Supporters and protesters braved the heat and humidity Wednesday afternoon to hear what Donald Trump might say to a state that polls suggest he will win easily.
Nell Yarborough said the campaign stop, which included a fundraiser and rally at the Mississippi Coliseum, showed that Trump wasn’t resting on his laurels.
“Him coming here shows he is campaigning for all of us,” Yarborough said. “Up until a few years ago, we thought we could leave the government alone, but what we are finding is how bad that let things get.”
Now retired, Yarborough relies on Social Security income.
“We are getting less money. Now we’ve got foreigners taking money that was supposed to be for us. This is about our children and grandchildren and the country they will live in,” he added.
Joining Trump on the campaign trail was Nigel Farage, a former member of the British Parliament who gained notoriety for his campaign to remove the U.K. from the European Union.
“We made June 23 our independence day when we smashed the establishment,” Farage told Trump supporters. “Everybody said we’d lose. And what did we see? We saw experts from all over the world … telling us if we voted not to be run by a bunch of unelected old men in Brussels.
“They told us our economy would fall off a cliff. They told us there would be mass unemployment. They told us investment would leave our country. We saw the polling industry doing everything they could to demoralize us. On the day of the vote itself, that morning, they put us ten points behind. They were wrong.”
Despite Farage’s message that polling can be unreliable, many national polls indicate that Trump has an uphill climb against his Democratic opponents, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
FiveThirtyEight’s 2016 election forecast aggregates and weights polls from several organizations, including HuffPost Pollster, RealClearPolitics, other polling firms and news reports. On the day of Trump’s rally in Jackson, Clinton had 83.5 percent chance of winning the election, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Nonetheless, some rallygoers, like Kris Dolan, a 40-year-old from Jackson, said Trump’s visit was a “huge moment” for our state.
“We’re just in a state of rebellion. We’ve seen what Britain did when they wanted change. There is just so much uncertainty. We’ve had so many scandals. We need to put the decision back in the hands of the people,” Dolan said.
“When he brought (Farage) in, he is saying that the little man matters. If Brexit can do it, so can we. Now I don’t mean that we should break away from the Union, but to form our own ideas again because people are brainwashed by the media.”
Trump supporter David Rushing added: “We have to make sure that we are getting a good deal. You know Trump is a businessman. You know who was the best governor we ever had? (Kirk) Fordice was a businessman. Not a politician. That’s real judgement.”