LATIMES.COM WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020A
were 45 or older. Although
Sanders has emerged as the
runaway favorite among
young voters, he has strug-
gled to win over the Demo-
cratic Party’s older, and
most reliable, constituents.
Sanders has tried to im-
prove his standing with old-
er voters, particularly by po-
sitioning himself as the
champion of Social Security.
But last week, Biden won the
backing of two-thirds of vot-
ers 45 to 64 and got nearly
80% of those 65 and older.
Together, the two groups ac-
counted for 66% of the voters
on Super Tuesday.
Sure enough, when the
polls in Missouri closed at 8
p.m. Eastern time, Biden
was swiftly called the winner
of the Show-Me State.
Whiplash from the
white working class
When Sanders mounted
a serious challenge to Clin-
ton for the Democratic
nomination four years ago,
he was boosted by support
from white working-class
voters. That demographic,
which sided decisively with
President Trump in 2016, has
been central to Sanders’
pitch this time that he is best
positioned to win the White
House.
But Tuesday’s results
signaled that Sanders may
not have such a firm grip on
those voters. In Missouri, he
narrowly won white voters
without a college degree in
2016, but this time, Biden
squeaked out an advantage
with that group, according
to preliminary exit polls.
The same goes for Michi-
gan, where Sanders notched
a strong performance in
2016 among working-class
whites, bolstered by his de-
nunciation of free-trade
deals that hammered the
state’s industrial economy.
But on Tuesday, exit polls
found Biden beating Sand-
ers among white voters with-
out a college degree by 5
points. The surveys also
found Biden with a 12-point
lead among voters in union
households.
Feeling the Bern
no more
Compounding the sting
of Sanders’ bad night was
that he had a decidedly lack-
luster showing in states that
had once enthusiastically
embraced him.
Michigan was the high-
est-profile reversal for Sand-
ers, but the later contests of
the evening took place in
states where Sanders had
racked up enormous wins
over Clinton in 2016. He won
North Dakota by nearly 40
percentage points four years
ago, Idaho by almost 60 and
Washington by 45.
For most of Tuesday
night, those races remained
too close to call, a sign that
Sanders’ once-commanding
advantage had evaporated.
But Idaho officially moved
out of his column when the
Associated Press called the
state for Biden late in the
evening.
Campaign, meet
coronavirus
It’s fair to say Tuesday’s
contests were a bit over-
shadowed by the growing
alarm over the spread of the
novel coronavirus in the
United States and across
the globe.
The specter of the virus
has hovered around the
campaign for days, but it di-
rectly affected the stump on
Tuesday, after Sanders and
Biden both canceled eve-
ning rallies in Cleveland, cit-
ing guidance from public
health officials there.
Meanwhile, in Washing-
ton state, which has been
among the hardest-hit by
coronavirus, the all mail-in
ballot election eliminated
the need for large gatherings
at polling places.
Officials there suggested
another level of caution, urg-
ing voters to use damp spon-
ges or cloths to seal the bal-
lot return envelopes. The
Washington secretary of
state tweeted a catchy slo-
gan: “Whether healthy or
sick, please don’t lick!”
Six
lessons
from six
diverse
states
[Takeaways,from A8]
ring up the end for mom-
and-pop businesses.
In fast-changing neigh-
borhoods in California’s ur-
ban enclaves, battles over
gentrification and commu-
nity identity have centered
on more bourgeois new-
comers: vegan restaurants
in Silver Lake, art galleries in
Boyle Heights, pricey new
apartment complexes in
South Los Angeles. In Cool,
the specter of gentrification
takes the form of a far-from-
hip retailer known for deals
like three-for-$5 boxes of
Cheez-Its. Residents worry
that a Dollar General would
create traffic gridlock in a
town so small its residents
brag that there is no need for
street lights.
“This is about preserving
rural America,” said resi-
dent Susan Yewell, 74. “We
feel vulnerable. We don’t
want big-box stores to come
in, because the beauty of the
place is more important to
us than buying some
cheaply built something.”
