The politics of climate change — and the fact that so many residents of vulnerable towns are dyed-in-the-red Republicans — has taken on a new intensity during the Trump administration.
Mike KellyFrom Delaware — home state of former Vice President and Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden — north to New Jersey and the suburbs of New York and on to Vermont and New England, Democrats can count on heavy support in the 2020 election. And yet, as veteran USA TODAY Network columnist Mike Kelly and visual journalist Chris Pedota found, resilient pockets of Trump supporters persist amid this Democratic landscape.
Like White, nearly 70 percent of Mantoloking’s voters are Republicans, according to state voter registration records compiled recently by the USA TODAY NETWORK. In decidedly blue Democratic New Jersey, Ocean County, which is home to most of the state’s barrier island towns like Mantoloking, has become a Republican bastion. Only 30 Mantoloking residents are registered Democrats.
“But I don’t act on it,” said McIntyre, who, as the borough's emergency management director, would play a key role in helping to evacuate residents in a major storm. That morning, White, tall and chatting easily in a self-assured baritone, arrived at his mayor’s office at Mantoloking Borough Hall seemingly ready for a casual, beach-town kind of day. He wore a blue blazer, white slacks, a white shirt and loafers with no socks.
Like many longtime Jersey Shore residents, White, who purchased a home in Mantoloking in 1997 and moved permanently to the town in 2007, insists that he cherishes his beach life and does not want to move. And even if the predictions come true, White reasons that he probably won’t be alive to see his town get swamped.
By the time Sandy’s winds died and its tides subsided, the Atlantic had cut three inlets across Mantoloking. Nearly 100 homes were destroyed — some of them sucked into the Atlantic and never seen again. Others were flooded with water and sand, their sofas, beds and refrigerators swept into Barnegat Bay.
"The damage was horrific," White said."We were one of the first in town to raise the house. We moved the building to the side, drove in timber piles, then dropped the house on it."Gilbert Gaul, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who lives in Cherry Hill and surfs a variety of beaches on the Jersey Shore, spent portions of the last two decades studying the impact of the building boom along America’s beach communities.
“It is no accident that the federalization of disasters coincided with the explosive development at the coasts,” Gaul said. What was once a debate among environmentalists, however, has now become wrapped in partisan politics. The politics of climate change — and the fact that so many residents of vulnerable towns like Mantoloking are dyed-in-the-red Republicans — has taken on a new intensity during the Trump administration. What is difficult to understand for some is why more Republicans in beach towns have not pushed back against their party’s criticism — in some cases outright disdain — of climate change predictions.
“The people who put Trump in office are the people he’s screwing to the wall,” said Stewart Farrell, the director and founder of the Stockton University Coastal Research Center in Port Republic, New Jersey. “Nobody seems to understand why these people vote against their own economic self interest.” Corbett is 88 and has lived for decades in Mantoloking — along with other homes in Florida and in the Bahamas. He does not expect to see the 22nd century. But no matter. Corbett, a former journalist who became a stock broker, does not believe that sea levels will rise enough to swamp his town.
Point Pleasant Mayor Stephen Reid on the beach where 18-22 foot dunes have been built to protect the boardwalk from a rising ocean.Reid meets regularly with other mayors of New Jersey’s barrier island towns. Their most frequent topic now, he said, is flooding on local streets from rising sea levels. Many barrier island towns now say that even a normal high tide leaves several inches of water on some streets.
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