Republican president-elect Donald Trump’s momentous election victory Tuesday has already mustered conflicting feelings of confidence and uncertainty across the nation and in Durango.
His triumph over Democrat Kamala Harris caught Durango Democrats off guard, sent fear rippling through the immigrant community and spun dollar signs in investors’ eyes across the country, according to area representatives and experts.
La Plata County Democratic Party Chair Anne Markward said Trump’s triumph took her completely by surprise. Democrats racked up more votes in every local race, but flailed in the national elections.
She said door-knocking efforts across La Plata County paid off in local elections; volunteers emphasized child care and affordable or workforce housing needs and women’s rights issues.
But she has no idea how Harris’ national campaign flopped so hard.
La Plata County Republicans had the opposite results of their Democratic opponents. They didn’t pick up any local offices, but the party won the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.
La Plata County Republican Party Chair Dave Peters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On the campaign trail, Trump returned to his roots with promises of mass deportations of immigrants and tax cuts and reductions for corporations and individuals alike.
Stocks soared to record highs this week after Trump’s and the Republican Party’s sweeping victories in the presidential and congressional races, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the Nasdaq Data Link closing at record highs Wednesday and continuing their climb Thursday.
A positive market outcome would likely have occurred regardless if Trump or Harris were elected to be the 47th president of the United States, said Bill Clements, a financial adviser with Legacy Financial Advisors in Durango. Investors hate nothing more than uncertainty, and a clear victor in the presidential race erases doubt.
He said Republicans’ overwhelming victory in not only the presidency but the U.S. Congress has further encouraged investors’ present bullishness in the market.
Postelection years tend to be good for the stock market “no matter how you shuffle the deck,” he said. Whether the federal government has a stronger Democratic or Republican presence or it’s fairly mixed among both parties, markets rise on average between 8% and 13%.
Typically, Democratic offices tend to raise markets by 8% while Republican offices raise markets by 11%.
“Under Trump, it’s presumed that we’ll see an easing in our taxes, both corporate and individual, whereas with the Democrats, it was really assumed that we would see higher corporate taxes,” he said. “If the parties had been able to achieve their agendas, certainly a Trump win is better for lower taxes, which typically means better markets.”
Clements said most of his clients didn’t see a reduction in their taxes during Trump’s first term in the White House, although Trump did make major changes to the tax landscape, one of them being a “tremendously simplified” tax return in doubling standard tax exemptions and removing a number of tax deductions.
“We would expect more of that simplification of our tax code, streamlining laws and regulations that are very good for business,” he said. “In that sense, Trump and his administration, we expect to be very promising.”
The stock market, however, reaches record highs all the time. Often, what follows is market volatility. He said investors would do well to diversify their portfolios because while investment opportunities have presented themselves this week and likely for some time to come, volatility is sure to follow as new political policies are set into place.
While short- to mid-term confidence in the stock market has surged, uncertainty is already setting in among Durango’s immigrant community, which contributes significantly to Durango’s local workforce, particularly in the tourism and service industries, said Enrique Orozco, co-executive director of Compañeros: Four Corners Immigrant Resource Center.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2022 census, foreign-born people make up about 1.9% of Durango’s population, or 357 residents. But the census doesn’t account for households of immigrants who decline to take the census, which many do decline, Orozco said.
He said fear and anxiety have gripped Durango’s immigrant community after Trump’s victory.
On the campaign trail, Trump promised repeatedly he would implement the largest deportation operation in United States history.
Orozco said based on Trump’s track record during his first term, which resulted in Durango having the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in Colorado and family separations, Compañeros and its clients believe the president-elect.
“Our experience was that anyone that was brown and looked like they were from Latin America was … getting stopped,” he said. “We have examples of Native American students at Fort Lewis (College) who were stopped by ICE because they thought they were of Latin American origin.”
Compañeros’ phone lines have been tied up and WhatsApp groups are bloated with messages from clients asking what to do.
“We do have a lot of mixed-status families where the kids are documented U.S. citizens because they were born here, and the parents may not still have documentation,” he said.
He said Compañeros is prioritizing client cases that can be processed faster than others, as well as the most severe cases, such as those that involve asylum-seekers who fled dangerous conditions in their homelands.
An emergency response line for reporting ICE activity is also being established.
Contrary to Trump’s claims President Joe Biden and Harris, his vice president, have allowed immigrants to illegally enter the country in droves, Orozco said Biden’s immigration policies were detrimental to the immigration community.
While Biden didn’t push for tracking down immigrant families, he did expand ICE’s budget by 15% and continued building the wall across the U.S.-Mexico border started by Trump, Orozco said.
“The messaging that the Biden administration gave to the immigrant community was one of safety and ally-ship, but that was very different than what they were doing behind the scenes,” he said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
