Letter From King County
Seeing Red
As the anniversary of President Obama’s election approached, I was dispatched to the reddest county in America with a straightforward but extremely challenging task: Find a Democrat.
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Back to the courthouse. Every county has a Republican party chairman and a Democratic party chairman, who are chosen in their party primaries. Surely the Democratic county chair would know who the Obama voters were. “Does King County have party chairs?” I asked Timmons. She said that the Republican chairmanship was vacant but that there was a Democratic chair. Her name was Judy Jackson, and she worked in the tax assessor’s office, just a few steps away.
What had it been like, I asked Jackson, presiding over the disastrous Democratic turnout? Jackson gave a little shrug. “I knew how it was going to come out,” she said. Was she excited about voting for Obama? There was a noticeable silence. “Not really,” she said. Jackson said she did not know who the Obama voters were; frankly, I would be very surprised if the chair herself were among them.
It was beginning to seem less and less likely that I would succeed. Guthrie is a town that has no gathering place, nowhere to meet people and engage them in conversation. When I asked Bob Burkett, an agricultural communications teacher at the school, who also serves as a county commissioner, about my chances of finding someone who had voted for Obama, he grinned. “You’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”
He was right. I never did find anyone who would admit to voting for Obama, but I did learn a lot about King County politics. After I left the school, I returned to the courthouse and asked Timmons to let me see the returns of recent elections. At the top of the ticket—the races for president, senator, and Congress—King County votes overwhelmingly Republican. In George W. Bush’s two presidential races, for example, Al Gore and John Kerry each received only a handful of votes more than Obama did in the last race. Bush defeated Gore 120 to 14 and Kerry 137 to 18. In 2008 the Democratic candidate against Republican congressman Mac Thornberry received only 7 votes out of 148. But at the bottom of the ticket, in the contests for local offices, the reddest county in America is true blue. County judge Daniel is a Democrat. Commissioner Burkett is a Democrat. In fact, most county officials are Democrats. And if the primary that residents choose to vote in is a reliable guide, King County is a Democratic stronghold.
In the 2008 party primaries, 84 voters turned out for the Democratic primary in King County. Hillary Clinton led with 36 votes, Obama received 27, and John Edwards got 15. Only 20 voters participated in the Republican primary, with Mike Huckabee outpolling McCain 10 to 8. Rudy Giuliani and somebody named Hugh Cort split the other 2 votes. Proposition 2, a statewide referendum for Republican voters on whether a person should have to show a photo ID before casting a ballot, passed by a mere 6 to 4. I doubt if another county in Texas posted such a low winning margin, just 60 percent, for voter ID, a hot-button issue for most Republicans.
What explains this dichotomy between the top of the ticket and the bottom? There is an aphorism about politics and agriculture that holds that “cotton is Democratic and wheat is Republican,” and King County is cotton country. Burkett, who voted for McCain, attributes the county’s political leanings to history. “For many years,” he said, “Democrats were Democrats. It didn’t matter who was on the ticket. You were going to put an x by it.” This was true of most of rural Texas into the seventies. Now this part of the state is just about the last place where the rural conservative Democratic tradition endures.
This tradition, which was based on nineteenth-century populism—an antipathy to big money (banks, insurance companies, wealthy landowners, and other elites)—has given way to twenty-first-century populism, which is based on anger toward big government over illegal immigration, the breakdown of moral values, and the unchecked financial speculation that brought about a worldwide economic recession, all of which big government has failed to control, or made worse.
The 2008 election was a watershed event, not just because it gave the country its first black president but also because it tipped the scales of power in the Democratic party, and in American politics, irrevocably toward cities and their suburbs. As recently as the nineties, the Democrats’ nominee for president was a bubba from Arkansas. It is hard to imagine that happening today. Look at the math: Obama carried urban slivers of Virginia and North Carolina that negated the votes of 90 percent of the mostly rural land area of both states.
This is happening all over the country. In King County, the legislative and congressional redistricting maps that will follow the 2010 census will only make matters worse. The part of Texas lying between Wichita Falls and Lubbock, then northward to the top of the Panhandle, is losing population, and it follows as surely as night follows day that it will lose representation as well. That this trend manifested itself at the same time that the conservative cycle that began with Ronald Reagan came to a natural end only leaves the rural areas feeling more isolated. It is no wonder that I couldn’t find an Obama voter in King County. All the Democrats are voting Republican.
On my last day I spent an hour or so driving around the 6666 with Joe Leathers, the general manager, hoping that I would be able to read the notes I was taking as we bounced down the washboard roads. Leathers is tall and gangly, with the unmistakable look of a man who spends most of his waking hours outdoors. “What we’ve seen is rural areas dying,” he told me. “The kids have left and haven’t come back. The nation is not informed and educated about agriculture. It doesn’t know where food and clothing come from.”
The land around us was classic South Plains, a high prairie with a gentle slope and lush grasses that grew as tall as three feet. No brush obstructed our view across pristine pastures. But if brush, the ancient enemy of ranchers, has been tamed, more-contemporary adversaries have not. “America feeds the world,” Leathers said. “Scripture tells us, ‘I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in.’ Now we spend all our time trying to knock down what the federal government is doing to us. We won’t be able to afford to feed the world anymore.” He turned his pickup off the dirt road we had come down, and we were back on hard pavement, headed for the supply house where I had parked my car. “CNN tried to make a big deal out of the Republican percentage,” he said. “We as a county voted for the person who could best be able to help us make a living.”
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