FDR made it a blue bastion – now it’s Trump’s stronghold in California. Is it forever lost?

Shasta has embraced the Maga movement with gusto – can Democrats ever win back the rural, working-class voters they once relied upon?

A crucial election was approaching and the country was desperate. Despite promises that economic conditions were improving, nearly a quarter of the US was out of work as voters headed to the polls in 1932.

It was the darkest time since the civil war, a period so dire that in California’s capital people fought each other for work. In early 1931, a crowd of 200 men scuffled over a handful of temporary jobs moving back-breaking loads of granite, the Sacramento Bee reported.