Another cause for con-
cern among Cool residents:
more than 200 proposed new
campsites at the adjacent
Auburn State Recreation
Area, which could bring tens
of thousands more people
traipsing through this ridge-
top El Dorado County town
every year, raising fears of a
catastrophic wildfire.
An hour’s drive north-
east of Sacramento, the un-
incorporated town —
named, according to local
lore, for an itinerant Gold
Rush-era preacher named
Peter Cool — is known
mostly for endurance com-
petitions like the Way Too
Cool 50K Endurance Run
and the Tevis Cup 100-mile
horse ride. A sign on the
edge of town tells visitors to
“Have a Cool day!”
This year, a small group
of local activists revived
a long-defunct community
group, the Cool-Pilot Hill
Advisory Committee, to dis-
cuss ways to fight the pro-
posed Dollar General and
campsites. The group had
been dormant for about two
decades — ever since it beat
down a plan for a major resi-
dential development. At a
meeting last month in the
Holiday Market grocery
store, Loomis pointed to a
mural depicting the nearby
American River, with gold
miners clutching pans, mod-
ern-day hikers and moun-
tain bikers.
“That’s us then and us
now,” she said. “I don’t see a
Dollar General!”
Dollar General antici-
pates making a final deci-
sion on whether to open a
store in Cool this spring, said
Mary Kathryn Colbert, a
company spokeswoman.
“Our customers are at
the center of all that we do,
and meeting customers’
needs is Dollar General’s top
priority when choosing store
locations,” Colbert said in an
email. A store in Cool would
employ six to 10 people.
As of November, there
were nearly 16,100 Dollar
General stores nationwide,
including about 200 in Cali-
fornia, Colbert said. In De-
cember, the company an-
nounced that it planned to
open 1,000 new stores in 2020.
“There’s a significantportion of the rural popula-
tion that see Dollar General
as a good thing,” said David
Procter, director of the Rural
Grocery Initiative at Kansas
State University. “The pro-
Dollar General people say
businesses in small towns
are closing all over the U.S.,
that these towns are literally
dying, and you have a busi-
ness that wants to come in
and wants to build and hire
people and pay taxes and
would be a sign of growth for
your town, and why wouldn’t
you want that?”
Most towns that have
tried to put up a fight have
been unsuccessful, he said.
El Dorado County Super-
visor Lori Parlin said she be-
lieves Dollar General’s
“business model is to use
their mass purchasing
power to undercut the prices
of competitors, which makes
it difficult for mom-and-pop
stores to compete.”
When she was running for
office in 2018, Parlin touted
her support of residents who
successfully fought a pro-
posed Dollar General in un-
incorporated Georgetown, a
Gold Rush hamlet 12 miles
east of Cool. That entire
town is a California historic
landmark, a designation
that helped locals who sued
the developer and county,
saying the store would de-
stroy the character of
Georgetown.But in Cool, residents
have not been able to find a
policy that could be used to
stop the project, which
would be built on property
zoned for commercial devel-
opment, Parlin said.
At the meeting of the
Cool-Pilot Hill Advisory
Committee, Aloha Adams,
82, urged attendees to con-
tact county officials and re-
lay concerns about issues
like traffic congestion, an
overtaxing of the town’s wa-
ter supply and competition
with local businesses.
“We have to get past ‘We
don’t want the damn thing’
and give them the reasons,”
she said.
Adams attended a one-
room schoolhouse in Cool in
the 1940s. She cherishes
memories of those simpler
times, when the teacher
would take students outside
to pick wildflowers. Back
then, Cool didn’t even have a
stop sign.
At Cool Florist and Gifts,
the shelves were stacked
with Cool-themed tchotch-
kes, locally made salsas and
jams and T-shirts that
owner Rosie Borba, 73,
screen-printed herself.
Borba’s shop is across the
street from the site of the
proposed Dollar General,
which, she fears, would drive
her out of business.
She opened her store 20
years ago. She knows mostof her customers and has
provided free flower ar-
rangements to grieving fam-
ilies who couldn’t afford
them. Borba raised her two
children here, embracing
the slow, small-town lifestyle
alongside people who don’t
lock their doors and lean on
each other in good times and
bad. All that feels like it’s
slipping away, she said.
