In my Associated Press days in Dallas, I helped cover Texas developments in President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

Those stories ranged from analyzing the grassroots war for popular votes in the red state to highlighting a rare Lone Star county that split on Bush-Gore in 2000. Yes, I tackled religion-related angles, too, exploring "How would Jesus vote?" and explaining the political appeal of a Bush speech to the Knights of Columbus.

But one of my most memorable Bush-related pieces involved a furor over the president's "hometown paper" endorsing Democratic challenger John Kerry:

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — Signs at the bank, the cafe and the Bottlinger Grain bins all declare Crawford – the proud home of the president’s ranch – as “Bush Country.”

So when the Lone Star Iconoclast, a tiny weekly that bills itself as Bush’s hometown paper, endorsed Democrat John Kerry, there was hell to pay.

Local businesses pulled their ads and banned the paper from their stores.

“We felt a little betrayed,” said Larry Nelson, manager of the Crawford Country Style, a downtown shop that sells “Luvya Dubya” trinkets and other Bush memorabilia.

Most folks in Crawford (pop. 705) wholeheartedly support the re-election of the man whose “Western White House” made their speck on the map famous. Eighty-two percent voted for President Bush in 2000.

The paper’s publisher, W. Leon Smith, said he never expected such a hostile response. He knew “a person or two might pull an ad, that we might lose a subscriber or two.”

“But this has turned a little more vicious,” said Smith, 51, wearing a decade-old knit tie and ink pens in his white shirt pocket.

Twelve years later, as normally reliable Republican editorial pages backed Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves, media organizations ranging from NPR to Time to Vanity Fair all asked the same basic question: Do newspaper endorsements even matter anymore?

Short answer, based on Donald Trump's stunning victory on Nov. 8: Nope. Nada. Not at all.

But as the New York Times reported this week, endorsements definitely mattered in certain locales — just not in the way that journalists who wrote pro-Clinton editorials might have hoped. (That old editor in Crawford might have warned them.)

Here in my home state of Oklahoma, the Times focused on the backlash over the Enid News & Eagle — founded in 1893 — endorsing a Democratic for president for the first time in its modern history.