Lacey Township is white, middle class and overwhelmed with government regulation
Chuck Monjoy couldn't find a Donald Trump sign, so he made one.
He took a cardboard box, drew the word TRUMP with a heavy black felt-tip pen, then propped it up outside his commercial property on Route 9 in the Forked River section of Lacey Township.
The fact that he couldn't find a Trump sign struck him as unusual. Lacey is a large municipality in Ocean County, one of the reddest regions of New Jersey.
And in this election, Lacey was the second reddest of the red.
In New Jersey towns with more than 10,000 people, only nearby Lakewood had a greater percentage of voters (74.4) who pulled the lever for president-elect Donald Trump.
This was not surprising. Seventy-two percent of Lakewood, with its high population of very conservative Hasidic Jews, voted for Mitt Romney in the last election.
But while Lacey voters also went overwhelmingly for Trump (70.1 percent) they are not quite as historically red as Lakewood. In the last election, 59.1 percent voted for Romney.
So why couldn't Chuck Monjoy find a sign?
What happened in Lacey is very typical of the national results. Call it the stealth Trump support.
"Every year, people come and put campaign signs on my property. I get inundated with them," said Monjoy, 76, who owns Custom Auto Radiator and whose property is across the street from Caffrey's Tavern, one of the most popular restaurants in town.
"This year, I was hoping they'd come by with Trump signs, but nobody did," he said. "There wasn't an organized effort by anybody to put up Trump signs. There was no local effort for Trump."
True enough. In the days after Donald Trump was elected president, campaign signs for Republican Mayor Steven Kennis and Deputy Mayor Peter Curatolo still lined the streets of Lacey. The dearth of Trump signs, especially in light of the election results, was surprising.
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The underground Trump support that got unleashed on Election Day was only one way Lacey is a microcosm of the national election results. Millions of Americans who didn't want to be labeled as angry or scared racists, homophobes, xenophobes or misogynists but simply wanted change were quiet about their candidate of choice until the curtain was pulled on the voting booth. Hence, the stunned pollsters and pundits.
Lacey, like much of Trumpland, is 94 percent white and its median household income of $71,835 average for the state. Like many Ocean County towns, its population of people over age 65 (16 percent) is higher than the state average (14 percent). But like other places that voted for Trump, it's a place of great economic diversity.
In the 99-square-mile township of just fewer than 30,000 residents, there are yacht clubs and marinas along Barnegat Bay, surrounded by modern homes that sell north of $750,000. But interspersed within these lagoons and boating developments are square, tiny bungalows -- old beach houses now converted to year-rounders that can be bought for about $100,000 or less.
In those neighborhoods, the residual impact of Hurricane Sandy can still be seen. There are homes that are still vacant, under construction or in foreclosure.
One of those homes belonged to Nancy Wirtz, who voted for Trump because of the bureaucratic mess encountered with FEMA and state government after her house was damaged by the storm. She got an insufficient insurance payout, then had a state-approved contractor disappear with her money. Foreclosure followed.
"It is absolutely why (she voted for Trump)," she said. "I lost my home, I was foreclosed on, because I got screwed at every turn. We need some change."
George Kasimos, founder of Stop FEMA Now, also said a "Sandy effect" was seen in support for Trump along the coast. In Union Beach, for example, where 85 percent of the homes were damaged, Trump won 60.3 percent of the vote, compared to the 46.3 percent who voted Republican in 2012. Other storm-ravaged Raritan Bay-area towns that flipped from Democrat in the 2012 election to Republican this year were Atlantic Highlands, Highlands, Keansburg, Keyport, Old Bridge and Sayreville. In Ocean and Monmouth counties, traditionally red towns got redder, with Trump receiving up to 10 percent more votes than Romney did in 2012.
"People want to see this process streamlined," Kasimos said. "There's a lot of bitterness over the insurance fraud, the paperwork, the (new FEMA) flood maps. Four years after the storm, we still have people fighting the NFIP (FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program) carriers for fair settlements and we still have people out of their homes."
Kennis, the mayor, said Sandy frustrations played a role in the Lacey vote, but he felt the biggest factors were the economy and regulation.
"Between developers, builders and people who do home improvement work, much of our economy is real-estate based," he said. "But two-thirds of our town is in the Pinelands National Reserve, and east of the Parkway, we fall under CAFRA (the Coastal Area Facility Review Act, a 511-page piece of legislation that guides development and land use along the sensitive coastal areas of the Atlantic Ocean and Delaware Bay.)
"So I think when Donald Trump spoke about deregulation, it resonated here," Kennis said.
Like the industrial states of Ohio and Michigan that swung for Trump, Lacey is facing an economic hit with the looming closure of Exelon's Oyster Creek Generating Station, the oldest continuously operating nuclear power plant in the country.
"I think the closure of the plant had a lot to do with it (the election result). There is almost a Rust Belt element to it," said Amanda Devecka-Rinear, executive director of the New Jersey Organizing Project, which has pushed for better Sandy recovery response and better environmental protection of the shore and Barnegat Bay.
Exelon is closing the aging plant, which employs 700 people, in 2019, after a controversial agreement with the state in 2010 that allowed it to operate for another decade without building federally-mandated cooling towers.
"I think that's a big hit for the community," said Forked River Diner owner Rob Moody. "People are worried about the economic impact."
Moody said the pre-election talk in the diner was subdued.
"People were pretty low-key," he said. "It's a pretty Republican town, but not everybody was advertising their vote. I do remember one lady saying, 'Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I'm voting for Hillary.' "
Moody's diner is a classic stainless-steel railcar type, a sharp contrast to the new strip malls anchored by box stores along Route 9. But, just like the housing diversity, there is a wide swath of commercial properties. A new hardware store, a storefront palm reader. Chain auto parts stores and mom-and-pop suppliers like Monjoy.
"We're a middle-class town," Monjoy said. "All my neighbors are middle-class people. Teachers, mechanics, small business owners. I think Trump's promise to put America first again appealed to them."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.