— Rural Inyo County was one of two California counties to vote for Biden in 2020 after supporting Trump in 2016.
— The red-to-blue flip came after an influx of new residents, who skewed Democrat, from other counties.
— Progressives in the small town of Bishop have become more visible in the Trump era.
The last time rural Inyo County backed a Democrat for president was in 1964, when voters chose Lyndon B. Johnson.
But in 2020, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. By 14 votes.
Considering Trump carried Inyo County by 13 percentage points four years earlier, it was quietly one of the most dramatic red-to-blue flips in the country.
While California almost certainly will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump, once deep-red Inyo County — home to some 19,000 people between the Eastern Sierra and Nevada state line — is a tossup.
Unlike other rural places that overwhelmingly vote Republican, Inyo County “is more of an outlier,” with its mountain and desert towns appealing to “rednecks and hippies,” gun-toting hunters and backpacking environmentalists, said Kim Nalder, director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State.
“Our politics are so divided right now, but I have a little glimmer of hope that exposure to each other as humans will break through that at some point,” said Nalder, a former wildland firefighter who has spent much time in Inyo County. “I think the best opportunity for that kind of future healing is in small towns where there’s no way to avoid people from the other side.”
Alas, Inyo County’s purpling has been uncomfortable for the politically-inclined, who have grown more vocal, and more suspicious of their neighbors, whether they are ultra-MAGA or never-Trump.
And just about everybody blames the changes on newcomers — remote workers and “the invasion of L.A. Sprinter vans,” as one Democrat put it, who during the pandemic fled their expensive, locked-down cities for the Eastern Sierra, and never left.
(The city folks left so much trash and feces in the forest that locals distributed stickers promoting proper camping etiquette, including one with a smiling piece of poop that reads: “Pack it out! We care where you go!”)
Lynette McIntosh, who describes herself as “very, very MAGA” and has lived for nearly five decades in Bishop — the county’s biggest town, population 3,800 — has a dark view of the influx.
She believes there has been a coordinated effort by well-connected progressive groups like the Sierra Club to infiltrate and divide small, conservative communities all over the country, to take over school boards and city councils, and to turn residents against Trump.
In another sign of differing views here, McIntosh charged that a new public artwork depicted the horned demonic deity Baphomet. Local artists say it is just a fanciful mashup of animal images, including a bear and bighorn sheep — with wings in the rainbow colors of the Pride flag.
“We’re a real conservative community, but there’s this whole barrage of left wingers that have come in — I mean, radicals. Radicals,” said McIntosh, a 73-year-old Presbyterian church elder who favors bedazzled, star-spangled ball caps and drives around with a “Trumplican” bumper sticker.
McIntosh, who happily credits Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, says Trump is “called by God” to lead the country.
Fran Hunt, a fellow Bishop resident, also mentioned God when asked how she felt about Trump. “Oh, God,” she said, putting her face in her hands and shaking her head.
Like McIntosh, Hunt, 65, is a grassroots political activist who still attends public meetings and protests in a face mask to guard against COVID-19, drawing eye rolls from McIntosh, who protested mask and vaccine mandates while Trump was president.
Hunt is a proud Democrat who is, yes, retired from the Sierra Club. She helped organize Inyo350, a chapter of the international activist group 350.org, which focuses on environmental and social justice issues.
Hunt and her wife — the daughter of a tungsten mine worker who grew up in Bishop — moved here from Washington, D.C., in 2014 to be near family. She is horrified by the possibility of another Trump presidency.
“He’s threatening a dictatorship,” she said. “He’s threatening to prosecute his opponents. Mass deportations. He’s threatening chaos in a country that is full of guns. Where does my worry list stop?”
Hunt is heartened by Inyo County’s recent liberal tilt. But what’s sad, she said, is that “we may be more blue — or more purple — but we are more divided.”
The politics of Inyo County, a place roughly the size of Massachusetts, have long been tinted red by residents’ distrust and resentment of liberal big cities like Los Angeles, whose Department of Water and Power owns much of the county’s land.
This is a place where people still brag about then-Gov. Ronald Reagan being grand marshal of the Mule Days parade in 1974.
When Trump ran in 2016, just over 41% of registered voters in Inyo County were Republicans — a 10-point advantage over Democrats.
This year? Republicans hold a 4% registration advantage.
Newcomers have almost certainly had an impact.
In 2020, when the county went purple, 10% of registered voters had moved to Inyo County from another county in California since 2016, according to an analysis of voter registration data for the Times by Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.
Statewide, just 5% of registered voters in 2020 had moved from a different county since 2016.
