Visiting the Trumpiest county in a swing state

Sherri Rowell remembers her grandfather telling her, “Republicans were for rich people.” “That’s what I was always taught. Democrats were for us poor people,” she said.

Money is still tight for many in Brantley County in southeast Georgia, but its people no longer look to Democrats to help. In fact, with more than 90% of voters picking former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, it’s the most pro-Trump county in the six battleground states that could decide the presidency this year.

CNN met Rowell at a small shop in downtown Nahunta, population 1,000ish, where she was buying a Trump yard sign and a black Trump hat.

She took them to a graveyard outside town, and placed the sign by a fresh grave. She put the Trump hat just in front of the new marker for her first grandson, Talan Tanner. Two months ago, Tanner died after falling out of a pickup truck window and being run over, she said. He was 17.

“No drugs, no alcohol, just youngins being youngins,” Rowell said. She could list the ages of the people his organs were donated to. “There’s a blessing in it somewhere. I mean, the Lord don’t make mistakes. But he did love him some Trump.”

When Talan’s parents arrived at the graveyard, they picked a few new shoots of grass from the top of his grave. His father, Michael Tanner, knelt next to it. Talan had become interested in Trump after he got his first job, Tanner said. “He was like, ‘I make, $9 an hour, and I work this many hours. Why do I only make this much money?’ And I told him, I said, ‘Son, it’s politics. You’ve got to pay taxes,’” Tanner explained.

Talan started researching politics. “He said, ‘Dad, looking at what me and you talked about, we need Donald Trump in office.’ And he just became a huge Trump supporter,” his father said. “We felt this was what he would want — he would want people to know that he was a Trump supporter. He’s not here to be able to say it anymore, so we want it to be shown at his grave.”

Brantley County is rural, about an hour from the Atlantic coast, with the Okefenokee Swamp to the west. It’s a flat landscape with tall pines, palm trees and Spanish moss hanging from the branches of the live oaks. It is not the kind of place that has fallen on hard times because factories moved overseas, several people said, because there had never been much industry there. The pawn shop in Nahunta entices customers with hand-painted signs: “Baby daddy got a new honey? Sell that ring, keep the money.”

Ronald Ham, chair of the Brantley County GOP, comes from a family that has been in the area since the 1880s. His great-grandparents were farmers, but he said it’s hard to make a living farming now without many hundreds of acres. Ham leases his land and works as an IT consultant.

Many people in the area live on a fixed income, and there are more mobile homes than brick or wood homes, he said. People have to drive outside the county for work, which means gas prices matter a lot. So does inflation. “When there’s too much month at the end of the money, people vote with their wallet,” Ham said.

“They connect with him,” Ham said of Trump. “They’ve got a track record with him, and they feel like he’s fighting for them.”

Rowell said her life had changed quickly when the presidency transitioned from Trump to Joe Biden. “We have to drive so far for work. I drive 50-something miles one way. Gas is $3 and something a gallon. It was $2 a gallon four years ago,” Rowell said. “I could take you to the Piggly Wiggly in Nahunta, you just look at the prices. I don’t know where y’all come from, but compared to what we had four years ago, it’s triple.”

Rowell, a nurse, is focused on her paycheck, like her grandson was on his. “The taxes that come out of my check are outrageous,” she said.

“Trump dropped the taxes on our pay … made a great difference,” she said.

A few years ago, there was money for extra things, like going to Walt Disney World, Rowell said. Even the kids could feel the difference.

And that’s more important to her than Trump’s bombast.

“It’s just my place to say I’m living better, and my family’s doing better, and we’re not struggling,” she said. “So, if he wants to tweet something, tweet on brother, I don’t care.”

It wasn’t that she was against Kamala Harris, Rowell said. It’s just that she wasn’t confident Harris would be much different from Biden. “She should have come out and run an independent. Then I might have listened to her a little more.”

It was easy to talk politics here, compared with more closely divided places where people shy away from interviews or yell at reporters.

In Nahunta, locals were eager to help to find a rare Democrat in this very pro-Trump place. People were happy to call their neighbors and invited CNN to breakfast at a local diner where regulars liked to debate.

At the Gold House, Ham sat with three friends, among them David Herrin, a big man with a big white beard who’s in the trucking business. He used to pay 4.25% interest to buy a truck, but now he’d have to pay 7% interest to buy the same vehicle. He said he understood that the rates were high to cool down inflation. “I understand that it works, but I don’t understand why I should think that’s a good thing to take more of spendable income away,” Herrin said.

CNN wanted to see what they made of Democrats’ proposals to address the economic problems so many in Brantley County talked about. What about the idea the tax code should be changed so wealthier people pay more taxes, and that money would pay for education and health care in places like this one? The people around the table didn’t buy it.

Button Lee, a retired firefighter, said she wanted to pass her house down to her kids, and didn’t want them to have to pay big taxes on it.

Herrin said he was glad the level at which the inheritance tax kicks in was raised by Trump. “You think, ‘Well, that’s a rich person with $10 million’ — but it’s not in the trucking business with the trucks and the assets that we have to have,” he said. “If I died, I would probably be valued at over $10 million, and my kids would be forced to go come up with 40% of that in order to keep my assets. Trump set that up high enough that the people like me, the small-town businessmen, don’t get affected by that.”

Bill Middleton, a retired union boilermaker, was not impressed that Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension fund. “If the Teamsters pension was in trouble, there’s a serious problem at the top of the Teamsters’ union, and it’s either gross mismanagement or theft,” he said. Herrin chimed in that no one bailed out his 401(k).

And that big jobs report number in September? They weren’t impressed by that either. They were “government numbers,” Middleton said. Herrin said, “You can’t take that and give credit to Washington, DC. You give credit for that to the American people that go to work every day, even when they down, even when it’s against them, even when it then when it’s going uphill. We get up and we continue to work, we continue to fight, and we’ve made this country better. Ain’t nobody in Washington got a right to take credit for what the American people have done.”

But when Corbet Wilson and Donald Lewis, two older gentlemen, joined the Trump fans around the table, they were very direct when explaining their take on the presidential election.

“I ain’t going to vote for a criminal,” Wilson, an independent, said. The storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, should have been a disqualifier, he said, and Lewis agreed. “He’s anti-American. He’s trying to overthrow our government,” Lewis said of the former president.

Wilson and Lewis agreed the connection their neighbors felt to Trump was more intense and personal than their attachment to Republicans Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or Mitt Romney. But they didn’t have an explanation for it. “People would kill for him, I think,” Wilson said. “I don’t understand it. I don’t even try.”

Still, around the table there is no animosity. “They can vote any way they want to vote,” Wilson said of his companions. Herrin chimed in: “And we’ll still eat breakfast again.”