In 2012, voters across the region liked what they saw in Barack Obama. The president won the popular vote in 24 of the 25 towns in New London County in his bid for re-election, mirroring the support he got in Connecticut and across the country.

Four years later, four of those towns had had enough. In Ledyard, Montville, North Stonington and Salem, turnout went up, support for Democrats went down and Donald Trump won hundreds more votes in each town than both Mitt Romney in 2012 and Trump's rival in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

They're not alone — 40 other Connecticut towns flipped from Obama to Trump this year, and only about 10 flipped from Romney to Clinton.

On the whole, the state stayed blue. But the way voters in these four southeastern Connecticut swing towns behaved in the election — and the way they look — mirrors the parts of the country that helped Trump win.

In the national popular vote, Clinton won more votes than Trump but failed to draw in as many as Obama did. Nationwide, Clinton's inability to bring Obama supporters to the polls for her seems to be the driving factor in her loss of several swing states.

In Ledyard, Montville, North Stonington and Salem, voters felt both pushed toward the Republican nominee and pulled away from the Democratic one — but the push toward Trump was stronger. In the four towns combined, 1,770 more people supported Trump than voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.

In the same four towns, Clinton drew 1,065 fewer votes than Obama did in his 2012 re-election campaign.

Sitting in Herb's Country Deli on Route 32 in Montville on Thursday, a woman who gave only her middle name, Mae, said she and her husband both voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Mae has biracial nieces and nephews, she said, and thought a black president would "give them a better chance."

"I thought with some hope that he could make a difference," she said. "That he would put more into it."

Mae and her husband voted for Trump this year. She joined more than 4,000 people in Montville who did the same, including more than 1,000 who voted for Trump despite either not voting in Montville or voting for someone other than the Republican nominee in 2012.

She said that while her own life hasn't gotten harder in the last four years, her family hasn't seen the effects of the country's economic recovery. Property values have dropped, she said, and even while her husband works two jobs, they still struggle to pay for everything.

"I want to see this country booming," she said.

In many ways, the four New London County towns that flipped this year resemble the parts of America that flocked to Trump and helped him win the Electoral College vote.

All four towns are mostly white — and whiter than both the averages for New London County and Connecticut. In the U.S. as a whole, exit polls show white voters preferred Trump over Clinton by 21 percentage points.

The towns all are relatively rural, in a country where the 2016 electoral map showed rural areas leaned red and urban centers leaned blue.

In Montville, where the shift from Obama to Trump was largest, only 20.2 percent of people have a bachelor’s degree or higher — which is about two-thirds of the percentage in New London County and about half the percentage of people with a college degree in Connecticut.

Nationally, the Pew Research Center said more college graduates voted for Clinton, while those without a college degree backed Trump, and the gap between those two groups was the largest since 1980.

Ledyard, North Stonington and Salem buck this trend — more people in those places have bachelor's degrees or higher than the average for New London County.

North Stonington and Montville both have a higher percentage of people over the age of 65 than both the county and the state. Nationwide, people in that age group preferred Trump over Clinton by 8 percentage points.

Some of the economic concerns in parts of the country that swung toward Trump — loss of manufacturing jobs, higher unemployment, slower job growth and lower earnings since 2012 — also apply here.

Montville Town Council Chairman Joseph Jaskiewicz, who was the town's mayor between 2003 and 2011, knows well the struggles the town has faced. Almost a year ago, the company that owns the WestRock corrugated cardboard plant announced it was closing the plant because of decreasing demand for paper products. AES Thames, the former coal-fired power plant, closed in 2011 and was demolished in 2012. The town's grand list lost a big chunk of taxable income, cuts in state and federal education funding have hit the town's school budget and the town has been paying off a lawsuit settlement with Rand-Whitney Containerboard.

Jaskiewicz said he thinks people took their frustrations about the state budget and their higher tax bills straight to the top.

"They were blaming one guy," he said — President Obama.

Finishing a breakfast at Herb's, Montville resident Linda Heller was clear: the reason she voted for the man who promised to make America great wasn't because her life in Montville isn't great. She said she voted for Trump on behalf of Americans "who can't make ends meet."

"My concern is for the people of Connecticut and our country," she said.

Heller said she distrusts Clinton and never would have voted for her. But when she imagined people across the country who were jobless and hopeless, she saw in Trump someone who could fix it.

"I hope the president can unite this country ... and bring job security," she said.

Is she optimistic that he can?

"I have to be, yes," Heller said. "I don't want to live in negativity. ... I want to wake up and think that something better is going to happen for our country."

Beverly McNickle, a 35-year Montville resident who voted for Clinton, chimed in with a different brand of optimism.

"We're going to fight him," she said. "I have hope for my town, hope for my country."

McNickle said she was surprised that Trump won. While she doesn't begrudge her neighbors their votes for Trump, she said she can't explain why her town seems to feel so strongly that something needed to change.

"I couldn't believe it," she said. "It's a good town. I don't know why they did it."

Sitting behind the counter of the pawn shop he owns in a North Stonington shopping center, Republican Town Committee Chairman Brett Mastroianni also puzzled over what pushed his town to flip.

Trump won in North Stonington by almost 9 percent over Clinton, and he drew more than 300 more votes than Romney in a town with a population of just a little more than 5,000.

Support for Clinton was down by nearly 100 votes compared with 2012 support for Obama.

Mastroianni said many of his customers came in with concerns about Democratic attempts to change the permitting process for those who wanted to buy a rifle from the row of weapons on the wall across from him. Most despised the Clintons and anyone who associates with them, including Obama and Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

"It's those Democrats that were in control," Mastroianni said.

A customer in the store who voted for those Democrats declined to give her name, but said she is a real estate investor and is now worried what a Trump presidency will mean for property values.

"I thought things got better (under Obama)," she said, shaking her head.

Among voters in Connecticut, and in the U.S. popular vote, she was in the majority. But this year in rural North Stonington, a different mentality won out.

"It's the same thing that happened in the country," Mastroianni said. "Just on a smaller scale."

m.shanahan@theday.com