle drawl, he asks straight away, “I would imagine one of the things you want to know is, what do we think of the rioting and stuff that’s going on?”
Before I can say that I have seen no such rioting, Chamberlain offers an answer to his own question: “It’s complete nonsense in my opinion.”
Ritzville is in the heart of Washington’s Trump country. Beyond where the land flattens out and the trees disappear, past the wind turbines along the Columbia River Gorge, the town is one of a relative few in the sagebrush desert and wheat.
Adams County, of which Ritzville is the seat, voted 67 percent for Donald Trump. If it weren’t for a sizeable Latino population in Othello, roughly 50 miles to the southwest, that number would have been even higher. In the almost exclusively white Ritzville, Trump received 77 percent of the vote.
http://crosscut.com/2016/11/in-search-of-the-forgotten-washington-that-voted-for-trump/