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In Mcdowell County, West Virginia, voters are feeling vindicated.
You wouldn’t know it driving around here. There’s barely a Trump yard sign in sight.
But this is the county where — at 91.5% of the vote — Trump won his biggest primary
victory nationwide and on Tuesday, voters here helped fuel his improbable win.
I was ecstatic, and I was glad that I’m in McDowell County, West Virginia.
People here in McDowell are happy cause he got it.
We got a little hope.
While much of the country is still devastated at the prospect of Donald Trump actually being president,
residents here are hopeful he’ll pull through for them.
This was once a booming coal mining community.
But now, with the coal industry’s decline, the jobs have dried up,
It's now one of the poorest counties in the nation.
Trump’s promise to back jobs,
in particular coal jobs, appealed to white working class voters here.
who feel they've been left behind in a tech-focused global economy.
On election night in Mcdowell, voters fearful of a Clinton presidency were preparing for the worst.
If Hillary does get it, that's it. This county is done for and so is this state.
And what she’s doing, and what she plans on doing if she gets in, we might as well
just forget it because we’re not going to be up to her standards. Forget it.
Let me just put it to you like that. We are not going to be up to her standards at all.
And it's just, it's really hard.
It really is.
Just eight years ago, Obama won McDowell County.
Like Obama, Trump fashioned himself an agent of change.
We’re kind of like the forgotten people around here.
We were just voting for the guy that didn’t was part of the establishment to try to change things.
It was like Obama’s change.
We’re trying to look for change as well here.
Obama's slogan in the first campaign was change. Right?
I used to have rolls of hundred dollar bills in my pockets.
Now I have change.
He gave me lots of change.
The new reality of a President Trump has working class voters here feeling optimistic.
Or at the very least, no longer ignored.