In Inyo County, about 34% of the newcomers came from Los Angeles or Orange counties, according to the data. Eleven percent came from the Bay Area. Most were Democrats and independents.
The only other California county to flip blue after voting for Trump in 2016 was mostly-rural Butte County — which saw massive displacement after the deadly Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise in 2018.
David Blacker, chairman of the Inyo County Republican Central Committee, said that, in 2020, local conservatives “got lulled into a false sense of security” and were surprised by the political flip.
He noted that the GOP still wins down-ballot races here, and that in the 2022 gubernatorial race, Inyo County voters backed Republican state Sen. Brian Dahle over Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Blacker, who lives and works in Death Valley National Park, said the economy is voters’ top concern in Inyo County, which relies upon tourists’ financial ability to vacation in its public lands. Biden-era inflation, he said, has been brutal.
“All the people I’m talking to now, they’re saying they’re they’d rather have mean tweets and a vibrant economy than continue the way we’re going,” Blacker said.
Trump appeals here, he said, because Democrats in Washington and Sacramento “don’t understand rural communities” and prioritize things like electric vehicles — which do not work well in far-flung places with few charging stations. (He said he has to drive at least an hour to the grocery store — and across the Nevada state line to buy cheaper gas.
Emily Lanphear, vice chair of the local Republican Central Committee, ran a booth last month at the county fairground — complete with a giant photo of a bloodied Trump raising his fist after a July assassination attempt. She said she was pleasantly surprised by how many kids and teenagers came up to ask questions and pose with a cardboard cutout of the former president.
“They think he’s such a badass,” she said.
Lanphear, a 21-year resident of the Owens Valley and the wife of a law enforcement officer, said many people are nervous to display Trump signs and flags because of the county’s growing political divide.
After Trump’s 2016 election, marches were organized for liberal causes.
“All of a sudden we see women’s rights protests, anti-Trump protests, pro-immigrant open-border protests,” she said, adding, “Locals are like, ‘What is going on?’ That creates division.’”
Even before the pandemic-era newbies moved in, local progressives aghast at Trump’s 2016 victory were becoming more visible. They restarted what had been an inactive Inyo County Democratic Central Committee. They organized a women’s march and Black Lives Matter protests in Bishop.
In 2018, progressives helped elect Stephen Muchovej, the first out gay member of the Bishop City Council, who said he got into politics because he believed Trump was stoking anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.
Muchovej, a 44-year-old Brazilian immigrant and astrophysicist, moved here from New York City around 2007 to work at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory near Big Pine.
Around the time Trump was elected, Muchovej and his husband were walking their dog — a black lab nicknamed Prince Valium “because he was so chill” — through a public field when, he said, members of a nearby church called the cops on them, alleging that their dog was running amok and scaring children.
There were no kids around at the time, said Muchovej, who believes the real issue was “walking while gay.”
In his first City Council race, Muchovej defeated the incumbent, a former Bishop police chief. He ran for reelection in 2022 unopposed.
“A lot of people — closeted liberals — are realizing that they’re not in the minority, and that conservatives nationwide have been skewing so far to the right that [liberals are] not willing to sit in the shadows anymore,” he said.
Indeed, in 2022, the region’s increasingly-visible local LGBTQ+ community organized its first-ever Eastern Sierra Pride, complete with an all-ages drag show — over the objections of religious conservatives who vowed to “reclaim the rainbow.”
One of the event’s founders was Deena Davenport-Conway, who married her wife at San Francisco City Hall in 2013, the year the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriages to resume in California — after Harris, as state attorney general, refused to defend Proposition 8, the state ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriage.
Davenport-Conway, 58, fears Trump will roll back hard-won rights for women and LGBTQ+ people.
But from her beauty salon on Bishop’s Main Street, she tries to be upbeat about the county’s political divide. Since moving to Inyo County in 2016, she has made a lot of conservative friends and neighbors. They have embraced her — and she, them.
“There’s a lot of sophistication in compromise,” she said. “Hopefully our country can get back to that. The Owens Valley, and Inyo County in particular, is a perfect cross section of America.”
Bishop Mayor Jose Garcia, a healthcare interpreter and former dentist from Mexico City who moved here in 1989, said that in Inyo County he has found kindness and grace that transcend partisan bickering.
“We’re less than 4,000 people. Are we going to divide ourselves because of politics? No,” he said.
Garcia, who was elected in 2020 and is running for reelection, last month he did a substantive interview on the podcast Butthurt Owens Valley, which is named after a red-leaning Facebook group where locals gossip and gripe.
He read aloud a recent comment from the Facebook page: “Democrats stay off my property!!! and Mr. Garcia you’ll never have my vote!!!”
It made him laugh.
