Alice Rogers admitted that identifying as a Democrat in Siskiyou County felt a bit “like coming out.”
She stood under a canopy of tall trees in Weed’s Carrick Park on a warm June afternoon along with about 100 other local Democrats at the county party’s annual fundraising dinner.
Like many Democratic women across the U.S., Rogers, the chair of the Democratic Central Committee of Siskiyou County, and Robin Richards, the committee’s treasurer, were called to action after the election Donald Trump in 2016, as they watched their Republican neighbors ride the MAGA wave further to the right.
“I didn’t know there were other Democrats in Siskiyou County,” said Rogers, a lifelong Democrat. But as she and Richards realized there were more Democrats than they thought — 35% of the county voted for Hillary Clinton — they began to strategize.
“We were so angry,” said Rogers. “And we were both retired, so we had the time for it.”
Rural north state Democrats have long understood that the real action for their party is in Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Sacramento. Even though the region north of Sacramento is geographically enormous, its population and wealth simply aren’t enough to influence state politics.
But these days, rural Democrats, in Siskiyou especially, feel surrounded by increasingly empowered conspiracy theorists, separatists, and extremists. They sense that grassroots organizing is more important than ever.
“We want to avoid turning out like Shasta County,” said Katherine Shelton, secretary of the Siskiyou central committee.
In Siskiyou’s sister county to the south, three far-right members of its Board of Supervisors voted in January to end the county’s contract with Dominion Voting Systems. Trump supporters believe the company and its machines thwarted his bid for re-election in 2020. (Fox News owes Dominion $787.5 million for perpetuating this lie.)
In the months since, board…
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