The neighborhood is part of the large, diverse voting precinct Harrison-C, one of several in Montgomery County that swung from majority support of President Obama in the last election to picking President-elect Donald Trump on Nov. 8.
An analysis of voting data by the Dayton Daily News found four precincts where Obama won or tied in 2012 that saw close to 20-point shifts to the right two weeks ago. These precincts helped secure the first win of Montgomery County for a Republican presidential candidate in 28 years.
Lough said he has no idea why people would have switched from voting for Obama to supporting Trump.
“Clinton was the only choice,” he said. He worries about the U.S. maintaining good relationships with foreign nations under a Trump presidency.
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But Winterbotham thinks people are fed up with the liberal agenda they’ve seen with Obama and weren’t going to put up with the corruption they saw Clinton representing. He said he talked to neighbors who were very concerned about the response to the terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy in Benghazi while Clinton was Secretary of State.
“They said this is the last person we need being commander in chief,” he said. “People were just sick of it and they just did not want a criminal leading this country.” He referenced investigations into Clinton’s use of a private email server for which she has not been criminally charged.
Although ideologically different, and representing different political parties, Obama and Trump had some things in common that may explain this dramatic shift, said Mark Caleb Smith, director of Cedarville University’s Center for Political Studies.
“They both were promising change,” Smith said. “And so they voted for Barack Obama because they still thought of him as the change candidate. Donald Trump represented the most significant change in this election.”
Smith also noted that Trump’s celebrity status and name recognition may have contributed to his success.
“Montgomery County going Republican is odd, based on recent history,” he said, but it will take several elections to determine if this is a trend or if voters will continue to swing to whatever side presents the most dynamic candidate.
Who to trust?
The Riverside-H precinct encompasses the Overlook Mutual Homes, a privately owned cooperative of multi-unit buildings off Airway Road near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
The neighborhood was built as emergency war housing by the federal government in 1943, but has been owned by the tenants since the late 1950s. Neighbors say the more than 700 apartments are occupied by a mixture of longtime residents and short-term tenants.
“There’s a few of us that have been here for a while,” said Paula Pearson, who’s lived in her home on Eisenhower Drive for 15 years. She’s watched people come and go from half the units on her street in the past year.
“They stay here for a year or two before they can get some money saved up and then they go and either buy a home or move and rent a bigger home.”
Turnover of tenants may have contributed to the large shift from a majority Democrat vote there in the 2012 presidential election to majority Republican this year, but there were some people who simply liked Obama and didn’t like Clinton.
Pearson is one of them.
“She was starting to sound more like her husband … with the emails, it sounded like she was backpedaling,” Pearson said.
For her, trust was an issue. Trump, though brash, came off as in your face and saying exactly what he meant, she said.
Fewer votes cast
In all four of the precincts the newspaper examined there were fewer registered voters than in 2012 and fewer total votes cast.
In Harrison-C there were 225 fewer registered voters than four years ago, and only 45 percent cast a ballot, compared to 50 percent in 2012.
The drop in registered voters could also be attributed to turnover in rental units. Harrison-C is a sprawling precinct that includes hundreds of single-family homes, but also the large, government-subsidized Northland Village apartments.
Clinton’s campaign, Smith said, was never able to replicate the grassroots mobilization to get people registered and to the polls that Obama’s campaigns achieved.
Mindy Wagers was one Clinton supporter who didn’t vote. The young mother of two small children lives in the Overlook Mutual Homes complex. She feels like her vote doesn’t count, citing the fact that Clinton won the popular vote but not the presidency.
“I decided not to vote because, honestly, if voting mattered they wouldn’t let us do it,” she said.
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