I live in a white working class American town, and I know that Roseanne is wrong – we don’t all support Trump

Residents of the former steel town in Colorado where I live are not as easily stereotyped as the angry white working class voters that so much of the media portrays

Roseanne Barr, the comedian who has been called a working class hero and who sought the Green Party’s nomination for president in 2012 (and lost to Jill Stein), is back.

Her long-running eponymous show is two episodes into a reboot, and Barr is already is stirring up even more controversy than she did holding her crotch singing the National Anthem in 1990 or stating that she would run for prime minister of Israel.

As Roseanne Conner, the lightly fictionalised version of herself in the reboot, she has switched allegiances both on set and off – as a Donald Trump supporter.

“Thank you, Roseanne, very much appreciated,” President Trump tweeted in the summer of 2016 during his campaign after she told the Hollywood Reporter, “I think we would be so lucky if Trump won.” Barr got her wish, and thinks that everyone, on her show and off, shares her – and Trump’s – worldview.

I know the fictional town of Lanford, Illinois. It’s where Roseanne and Dan Conner, their now-grown kids and – who can believe it – their grandkids still live in their modest brick house, 30 years after the original run of Roseanne debuted.

Not that much has changed: a resurrected Dan still escapes to his shop with his tools and his fridge of beer, Roseanne and her sister Jackie still fight. But, 20 years later, it’s over a lot more than whether to support daughter Becky’s move away from home or even where Roseanne will find work when she’s laid off.

It’s 2018, so they fight about one thing: Trump.

I know Lanford because I live in it. But because this is real life and not TV, residents of Pueblo, Colorado, a former steel town in the southern part of the state where I live and work as a freelance writer, are not as easily stereotyped as the angry white working class voters that so much of the media portrayed during and after the election.

I arrived five years ago with my own stereotypes: that people in a much more conservative small town whose factories and plants had long closed – Pueblo is a small city of 100,000 but feels much smaller – would be similar to the depictions on shows such as Roseanne, or that it would be like the stories that occasionally ran about life in cities under the radar where main streets were shuttered and many had moved away.

But Pueblo surprised me.

“If he gets elected, we’re going to see protests in the streets like we did during Vietnam,” said one woman in her sixties, a lifelong Pueblo resident, as she held up an “I’m For Her” sign at a neighbourhood precinct meeting when the group was deciding between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as the election got under way.

“I’ve always voted Republican, but not this time,” the owner of an auto-body shop told me. He said Trump’s views on immigration could hurt both his business and his family.

And there was the 20-year-old community college student who, along with his mother – a lesbian who lived and worked in the community with her wife – planned to vote Democrat although he knew that his Republican grandparents would disapprove.

“I love my grandparents,” he told me. “They’ve always been there for me and my mother. But they don’t understand how I like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah. They’ve got Fox News on all the time, and it’s getting to where I can barely stand it.”

Pueblo is a traditionally Democratic blue-collar union town once dominated by the now empty hulking steel mill, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Like similar company towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and New Hampshire, it voted Republican in the 2018 election. But what wasn’t reported – possibly because it would muddy the media narrative – is that Pueblo County, like other similar counties, only very narrowly, by just thousands of votes in fact, voted for Trump.

Pueblo is a town trying to survive, despite economic hardship. That means that voters here put trust in people they know, even if they don’t share the same political affiliation. Although they might be Republican, they could still vote for a candidate for state or local office who is a Democrat because they know that person’s family or worked alongside their parents.

“Fighting for Pueblo: Vote For Daneya Esgar,” read the signs all over town during State House Representative Esgar’s re-election campaign in 2014. A Democrat and openly gay legislator and granddaughter of steel mill workers, she ran unopposed. In 2018, she’s planning another run in this just-turned Republican county.

That’s the truth of life in so-called Trump Country. Towns like Lanford are a lot different now than they were back when Roseanne debuted in 1988. In 1982, the collapse of the steel industry meant that Pueblo, a city defined by the steel mill, had to look to other opportunities for growth – and for hope.

Thirty-six years later, the mill sits largely empty, and local economic groups and initiatives continue to bring new businesses to the city. As much as steel means to the city’s history, its residents have had to change with the times. And for many – close to as many who voted for Trump voted for Hillary Clinton – that means that they reject the bigotry, racism, anti-immigration and misogyny that he represents.

“Home of the Heroes” reads the sign on the side of Interstate 25 as you exit into Pueblo, referring to the number of Medal of Honor recipients who received the highest military medal awarded by Congress. It’s a sign of pride, history and progress. Trump wouldn’t be welcome here, and if he showed up there would be protest in the streets, not the warm welcome predicted by Barr.