When I asked him to name his most important issue, the words had barely escaped my lips before Elders answered: “The economy.”

“It is terrible here,” he said.

Elders said that he counted himself lucky for having a decent job at a Michelin Tires facility down the street. But he noted that Laurens has suffered tremendously over the decade since he first entered the workforce.

“Most of your good-paying jobs, they’re in Greenville or Spartanburg,” he said. “We lost a lot of big businesses to overseas … We’re just stuck.”

Elders said he was put off by some of Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, but was unconcerned about whether the candidate is a genuine Christian believer.

“I got a big Christian background, and my mama, my daddy, my grandpa, and all of them are in the church,” Elders said. “You can look at his Christian views, or you can ask: Can this man actually get the job done?”