Despairing Democrats in rural Wash. county bucked history to vote for Trump; still awaiting action

Aberdeen, Wash., resident Forrest Wood shoots up. (AP Photo by David Goldman)

A story from The Associated Press shines a melancholy light on a rural corner of Washington state sometimes called "the Appalachia of the Pacific Northwest." Like the real Appalachia, the town of Aberdeen in Grays Harbor County has been plagued by poverty and ravaged by the opioid epidemic in recent years. And so the county, "once among the most reliably Democratic in the nation, swung Republican in a presidential election for the first time in 90 years," Claire Galofaro reports.

Aberdeen, Washington
(Sperling's Best Places map)

Donald Trump won handily in small towns and rural areas across the country, where residents saw him as a ray of hope — or a Hail Mary pass. "Penn State sociologist Shannon Monnat spent last fall plotting places on a map experiencing a rise in 'deaths of despair' — from drugs, alcohol and suicide wrought by the decimation of jobs that used to bring dignity," Galofaro reports. "On Election Day, she glanced up at the television. The map of Trump’s victory looked eerily similar to hers documenting death, from New England through the Rust Belt all the way here, to the rural coast of Washington, a county of 71,000 so out-of-the-way some say it feels like the end of the earth."

Aberdeen, hometown of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, was once a lumber boomtown, but the economy began slipping in the 1960s because of globalization and automation. In 1990 the federal government limited logging to protect an endangered owl. Today, "the county’s population is stagnating and aging, as many young and able move away. Just 15 percent of those left behind have college degrees. A quarter of children grow up poor. There is a critical shortage of doctors. All that gathered into what Karolyn Holden, director of the local health department, calls 'a perfect storm' that put Grays Harbor near the top of the lists no place wants to be on: drugs, alcohol, early death, runaway rates of welfare," Galofaro reports.

Some local residents Galofaro interviewed remain hopeful that Trump can fix the blue-collar economy. Antique-store owner Stacie Blodgett says she found Trump's bold words refreshing as a candidate, but says "What he needs to do is quit talking, and do what he said he's going to do."