Growth Has Lifted Counties That Voted for Trump. Mostly, It’s the Wealthy Ones.

The followoing article by Campbell Robertson and Jim Tankersley was posted on the New York Times website September 3, 2018:

President Trump’s economy has left the most distressed swaths of the country waiting for their share of the good times.

“You could feel things getting better and better,” said Tom Hughes, a homebuilder in St. Charles County, Mo., describing how his business began to rebound from the recession over the last few years.

ST. CHARLES, Mo. — The prosperity is apparent on the way into town: the 21-floor casino resort and spa on one side of the interstate, and on the other a freshly built retail quarter of boutiques, a brand-new Hilton hotel and a P.F. Chang’s. It unfolds from there along the highways heading west with more gleaming office parks and multiplying subdivisions.

This is not the Trump country of the popular imagination, the land of shuttered plants and the economically left behind. St. Charles County, in the suburbs northwest of St. Louis, has had the highest median household income in Missouri for several years.

But in 2016, Donald J. Trump won the county by 26 points, and he is still popular among people like Tom Hughes, a homebuilder whose business was rebounding from the recession before Mr. Trump took office.

View the complete article here.