Ruairí Arrieta-Kenna is an editorial intern at Politico Magazine.

On Sunday, October 16, the residents of St. Joseph, a fairly ordinary town of 75,000 in northwestern Missouri, awoke to discover that their local, family-owned newspaper had made history, in a manner of speaking. That day the St. Joseph News-Press became only the second newspaper in the nation to endorse Donald Trump, writing that the GOP candidate “represents something different for a broad swath of America that is serious about wanting a less intrusive government, a more robust economic recovery and leadership that protects our interests around the world.”

David Bradley, the paper's editor and publisher, his nephew Brian Bradley, and Dennis Ellsworth, the executive editor, made the decision to endorse together. But they say they didn’t realize at the time how unusual an act it was. “The national attention is the one thing I really wasn’t expecting,” Ellsworth told Politico. “Maybe I was a little naive. We didn’t actually see what others were doing. I think when I sat down to write the editorial on behalf of the family, I was on the internet and kind of looking around and realized that we might be the only one.”


Election year 2016 has been a radically unusual moment in the staid, old-fashioned world of newspaper endorsements. Big newspapers have taken unprecedented steps like "un-endorsing" Trump (a totally new thing in newspaper history); even USA Today has stepped out of its usual neutral lane to tell people that under no circumstances should readers vote for Donald Trump as president. As of this writing, Clinton has more than 200 endorsements from daily and weekly newspapers in the United States. A dozen or so papers have endorsed not-Trump, and one endorsed not-Clinton, but a striking 38 papers have chosen to endorse no one in this presidential election.

So far the number of papers that have endorsed Donald Trump—including the St. Joseph News-Press—stands at six. This, too, is a dramatic departure from the past. Newspapers have been endorsing presidential candidates for more than 100 years, and for the past 30, they’ve been pretty uninteresting. Across the country, right-leaning papers have reliably—and uncontroversially—endorsed Republican candidates while left-leaning ones have endorsed Democrats. In 2012, newspapers split roughly evenly between Obama and Romney. It has been so predictable a practice that a Pew Research Center study found that 7 in 10 Americans said their local newspaper’s endorsement had no impact on their vote for president in 2008. A 2011 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggested that newspaper endorsements have such trivial impact, precisely because they are so predictable.

Not this year.

Waxahachie Daily Light newsroom | Jonny Miller for POLITICO

Politico contacted every American paper known to have endorsed the Republican candidate. Apart from the St. Joseph News-Press, they are the Santa Barbara News-Press, the Waxahachie Daily Light in a suburb of Dallas, the Times-Gazette in Hillsboro, Ohio, and most recently, the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Review-Journal, the only major newspaper in the nation to come out for Trump. On Sunday, the Antelope Valley Press, a small family-owned daily newspaper in Palmdale, California, with a circulation of about 20,000, also published an endorsement of Trump, albeit with no accompanying explanation.

In a year when traditionally right-leaning newspapers have eschewed Trump on the basis of his erratic temperament, his demagogic behavior, his ignorance or his offensiveness, these six publications embrace Trump for his outsider status, his business leadership, his steadfastness on immigration and most of all, his representation of a presidency very, very different than that of the past eight years. To them, endorsing Trump when it seems like the entire media universe is arrayed against them, feels like the brave, responsible thing a genuinely independent local newspaper should do.

“I’m not afraid to be [a] maverick in the herd,” said David Bradley in a phone conversation from his office in St. Joseph. “I guess people aren’t willing to take a stand anymore as much as they have in the past. In this corporate, politically correct world, people are afraid to make enemies.”

The fallout hasn’t been easy, but it hasn’t been extreme, either. Editors and reporters at the Arizona Republic received numerous death threats after the newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton. That hasn’t happened in St. Joseph. “We’ve gotten a lot of people who are disgusted with us,” Bradley says. Ellsworth, who actually penned the editorial, said he’s had a few surprise visitors to the newsroom recently, including one woman who said she “had a couple of books she wanted me to read about Trump because she thought we’d missed something.” Even so, Ellsworth says, “I think we would have gotten just as much pushback in this part of the world if we’d endorsed the other side. About half of all the phone calls and email reactions we’ve been receiving have been supportive.”

Ellsworth says of the editorial’s local critics, “But these are really good people. These are people who consider this newspaper their newspaper. We’re so proud of that. That’s the way we want people to think about the newspaper, so we understand when we’ve caused them distress.”

Bradley adds: “We’ve had a small number of cancellations, and I think a lot of them will come back. They usually do. After they’re mad about something, that’s how they express their displeasure.”

Bradley, whose family has owned the newspaper for four generations, describes St. Joseph as, “a very stable, pretty conservative community of about 75,000. We’re very friendly, Midwestern town with a good work ethic. …. I think [the endorsement] reflects a good portion of the community, but not all of it, of course. We’ve endorsed Democrats and Republicans, but we’ve endorsed, in recent years, more Republicans than Democrats. We’ve endorsed both. It’s not just a straight party-line newspaper.”

