I managed to find one person in Coos County, New Hampshire, who would admit to voting for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary and Donald Trump in the general. Don Couture, 79, is a Berlin native who spent most of his career as a salaried worker at the town’s long-gone Converse plant. “I like pretty much everything about Bernie and will support him in the primary again,” said Couture, who registered as an independent in 2016 after a lifetime of voting Democratic. “People should work, not expect handouts, but I think everybody should have Medicare. The drug companies have gone berserk, making money hand over fist—what about this guy who raised the price of that drug a thousand percent? That’s ripping off the American people. When Bernie says something, he means it. He reminds me of Ross Perot.”

Sanders, Trump, Perot—wildly different politicians who shared an outsider’s sensibility and appeal. It was Sanders’s outsider status, his demands to tear down a rigged and unequal system, that delivered New Hampshire so decisively to his campaign four years ago against Hillary Clinton. That same message will likely deliver the state to him again, even against a full slate of rivals. If New Hampshire was the first great proving ground of Sanders’s campaign in 2016—the moment when he demonstrated he was more than a protest candidate and capable of slaying the establishment dragon—this time it’s the key test of a strategy to shorten the competitive primary. The campaign has for months been pressing its advantage in community contacts and issue expertise, deploying an army of volunteers and surrogates to deliver its message directly to the state’s politically unpredictable, overwhelmingly white population. The Sanders operation’s network of grassroots allies gives it an edge everywhere but perhaps especially in places like Coos County, which has recently seen great socioeconomic tumult and political drift.

If people outside of New Hampshire know anything about Coos, it’s the quaint quadrennial story of the first “midnight votes” cast during the presidential primary by the residents of the far northern village of Dixville Notch. For much of the last century, the region fit the stereotype of the wholesome Rockwellian New England democracy. Coos (pronounced Koh-oz) was once the prosperous center of the U.S. paper industry. Nestled inside the White Mountain range, it was home to several large mills that produced much of the nation’s newsprint and cardboard and provided union jobs for life to generations of French-Canadian immigrants and their descendants. A streetcar connected the red-brick downtowns of Berlin and Gorham, busy with shops, theaters, and restaurants. In the valleys, small farmers built a thriving local dairy industry.

The further this world recedes into the past, the harder it is to believe it ever existed. But the old-timers can testify that this fairy-tale of stakeholder capitalism in paradise was real enough. A recent headline of The Berlin Sun solemnly announced the death at age 94 of James C. Wemyss, whose family owned and operated the Groveton Paper Company for 60 years. My interview with the paper’s editor was interrupted when an elderly man stopped by to pick up a dozen copies. “I know a lot of people who will want to read this,” he said. “James Wemyss and his family did a lot for the community. When I was a boy, if somebody needed some food, or a handout, they went and saw Mrs. Wemyss. If you needed a Christmas tree, just go to their land and cut it down.”

When the mills were strong, so was the Paperworkers Union. Coos County was as solidly Democratic as any county in New Hampshire. “When I was growing up, my grandparents, who emigrated from Quebec, hung a five-by-seven picture of FDR in the living room,” said Paul Grenier, Berlin’s 64-year-old mayor. “The Democratic Party was revered here. The GOP was looked on as the snotty rich party.”