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Rural America sent Trump back to the White House. Flip in Clarendon County helps explain why. [1]

['Macon Atkinson Report For America Corps Member Matkinson Postandcourier.Com', 'Macon Atkinson', 'Grace Beahm Alford Staff', 'Staff', 'Wire Reports', 'Josh Archote Jarchote Postandcourier.Com']

Date: 2024-11

MANNING — If you want to understand how Donald Trump won the 2024 election, look at places like Clarendon County.

Clarendon, population 31,000, was blue for most of the 20th century. Black residents accounted for just over half the population by 2000. Most of the people who lived there were farmers, timbermen or textile mill workers. The two closest cities, Charleston and Columbia, were each an hour and a half away.

But as the mills closed and the farms bled their profits and the county's population waxed and waned, conservatives moved in and up. And gained ground.

In 2020, Trump was the first Republican candidate to win Clarendon County since Richard Nixon in 1972. Trump's margin of victory? 111 votes.

But on Nov. 5, Republicans won every race in Clarendon County. So did Trump, bigly, taking 55 percent of the vote to Kamala Harris' 43 percent, a difference of about 2,000 votes.

Rural communities like Clarendon shored up Trump's reelection not only in South Carolina, but in battleground states across the country. Meanwhile, the projected blue wall of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan crumbled for Harris, whose campaign struggled to connect with Black men and Hispanic voters — groups that previously were dependable supporters of Democratic candidates.

Yet again, Trump had strong support from working-class people. The AP VoteCast survey showed he won 55 percent of voters without a college degree, up from 51 percent in 2020 against Biden.

Trump's promises to restore the economy and "Make America Great Again" reverberated in rural communities.

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[1] Url: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/trump-rural-election-sc-clarendon-county/article_e20e938a-9c4f-11ef-8004-af358469a367.html

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