“The day of putting on a suit and tie at 6 in the morning and getting a clean cut shave and taking your briefcase to an office somewhere, it’s gone," said Blake Nash, 29, a Trump supporter whose mother was let go at the plant in 2006.
In Nash’s town of Lexington, near the Tennessee border, red, white and blue Trump signs sprout from streets studded with Baptist churches, the only banners of any presidential candidate in the area.
Nash, who has no health insurance and calls his university degree in health sciences worthless, recently applied for a job with a company that contracts work with Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp, but was rejected because he didn’t have the right training. With good jobs at home scarce, he works on contract in other states such as Texas.
Many farmers in Lauderdale County, the location of the International Paper plant, relied on the factory for their primary income, said Charlie Thompson, a farmer who worked there for 34 years and lost his job in 2014.
Thompson, 58, former president of the Lauderdale County Farmers Federation, estimates that about 15 percent of the sacked workers were farmers, further straining a county where the number of farms was already in decline.
“If you can equate signs in the yard with being popular, I would say probably Trump is a front runner around here,” said Thompson.
Still, a win is no sure thing.
At the Lucedale forum, Chris McDaniel, a Republican state senator in Mississippi and Cruz supporter, hammered at Trump’s inconsistency on conservative hot-button issues such as abortion.
“How sure and solid has Trump been? Just a few years ago, he was pro-choice,” McDaniel said, referring to a television interview Trump gave in 1999 when he said “I’m very pro-choice" and that he would not ban partial-birth abortions.
He has since said he is against abortion.