BUFFALO, Tex. — Susan Wilder describes herself and voters in East Texas who think like her as “closet Democrats” because to support that party or Hillary Clinton openly in this hardscrabble cattle and oil town halfway between Dallas and Houston is to invite ridicule and opprobrium.
The U.S.’s urban elites have mocked and vilified Donald Trump as a mean-spirited buffoon and charlatan. However, their harsh criticisms of the Republican presidential candidate often sound mealy mouthed compared to the astonishing levels of naked hatred that exist for Clinton in places such as Buffalo.
Leon County Commissioner David Ferguson, likens Clinton to “a heifer … who promises you everything you want and cannot deliver.”
Referring to Trump and the lawmakers now in Washington, the rancher says, “Let’s not sugar-coat it. We are ready for someone with cojones to kick the door down and throw them out. What is wrong with him being honest and saying what is on his mind. It is political correctness that is destroying our system. Nobody can say what they think and we’re tired of it.”
The situation is like “having a slow leak in your tire that is going to go flat one day,” says Tom Davis who runs a cattle feed store. The genial giant, who says he owns about 50 guns, says dissatisfaction with the political process is such that “there a lot of people digging holes and getting ammo. I mean that, sir.”
The issues that are brought up again and again in Buffalo are Clinton’s lack of trustworthiness, Christian values, limits on immigration, the need for a repeal of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that permits abortion, the right to bear arms and what Democrats and Republicans alike believe to be the U.S.’s diminished international reputation.
Jennifer Humphries, a seventh-generation Texan who has been on the school board for 15 years, presides over the Pharm restaurant, a busy local gathering point. She and her neigbours are proud of their traditions, which included allowing school administrators to “paddle” students who misbehaved because that made them “good, respectful kids.”
She openly worries that “in 1972 you couldn’t find a Mexican in Buffalo and this year 70 per cent of our enrollment in elementary school is Hispanic.”
Humphries is an ardent Trump fan because “he speaks his mind about such issues.”
The Lone Star State has mostly voted Republican since Democrat and native son Lyndon Baines Johnson was president more than 40 years ago. Although it remains a blue-collar state that has been reeling for several years from depressed oil prices, there are growing urban white-collar pockets that are among the most prosperous in the country.
That helps explain why, for the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, the Dallas Morning __news came out in support of a Democratic presidential candidate last month.
Clinton has robust and rising poll numbers in the capital, Austin, and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. She has such strong support from Hispanic voters that exit polls after early balloting in the border town of El Paso have her getting 71 per cent of the votes.
Yet dislike for the first women to have a good chance to win the White House is so deep-seated across vast swathes of the Texas hinterlands polls this week suggest she is trailing by as much as 10 points statewide.
“There is nothing particularly attractive about her,” Wilder says, citing Clinton’s “horrible voice” as a particular problem. “But she is an intelligent woman and I would sleep better at night if she was in charge.”
The 65-year-old teacher says she might have voted Republican if one of the earlier candidates for that party, such as Jeb Bush, had been on the ballot.
Supporting Trump was impossible because of his attitude to women and because he “is so arrogant and brags about it. It’s so icky. Even the Bushes are not going to vote for him. They are not excited by him.”
The father and son who were the 41st and 43rd presidents are not the only voters confounded by the choices thrown up by the Democrats and Republicans in this exceptional election year.
“I see no signs and no bumper stickers for either candidate and that is something I’ve never seen before,” Wilder says.
Buffalo’s mayor, Royce Dawkins, 75, and one of the few black Republicans in Texas, was as ambivalent as the Bushes and Wilder about which way to vote.
“It is an embarrassment to the United States to have a candidate like Trump. He is too much, ‘I, I, I,’ ” says Dawkins. “But one is not better than the other. Almost nobody is proud of how they are going to vote.”
The parish’s Roman Catholic priest, Fr. John Mary Bowlin, said much the same thing.
“I am very grateful that Jesus Christ is King because if I had to rely on the politicians I would be unhopeful,” he says. “I am pretty much underwhelmed by them.”
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