Note: Journalist Andrew Purcell is a foreign correspondent for the (Scotland) Herald, one of the planet’s oldest newspapers.
Purcell recently spent a few days in the lower Naugatuck Valley trying to figure out what people expect from a Donald Trump presidency.
His research included trips to the Valley Diner, Ansonia City Hall, Bar None in Derby during a Sunday football game, the Derby Historical Society, and the offices of the Valley Indy.
The first few paragraphs from his story are published below, with a link at the end to the rest of the story.
On November 8, 2016, the Naugatuck Valley in southern Connecticut voted to elect Donald Trump president. The Republican nominee won 59% of the ballots cast by residents of Derby, Ansonia, Shelton, Beacon Falls, Seymour, Oxford and Naugatuck, a string of post-industrial towns known to locals as ‘the Valley’.
These votes didn’t affect the outcome of the election – Hillary Clinton won the state easily, in the cities and New York exurbs – but they are part of a larger story. Trump’s victory was forged in small towns like these, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.
“We’re like our own little Rust Belt here,” reporter Eugene Driscoll told me, at the downtown Ansonia office of the Valley Independent Sentinel, a non-profit website founded eight years ago to replace a venerable daily newspaper.
Click here to continue reading Purcell’s story.
