I’ve lived in a small town with a large public university in the Virginian part of Appalachia since 1999, commuting to the private university in North Carolina where I’ve taught since 1987. It is a prosperous college town, often designated by business and “lifestyle” magazines as one of the best places to retire to in the US, and thus atypical of the region in terms of its relative affluence and the so-called cultural and leisure opportunities it provides.
Politically, the town is a liberal oasis in a desert of Republicanism. In the recent presidential election, Clinton beat Trump by just over 1% in the county where this college town is located (the county went narrowly for Romney in 2012 and Obama in 2008), while losing to Trump by whopping 20-40% margins in all the surrounding counties. In these overwhelmingly rural counties rusty and dented trucks sporting Virginia’s Tea Party “Don’t Tread on Me” license plates are a common sight.
I have never seen this license plate on a BMW or Mercedes Benz when driving through rural Virginia (and neither has anyone I’ve asked). Cynics among my friends say the people in the luxury cars probably rely on the lowish-income Tea Party drivers to vote for Republican tax cuts for the wealthy, thereby giving them a new Merc or Beamer every couple of years.
I started to get an inkling of what was likely to happen in the election during the weekly three-hour commute to and from my job in North Carolina. The only…