Four years ago, rural – and staunchly conservative – Inyo County pulled off an election surprise when voters there chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump by just fourteen votes.
Before 2020, the rugged eastern Sierra county had not supported a Democrat for president since 1964, when voters elected Lyndon B. Johnson.
Locals have long wondered whether an influx of new residents from the more urban parts of California — most of them Democrats or independents — during the pandemic had turned the place purple forever.
Inyo County, California
Would Inyo County Reject Trump Again in 2024?
That wouldn’t be the case.
As of Tuesday, Trump carried the county by 3 percentage points, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris there by 267 votes.
County Clerk Danielle Sexton said there were 12 ballots that had not yet been formally counted due to signature verification issues. Of those, seven ballots were “healed” — and will be counted — after election officials contacted voters by knocking on their doors or calling them. There are still problems with the other five ballots.
“Luckily, this time, no one wins or loses with those 12 votes,” Sexton said. She added that despite the country’s political divisions – and local election volunteers – polling stations had been calm and cordial on election day.
Read more: In this once red California county, Biden defeated Trump by just 14 votes. What happens next?
“Everyone is so stressed on both sides of the issue, and it’s so great to see the county coming together at the polls, regardless of which side they’re on,” she said. “Everyone had a great time. It was very polite and I was just proud of everyone.”
Considering Trump won Inyo County by 13 percentage points in 2016, Biden’s victory there in 2020 was quietly one of the most dramatic red-to-blue flips in the country.
The only other California county to turn blue in 2020 after voting for Trump four years earlier was mainly rural Butte County, which saw mass displacement after the deadly Camp Fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018. As of Tuesday, Trump led in Butte County by 2.9%, or 2,670 votes.
State law requires counties to finalize their official numbers 30 days after the election, no later than December 5 of this year. Secretary of State Shirley Weber will certify the results on December 13.
David Blacker, chairman of the Inyo County Republican Central Committee, said, “We may have gone 14 votes purple last time, but we have certainly restored Inyo to being a red county.”
“The RINOs and the Democrats have been spending recklessly,” Lynette McIntosh said last month at a candidates forum for the Bishop Congregational Council in Inyo County’s only city. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
As in other parts of the country, Blacker said, the economy seemed to be voters’ top concern in vast Inyo County — home to about 19,000 people, made up of mostly public lands and heavily dependent on tourists’ financial ability to to go on holiday. there.
Rural California, he said, was hit particularly hard by Biden-era inflation, and residents there often pay more for groceries because of shipping costs to far-flung places. They also often have to drive further than their urban counterparts, and gas prices tend to be higher than the rest of the state.
“You can’t have the kind of inflation spike we had and then shake it off,” said Blacker, who lives and works in Death Valley National Park, which covers nearly half the province.
Nina Weisman, chairwoman of the Inyo County Democratic Central Committee, said she was disappointed but not at all surprised that her county voted for Trump, given the rightward shift in American politics this year.
After Trump won in 2016, local liberals were fired up. They restarted the Inyo County Democratic Central Committee, which had been inactive. They organized a women’s march and Black Lives Matter protests.
This time, the resistance is a little more tired — but not gone yet, said Weisman, who lives in Independence.
“It’s exhausting,” she said. “But I hope they just get angrier.”
There were a few new attendees at the first Central Committee meeting after this election, Weisman said, and representatives from the state Democratic Party “came specifically to give us pep talks.”
“Our people were very depressed, but we had some guest speakers and new blood coming in,” she said.
That gave Weisman — a seasonal park ranger who has worked in Alaska and is deeply concerned about Trump’s loosening of environmental regulations — some much-needed hope.
Meanwhile, Lynette McIntosh, who lives just outside Bishop, couldn’t be happier with the election results. She is 73, retired from the custom window coverings company she and her husband ran together, and was thrilled by Trump’s campaign promise to end taxation of Social Security benefits.
“The RINOs and the Democrats have been spending recklessly,” she said, referring to so-called Republicans who are in name only and not loyal enough to Trump.
She likes the new president’s cabinet choices so far and believes that over the next four years, naysayers should “just shut the fuck up and let them do their job.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