Most of the editors and publishers of these papers said they were as surprised as David Bradley and Dennis Ellsworth were that they didn’t have more company in endorsing Trump. Scott Brooks, publisher of the Waxahachie Daily Light, told me that Trump’s scarcity of newspaper endorsements speaks either to an impending landslide loss or to a truly “silent majority that will reveal itself on Election Day.” If that happens, it would be a historical oddity: Only three times from 1972 to 2008 did the presidential candidate with fewer daily newspaper endorsements win the election.

***

The first newspaper to come out for Trump was also the most mysterious. On October 7, the Santa Barbara News-Press, the only daily newspaper in Santa Barbara County, California, published a list of endorsements for the upcoming November 8 ballot. At the top of the list was: “President: Donald J. Trump.” There was no editorial attached. No explanation. It was simply a declaration that the paper’s preferred presidential candidate is Donald Trump just as its preferred Senate candidate is the Democrat Loretta Sanchez.

But the endorsement of Trump should not have come as too much of a surprise. The California newspaper, circulation 45,000, was one of four newspapers that endorsed Donald Trump during the Republican primary—the others being the New York Observer (a weekly owned by Trump’s son-in-law), the New York Post and National Enquirer (a tabloid that has had a cozy relationship with the billionaire celebrity for quite a while).

Nor was anyone who knew the history of the paper shocked by the Trump endorsement. That’s because its owner is Wendy McCaw, a reclusive libertarian who has become notorious for her involvement in the paper’s editorial affairs. The Santa Barbara News-Press last made national news 10 years ago when five editors and a popular columnist resigned, pointing to irresponsible influence over the paper’s news and editorial content by McCaw. All six received the Society of Professional Journalists’ ‘Ethics in Journalism Award’. Since McCaw purchased the newspaper for $100 million from the New York Times in 2000, several publishers and editors either resigned or had been fired over differences with the new owner. A newsroom, which once had a staff of more than 200 now has just over 20.

McCaw declined to speak with Politico for this story, and Tyler Sam, maker of the documentary Citizen McCaw, told me, “She’s one of Santa Barbara’s most private people. She just generally has decided that she is going to live her life her way and not engage.”

In 2007, Wendy McCaw, left, sits inside a car outside a court building in Santa Barbara, where she testified that concerns about biased reporting, not union activity in the newsroom, led to the firing of two reporters. | AP Photo

McCaw, like Trump, has a penchant for threatening legal action against her opponents. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 that McCaw threatened a Santa Barbara hair salon with a lawsuit over its display of an anti-McCaw sign, she sued a magazine for publishing an article critical of her newspaper’s management, and she fought the California Coastal Commission over allowing public beach access near her estate. After rejecting her claim that a former editor violated his employee contract by speaking about her newsroom influence, an arbitrator said, “Mrs. McCaw is capable of great vindictiveness and appears to relish the opportunity to wield her considerable wealth and power in furtherance of what she believes to be righteous causes.”

Sam went on to say, “There is no question Wendy is behind the endorsement. There is no ongoing dialogue with the community, no effort to solicit other points of view. So I’m sure that it’s her point of view. It would deny 20-something years of history if it were somebody else’s point of view.” He added, “Unlike most journalistic organizations, the News-Press is a monarchy—or a dictatorship—run by Wendy McCaw.”

McCaw—who is also vegetarian and environmentalist—is seemingly proud of her editorial activism. She opposes labor unions and a mandatory minimum wage, and she describes herself as “a staunch defender of wildlife preservation and animal welfare.” One of the newspaper’s earliest editorials since her takeover, published around Thanksgiving that year, was an objection to turkey dinners, claiming that the newspaper could not stand by “a tradition that involves the death of an unwilling participant.”

Last Wednesday, October 19, the Santa Barbara News-Press did offer an editorial justifying its endorsement. Titled, ‘When a newspaper becomes the news,’ the editorial asserts: “Endorsements are not a popularity contest, and while it would be safe to endorse a locally popular candidate in an overwhelmingly Democratic-leaning county, the News-Press believes our role as the only daily newspaper in Santa Barbara County is to challenge those in power, regardless of party affiliation, who are taking the country from prosperity to dependency.”

The article concluded defiantly: “Haven't we had enough of a failed administration? We think so and we believe that, given the opportunity, Mr. Trump has a fighting chance to make America great again.”

“Santa Barbara is a lovely, coastal community with a very rich cultural life and a very diverse population,” says Tyler Sam, a longtime resident, “so it’s sort of a cloudy day when Wendy McCaw gets all this publicity for Santa Barbara—but we’re used to her acting that way.”

***

On Sunday, October 16, the Waxahachie Daily Light, with a circulation of about 5,000, came out with its Trump endorsement. “It wasn’t a very difficult decision—at least the way we see things—to come out and endorse Donald Trump,” says Publisher Scott Brooks, describing Waxahachie, with a population of about 30,000, as a very conservative town. “I am surprised [that there are so few other newspaper endorsements of Trump], but it doesn’t impact me or us. There’s still time for other newspapers to endorse candidates, and there will be some who don’t endorse simply because they don’t want to deal with the outcome, or reaction, or response to their endorsement."

