A toast to Trump: Hope and change. Sound familiar?

In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, Yahoo News visited towns and cities across the country, speaking to voters who had supported Donald Trump in the election. As the shape of his administration emerged, we asked voters if they were happy with their choice and optimistic about the future. Here is some of what we found:

_____

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, N.M. — It is known as the land of eccentrics — a small desert town where people of all types come to get lost, sometimes on vacation, sometimes permanently.

Artists, retirees, veterans, New Agers and people simply looking to escape life as usual have long descended on Truth or Consequences, a tiny sunbaked enclave about two hours south of Albuquerque that has a reputation for embracing the unusual.

For proof, look no further than the name, which was adopted on a dare from a popular game show 57 years ago in a bid to boost tourism and attract nationwide publicity. More recently, it has gambled on what some here believe might be another risky endeavor, reinventing itself as the gateway to outer space. Just 30 miles outside of town is Spaceport America, an expensive state-owned facility that was designed to be a major hub of commercial spaceflight for those willing to pay big bucks to soar above the earth. But so far, there have been no rocket ships to orbit, and some have begun to wonder if there ever will be.

Now there’s one more thing this quirky town is known for: In the middle of this predominately Democratic and heavily Hispanic state, T or C, as the locals refer to it, is officially Trump country.

While Hillary Clinton won New Mexico by eight points in November, Donald Trump claimed significant pockets of support in rural counties in the central and eastern part of the state.

The New York billionaire carried towns like Roswell, the state’s fifth largest city and the purported site of a UFO crash in 1947. Weeks after Election Day, a large Trump sign still hung on Main Street alongside streetlights in the shape of aliens. Trump also won Portales, a dairy town teeming with college kids from Eastern New Mexico State University, where arriving visitors are greeted by a massive sign on the side of a building downtown declaring, “We Don’t Trust You Hillary.”

In Sierra County, home to T or C, Trump beat Clinton by 27 points — a surprise to some, considering that the town’s population of about 6,200 includes a number of migrants from Los Angeles, New York and Washington. But although they are people who have come here to get lost, they are also people who have grown tired of being forgotten by the rest of the country, people who saw Trump as a change agent for good in a political system they are skeptical of.

Slideshow: Scenes from the road in Donald Trump’s America >>>

Among them, Mark Theall, a 53-year-old native of the Boston suburbs who, as a union hardhat, helped build nuclear power plants before he gave it up to become a nomad. He tried living in San Francisco, then Phoenix, before winding up in T or C, a town that used to be teeming with retirees like him who wandered through to experience the city’s famous hot springs and ended up staying.

But the town Theall came to a decade or so ago is different than it used to be, ravaged in part by a drug and opioid epidemic that seems to grow worse by the day.

Sitting at Raymond’s Lounge, a dive bar just outside downtown where the jukebox played sad songs about dead-end towns full of heartache and empty dreams, Theall spoke of a city that sometimes felt like a real-life episode of “Breaking Bad.” The local paper was dominated by reports of drug arrests and overdoses, mostly from meth and heroin. He saw young people everywhere ravaged by addiction. “This used to be a retirement community, but the grandkids come here, the grandparents die off, and they take their money and invest in meth and drugs and this and that,” he said. “That’s what we are up against here.”

Among the many reasons Theall backed Trump was his pledge to combat the drug epidemic, a proposal that dated back to the early days of his unlikely campaign. The real estate mogul and former reality television star made the pitch as part of his plan to build a “big beautiful wall” along the U.S. border with Mexico — something Theall and others here support. “Not just because of illegals, but because of the cartels,” Theall said. “We are getting all the drugs and crime.”

But Trump also promised to make dealing with addiction a central plank of his presidency, something Theall expects him to deliver on. Among other things, the Republican candidate repeatedly pledged in the final weeks of his campaign to speed up FDA approval of abuse-deterring drugs and to offer new incentives to state and local officials to pursue what he described as a “more humane response to addiction,” including sentencing drug offenders to mandated treatment instead of simply throwing them in jail.

Beyond Trump’s vague promises to create jobs and improve the economy, he also won support here for his relentless focus on veterans, including his pledge to improve VA hospitals and help those returning from wars overseas get better access to mental health services, education and employment. Even here, where the cost of living is cheaper than in other parts of the state, many vets have struggled to make ends meet. “We should not have homeless veterans,” said Cynthia Brisbois, a 63-year-old retiree originally from California who backed Trump, in part, because of his support for vets. She came from a military family. “I really think (Trump) is going to do something about that. He has to.”

Theall, as much as he likes Trump, is not giving the president-elect a honeymoon period. As soon as Trump is sworn into office, Theall expects the businessman to get to work and deliver on what he promised. “It’s all politics. He’s not gonna be able to follow through with everything,” he allowed. But, “I want to see positive results in the first year. I think he needs to follow through. And I hope it comes sooner rather than later.”

Here in a town packed with people used to living off the beaten path, a little on the fringe of society, the folks at Raymond’s heaped praise on Trump for being someone who “couldn’t be bought,” for his bluntness in being willing to say and do things that other politicians wouldn’t — and hoped that he would stay that way. A billionaire with a penchant for gold leaf and finer things, who would likely never cross the threshold of a darkened bar like this, had emerged to be viewed as their unlikely champion.

“I think he gives Americans like us hope, hope that we had lost,” said Vanessa Robinson, a 42-year-old bartender who, by her telling, had never been “political” until Trump came along. She and her boyfriend twice made the two-hour drive to Albuquerque to hear Trump speak, including at a rally last May where anti-Trump protests turned violent. Trump, she said, was going to bring necessary “change” to Washington — though she also worried about the possibility that Washington might change him. “I think, I hope he’ll be OK,” she said.

A few feet away, Theall held up his drink and cheered the bar. “Hope and change,” he said of Trump. “Hope and change.”

Told that “hope and change” had been the way Americans had described Barack Obama as he prepared to take office eight years ago, Theall looked surprised. “Was it?” he said. “I didn’t know that.”