Disillusionment, U.S.A. Where voters are just hoping for change.

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Yahoo News:

ALGONAC, MICH.--Parker Fox drifted out of the Donald Trump rally in a sort of euphoric daze, along with the thousands emptying into the parking lot alongside him. “After leaving a Trump rally, you’re very pro-Trump,” he recalled a few weeks later, describing a noisy communion with people who understood that politics mattered, unlike some people he could name at his high school. “It was so enthusiastic and so energetic you could feel it in your body. It gave you chills.”

 

He’d barely had time to calm down when he learned through Facebook that his other favorite presidential candidate would also be passing through his quiet corner of eastern Michigan—Bernie Sanders. In fact, the U.S. senator from Vermont would be at the same community college the very next day. This thrilled Fox: his first presidential election as a voter—he was 18—and the two most crowd-whipping, pundit-defying, establishment-bucking candidates in the entire race were practically paying him personal visits.

 

As it turned out, the residents of this part of Michigan were especially fond of the two men who had done the most to upend the 2016 presidential race. Both Sanders and Trump won the state, with Sanders’ narrow win in the Democratic contest stupefying pollsters who had predicted a comfortable lead for Hillary Clinton. Both did especially well in St. Clair County, with double-digit victories over their rivals. And, down at the precinct level, they barnstormed Algonac, a town of about 4,056 people about an hour’s drive from Detroit on a curve of the St. Clair River in the county’s southern end corner, and neighboring Clay, home to another 9,066 or so, including Fox and his family. In some Algonac and Clay precincts, Sanders and Trump won more than two thirds of the votes. Residents have a needlessly unflattering nickname for Algonac: The Swamp, derived, apparently, from the reed marshes that engulf the town’s edges and which are prettily dive-bombed by feeding birds and buzz with hidden insects.

 

If Sanders and Trump were the two insurgents of 2016, then the Algonac Swamp must be a sort of encampment of their guerrilla foot soldiers. What might such a place be like, down in the trenches?

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Still looking for hope and change after all these years...