SHINGLETOWN, Calif. — Victor Castellanos says the presidential election feels a lot like this: a choice between a raw jalapeño and a snow-cone. Two radically disparate things he’s not really in the mood for.
“I can’t wait until it’s over,” Castellanos, 58, said as he washed the windows of his Dodge Ram outside the Shingletown Store. Ultimately, he said, he held his nose and cast his mail-in ballot for Joe Biden — a man he believes is too old to be seeking the presidency — because “I’m not going to vote for that narcissistic [expletive] Trump.”
In this Shasta County hamlet of 2,200 people named for the shingle-makers who supplied Gold Rush miners, enormous flags backing President Trump flap in the autumn wind all along Highway 44.
Like vast swaths of rural California, this is Republican country. But in these final days before the election, voters on both sides of the aisle in the old logging towns of Northern California and flat farmlands of the Central Valley seem to agree: They want the campaign, and the constant partisan bickering that has infiltrated all aspects of life, to end. […]
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