Opinion | An Oklahoma County Where Trump’s a Given but the Politics Are More Interesting

Still, Cimarron County is singular for other reasons. Oklahoma is the reddest of the red states. It is the only state where Barack Obama did not carry a single county in either of his presidential races, while Donald Trump carried every county in both of his. In 2020, Mr. Trump won Oklahoma by a whopping 33 points. That accomplishment paled, however, compared to his electoral prowess in Cimarron County, where he won 92 percent of the vote. Out of 1,054 votes cast in the last presidential election, Joe Biden won 70.

“I don’t watch Fox News — I thought they went way too liberal during the last election.” The speaker was Clint Twombly, a former Border Patrol agent who is running for sheriff. Standing inside the cinder-block building where the Boise City Rotary Club meets every Wednesday at noon, Mr. Twombly delivered his first ever campaign speech.

Like most of the locals I talked with, he dismissed any concerns over global warming. Instead, he said, climate change is all about “somebody trying to sell a book and make money, rather than anything to do with science.” As for the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he said that “all in all, it seemed to me fairly innocuous.” Mr. Twombly was unaware that any police officers had died after the attack.

That said, you won’t find much adoration for Donald J. Trump here. Despite the presence of the highway named in his honor — “Nobody else wanted it,” Jody Risley, who runs the Cimarron Heritage Center, told me — unease about the character of the former president, even before his felony conviction, lingers. “He’s not a good person,” Mr. Twombly said. “He’s not somebody I want at the dinner table.”

But voting for the Democratic alternative is unthinkable. The last Democrat to carry Cimarron County was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Before that it was Harry Truman. Cimarron is no anomaly. There’s a 1,400-mile column of rural counties along the western Great Plains, stretching from the Canadian border to Mexico, where (apart from a few counties dominated by Native reservations) voting Republican is a way of life. If you ask Cimarron County locals what it would take for them to vote Democratic, you get platitudes about passing too many laws, or not enforcing the ones we have.