Hotchner is an entrepreneurial type. After a long career as a security camera installer in New York, he moved to Bangor after retirement to open a shop selling antiques and records. “It worked,” he says, “but not nearly as well as my Trump items.”
He cites fossil fuel and foreign policy as the reasons why he is voting for Trump, but it is the economic doomsday images Trump paints of the Democrats that really scare him. “That I have to give the money I earn to people in the city, who hold their hands for a lifetime? I find that incomprehensible.”
Hotchner approaches other election themes in a more pragmatic way. His ‘Made in America’ hats are made in China, because he can then keep the selling price lower. He considers the right to armor important, even if he does not have one himself. “Those T-shirts are selling really well.”
Hostility
When asked whether he himself knows people who vote democratically, Hotchner shakes a firm no. “I will not interfere with those people.” It’s an attitude that more people have here, note cafe owners Traci Mcginty and Leo Bongiorno. The two are some of the few Bangor residents who are registered as Democrats.
“We opened our cafe in July 2016. If we had known then that Trump would win, we probably never would have started,” says Traci. At the moment, things are going badly because of the corona virus, but it never was a storm before that either. Traci is convinced it has to do with their political background. “Some people refuse to have a beer with us.”
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