“It’s so different up here,”
Borba said. “It’s like life
should be.” Borba and oth-
ers say the ridge-top town’s
infrastructure cannot ac-
commodate a large influx of
people. They also worry
about a proposal by Califor-
nia State Parks and the
United States Bureau of
Reclamation to add up to
235 individual and five group
campsites to the Auburn
State Recreation Area.
Cool is seven miles east of
Auburn, population 14,000,
which lies across the recre-
ation area. The towns are
connected by two-lane High-
way 49, a slow, steep drive
with hairpin curves that
hang over the American
River canyon. That danger-
ous stretch and the two-lane
Highway 193 are Cool’s main
evacuation routes in case of
wildfire or other calamity.
The California Depart-
ment of Forestry and Fire
Protection has given much
of the Auburn State Recre-
ation Area, with its steepcanyons and rugged terrain,
its most extreme fire danger
rating. Cool residents say
more campsites would in-
crease the fire risk.
“We’re not antidevelop-
ment,” said Curt Kruger, a
member of the American
River Community Coalition,
a group of residents fighting
the project. “What we are op-
posed to are things that will
kill us.”
He ticked off recent
deadly wildfires: the Camp
fire in Paradise, the Tubbs
fire in Santa Rosa and the
Carr fire in Redding. “These
were once-in-a-generation
events, and they have all
happened in the last three
years,” he said. “More people
are living [in] and going into
forested areas, and that
equals more people at risk of
starting fires.”
In a statement, Califor-
nia State Parks said visita-
tion to the 30,000-acre
Auburn State Recreation
Area has increased by about
400% over the last three dec-
ades. The area currently has
36 campsites; the plan to add
more, which has not been fi-
nalized, is an attempt to
manage that growth.
State Parks and the Bu-
reau of Reclamation “under-
stand that some nearby
communities may have con-
cerns about wildfires, but it
is important to note that
most of the wildfires that
started in the recreation
area over the last several
decades were caused by fire-
works, illegal campfires or
other similar activities
away from developed camp-
grounds and day-use areas,”
the statement says.
Residents say that home
values have plummeted and
that insurers have raised
rates or canceled some
homeowner policies, citing
fire risk and proximity to
campsites. (In December,
California temporarily
banned insurers from drop-
ping policies in several wild-
fire-hit areas; El Dorado
County was not included.)
Lorna Dobrovolny, a former
State Parks employee who
lives in Cool, said the town is
feeling the strain of popula-
tion growth in nearby Sacra-
mento and its suburbs. In
2018, Sacramento had the
largest percentage gain in
population among Califor-
nia’s 10 biggest cities, with
1.5% growth, or 7,400 new
residents, according to state
figures.
For those urbanites,
Dobrovolny said, Cool and
the Auburn State Recre-
ation Area are an easy jaunt
to “the boonies” — and now
the boonies are getting too
crowded.
“You can’t invite more
people in until you do some-
thing to reduce the fire dan-
ger,” she said.
Back at Cool Florist and
Gifts, Borba said the town
could not handle a huge in-
crease in campers, who, she
said, probably wouldn’t help
the local economy because
they “bring their own stuff.”
Adding to the danger of a
possible fire or even a snake
bite at those new campsites,
she said, is the fact that Cool
has no hospital or urgent
care facility.
“Those are things we
need,” she said. “Not a Dollar
General.”RESIDENTS OF COOL worry their tiny town will be overwhelmed by a proposed Dollar General store, which they fear will hurt locally
owned businesses, and the possibility of more than 200 new campsites in the nearby Auburn State Recreation Area.Photographs byMyung J. ChunLos Angeles TimesResidents resist gentrification
LOCALS INCLUDING Lorna Dobrovolny have been fighting the proposed
campsites, which many fear could increase traffic and risk of fires in the region.LIMITED ACCESS to Cool, reached via winding, two-lane Highway 49 through
Auburn State Recreation Area, already presents a danger during fire season.[Cool, from A1]ELECTION 2020
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