Waxahachie, Texas | Jonny Miller for POLITICO

“The unique part of a community newspaper like us,” Brooks says, “is that we’re intimately connected to our community. We’re part of the fabric, and what we write and what we say impacts people. People aren’t just indifferent about it. Whether it’s my column or other columns that we write, we get a lot of responses, a lot of feedback, a lot of people stopping us in the grocery store.”

This is not the kind of decision casually ignored by most neighbors. “I would say that it wouldn’t surprise me if 70 percent of our community is at least aware of our endorsement,” Brooks adds, noting that the overwhelming reaction from residents has been supportive. “That being said,” he declares, “those who disagree are far more loud, far more angry, and far more willing to express their views about their disagreement than the 80 [percent] or 85 percent of those who agree.”

With regard to the recent controversies swirling around Trump’s candidacy, Brooks offers this explanation: “We’re putting Trump’s alleged or perceived indiscretions aside and saying, ‘Can somebody who’s not fettered with a political system in his background, who isn’t necessarily tied to any party, actually be good for our country?’ And we happen to believe that it can be.”

***

At the Times-Gazette, a small daily in Hillsboro, Ohio, with a circulation of just over 4,000, the decision to endorse Trump was unanimous. Publisher Gary Abernathy and Assistant Editor Jeff Gilliland told Politico that all four newsroom employees plus the ad sales manager met and made the decision.

On October 21, following six paragraphs of an endorsement for a local office and four paragraphs of an endorsement for a ballot initiative, the presidential endorsement came about halfway down the editorial in the form of two sentences: “Despite his obvious flaws as a candidate, Donald Trump best represents the drastic shakeup that Washington needs, and best reflects the conservative fiscal and social issue values that are important to the people of southern Ohio. His focus on securing America’s borders and defeating radical Islamic terrorism is the kind of decisive attitude needed in the White House.”

Gilliland noted that the paper’s endorsement for Trump has gotten little attention or reaction from locals, which is what he had expected. He told me, “the only way we would have gotten a lot of feedback is if we’d endorsed the other way.”

“We historically do endorse for the general election, and this year was no different,” says Abernathy. “Frankly, the region we’re in is one of Donald Trump’s stronger areas. It’s very Republican. If you were to drive around Highland County, you’d see a plethora of Trump signs.”

When asked whether he is surprised that so few other newspapers have endorsed Trump, Gilliland responded matter of factly, “No.”

***

Until this past weekend, the total circulation of all the papers that had endorsed Trump was about 100,000. That number tripled on Sunday morning, when the Las Vegas Review-Journal, with a circulation of about 200,000, became the largest American newspaper to endorse Donald Trump. The endorsement came just as President Barack Obama arrived in Las Vegas to stump for Hillary Clinton.

John Kerr, the paper’s editorials editor, wrote in the endorsement, “We are already distressingly familiar with the Clinton way, which involves turning public service into an orgy of influence peddling and entitlement designed to line their own pockets. … Mr. Trump represents neither the danger his critics claim nor the magic elixir many of his supporters crave. But he promises to be a source of disruption and discomfort to the privileged, back-scratching political elites for whom the nation’s strength and solvency have become subservient to power’s pursuit and preservation.”

The endorsement was little surprise: Major GOP donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson bought the paper late in 2015, a move that provoked an exodus of staffers concerned about editorial independence. Publisher Craig Moon tells Politico, “Sheldon Adelson didn’t have any influence over this endorsement.” However, Moon does acknowledge that “Sheldon hired me as publisher, and our views are very similar politically.”

Regarding the lack of newspaper endorsements in papers other than his, Moon told me, “What other media outlets have done was never a consideration. If you look at most of the media outlets—newspapers, websites, cable news outlets, or TV outlets—most of those folks have taken it on as a task to make sure that Donald Trump does not get elected.”

As of midday Monday, Moon says about 140 people dropped their subscriptions to the newspaper, but he says the paper expected that. “We’ve had what we thought would have been predictable given whichever point of view we would have taken on the endorsement.”

But will Trump’s only major-market endorsement make a difference? While Adelson has put his thumb on the scales with his newspaper’s endorsement, he’s been personally reluctant to give as much money as he hinted at earlier in the campaign, reserving the vast majority of his donations for down-ballot candidates through a $20 million contribution to the Senate Leadership Fund and about the same amount to the Congressional Leadership Fund. While Nevada is an important swing state, it appears to be leaning toward Clinton, and the Las Vegas paper’s support of Trump is hardly likely to change the outcome.

Moon said that the reaction to the Review-Journal’s Facebook post of the endorsement “looks like the country.” “It’s very divided,” he says, “You’ve got some people who like it, some people who shared it, and some people who hate it. There’s a little bit of everything.”

Although newspapers nationally are overwhelmingly against Trump, these six Trump endorsements—and the hotly mixed reactions to them—show that in both small and large pockets of the country, Americans overall are still very much divided.

This story has been updated to include the endorsement of the Antelope Valley Press.