For the first time, Fresno County is part of Republican Donald Trump’s world | Opinion
The conservative political wave that swept the nation Tuesday is also poised to carry Donald Trump to a first for his presidential campaigns: He is on his way to winning Fresno County.
Never before had the former president captured the majority of Fresno County ballots, despite the region's reputation as a conservative stronghold.
The last Republican candidate to win Fresno County was incumbent George W. Bush in 2004.
Barack Obama won here in 2008 and 2012, and Hillary Clinton captured the county in 2016, the first time Trump ran. She got 49% of the Fresno County vote to Trump's 43%. He, of course, became president by winning the Electoral College.
In 2020 Joe Biden received 53% of Fresno County ballots to Trump's 45%.
But after Tuesday night, with 40% of the votes tallied , Trump had won 53% of the ballots to Democrat Kamala Harris' 44%.
Political scientists will dissect the final results to understand what occurred here. But some immediate reasons for Trump's success this time occur to me:
Inflation, inflation, inflation. It already costs a lot to live in California. Mortgages and rents are higher than almost anywhere else in the nation, as are gas prices. Since the pandemic groceries have gotten more expensive — a box of my favorite cereal costs $6, which is absurd. The price for fast-food meals has also gotten hard to understand: $10 or more at McDonald's?
President Joe Biden, and by extension Harris, got the blame for inflation. Trump campaigned on bringing prices down. "Kamala broke it," he says in one ad. "I will fix it."
Latinos are not monolithic. The county's Hispanic community is long-tenured and sophisticated. They don't vote in a block for Democrats. Many are conservative business owners, and religious Latinos are turned off by liberal policies that Harris once espoused. Hispanics in greater numbers were swayed by Trump's arguments.
Border security. Even with Hispanics making up the largest share of Fresno County's demographics, concerns over illegal immigration could have fueled Trump's win here. National polls have shown that increasing numbers of Latinos f avor tightening up immigration .
The urban-rural divide . Democrats do well in metropolitan areas but poorly out in the country. The red-blue map of the nation shows how Republicans dominated in America's Midwest and South. When Fresno County results are parsed, I expect it will show a localized version of that divide as well.
Trump defies local registration
By winning Fresno County, Trump overcame the hurdle of local party registration.
Data on voter registration in Fresno County show that only four places have GOP majorities. Clovis is the main conservative stronghold, with 33,951 registered Republicans to 22,296 Democrats in Clovis.
Then there are the south county city of Kingsburg, the westside city of Coalinga and the rural areas of the county.
Everywhere else — from tiny Huron on the western edge of the county to metro Fresno — Democrats rule the registration.
The city of Fresno is where the political difference is made. Democrats in the state's fifth-largest city hold 110,974 registrations to the Republicans' 74,115. The data is as of Oct. 21, the most recent reported.
Mass deportations loom?
Throughout his campaign Trump stressed he would lock down the southern border into America. He said undocumented people were "poisoning the blood" of the nation, words scarily reminiscent of language used by Hitler when describing Jews in Nazi Germany.
More than half of Fresno County's population — 54%, or 540,743 people — is Latino.
Fresno State political science Professor Tom Holyoke noted this reality to me in an email. "I suspect a lot of voters know people who would be at risk, and this may even include family members," Holyoke said. "Local agriculture has always depended heavily on migrants and would suffer."
How Trump will provide a stable workforce for farmers remains to be seen, given his emphasis on deportations such that the nation has never experienced.
Early Wednesday morning the tallies in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Maine and Alaska had yet to be finalized. Fresno County elections chief James Kus also has a slew of local ballots to count as well.
But the result here is clear: Trump, unlike in 2016 and 2020, is on his way to finally capturing this farming center.
