Joe Wacha at the Howard County Fair in Cresco in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
AFTER EIGHT YEARS of displeasure with Barack Obama’s presidency, Carla Johnson was ready for a drastic change. The forty-five-year-old lab technician from Cresco, Iowa, fell for Donald Trump very early on in the 2016 primary season. She loved what she called his “take-no-shit” style, his conservative stances on gun control and immigration, his defense of traditional religion, and all that winning he promised to do on the economy. “I was a huge Trump supporter from the beginning,” she said. “Huge. I love the man. He was my first choice all the way through.”
A year-and-a-half into Trump’s presidency, Johnson was so pleased with Trump that she couldn’t envision not voting for him again in 2020. “It would have to be something catastrophic,” she said of what it would take for her to cast her ballot for somebody else. What’s remarkable about Johnson’s support for Trump is that not long before he came along, she had been a lifelong Democrat, and she had once voted for Barack Obama. It’s a vote she clearly regrets.
“When Obama first ran, he preached change, and it sounded fantastic,” Johnson told me in the summer of 2018, when we spoke near the county courthouse in downtown Cresco. “I bought into the hope and change, which is terrible because he didn’t do any of that.”
“Did he do any good?” I asked.
“No. I don’t like him—at all. I think he lied. I think he lied when he campaigned, and I have no time for lying. What did he bring us? Segregation.”
Johnson is so bitter that she now entertains the conspiracy theory, at times championed by Trump, that Obama was born in Kenya and thus was ineligible to run for president. “I believe that he honestly somewhat supported the Muslims and terrorist ways,” she said. “I don’t think he had the country’s best interests at heart.”
Johnson’s political evolution underscores several of this book’s core themes, including how thoroughly the disease of tribalism has spread through America’s body politic.
Howard County, Iowa, is the only county in America that voted for Obama by more than 20 points in 2012 and then for Trump by more than 20 points in 2016.1 I first traveled to Howard County in the summer of 2017 to find out what had prompted such a dramatic reversal. I spoke at great length and on multiple occasions with more than two-dozen voters. Not all of the Trump supporters I met were as harsh as Johnson in their criticism of Obama, nor were most as effusive in their praise of Trump. But even the more restrained assessments conveyed roughly the same sentiment. At the top of their list was a complaint about the Democratic Party’s abrupt leftward shift. It has alienated the culturally conservative Democrats who populate much of the rural Midwest. Perhaps that merely confirms the conventional wisdom. But the question I arrived with during a ten-day trip the following year was whether Howard County’s vote for the maverick Republican was a fit of pique or the sign of a permanent political shift.
My first stop was the Mighty Howard County Fair in Cresco, where I poked my head into the Moo Mobile malt truck to say hello to Joe Wacha. Like Johnson, Wacha had been a lifelong Democrat and an Obama voter before switching to Trump. At the fair the year before, Wacha told me his vote for Trump was prompted by the Democrats’ leftward drift and preoccupation with identity politics. “The reason I didn’t vote as a Democrat, and I am a registered Democrat, was I felt like they’re no longer the party they were thirty years ago,” he told me in 2017 as we strolled around the fairgrounds. Today’s Republican Party “is more like the way the Democratic Party was thirty or forty years ago,” Wacha, who is in his early sixties, added.
I was curious to know how Wacha was feeling a year and a half into Trump’s presidency. I had spent enough time around Wacha to know him to be kind, gracious, and unfailingly polite. So I half expected him to tell me that Trump’s boorish behavior was making him regret his vote. I was wrong. He felt no such regret. Wacha told me he was pleased with Trump’s performance thus far. In fact, the media’s and Democrats’ unflinching opposition to everything Trump was doing had only hardened his support for the president. And he told me he was planning to change his voter registration to Republican the following week.
Later that day, I sat down with Lee and Larry Walter and Ernie Martin, three elderly brothers who had instructed me to meet them at the Cresco Wildlife Club, an indoor shooting range inside the fair-ground’s main exhibition hall. For weeks prior to our interview, Ernie had peppered me with emails containing facts about Howard County that often started with “People have NO IDEA that …” or “Your readers will be surprised to know that …” The emails were meant to underscore how remote and disconnected this two-stoplight county really is. “We’re so behind here,” Lee and Ernie each told me separately, “that we don’t get the Today Show until tomorrow.”
Joe Wacha at the Howard County Fair in Cresco in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
Like most people in rural areas, Ernie and his brothers regarded their hometown’s cultural and geographic distance from America’s cities as a point of pride. This stands in contrast to the disdain with which Hillary Clinton seemed to regard rural places, depicting them as backward and out of step with the times. Ernie, Lee, and Larry had come to my attention on a previous visit when I walked past Lee’s home in Cresco and saw three billboard-sized pro-Trump, anti-Clinton signs displayed in his front yard. One of the signs simply read, “Lock the bitch up.” I had a feeling it wouldn’t be hard to get these guys to open up.
I asked them for their thoughts on why Howard County had swung so far from Obama to Trump. Lee said it was because Clinton had pledged to “take away all the guns and abolish the Second Amendment. Your readers should know that everyone here owns at least two ARs and dozens of shotguns and long guns and two handguns.”
All three brothers complained about the opposition Trump was receiving from the media, Democrats, and even some Republicans. “We didn’t vote for Obama, but after the election we supported Obama,” Ernie said. “I’m seventy-two. I’ve seen a lot of national elections. I’ve never seen one like this, with people upset, so upset they want to kill Trump for a year-and-a-half.”
Then Ernie slid into the familiar conservative refrain about voter fraud:
Hillary spent millions rigging that last election, we know that. There were all kinds of foreigners that voted in California. The dead voted in Chicago. Illegal foreigners voted in New York by the busload. Not only did they vote once, they voted two or three times. There are lots of precincts where they have gone through and checked and found out that they had more people vote than the people who live there.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
“I have read that in the Republican news,” Ernie responded. “And … ah … Rush Limbaugh talked about it. He’s the only news source we can trust.”
What struck me in speaking with Ernie Martin and his brothers, as well as other Trump voters, was not their loyalty to the president. That I had expected. It was their eagerness to defend policies that Washington pundits were sure would cause his voters to abandon him. For instance, I found little sympathy for immigrants affected by the administration’s policy of separating migrant families who crossed into the US illegally and detaining children without their parents. At the time, a “zero tolerance” policy had resulted in thousands of separations, drawing rebukes even from some pro-Trump Republican lawmakers. But every Trump supporter I met offered some variation of “Nobody wants to see children separated from their mothers” before launching into a full defense of a policy that had sent Trump’s opponents into fits of rage.
“I don’t want to see people suffer, but they’re putting themselves in that situation,” said Chris Chilson of nearby Lime Springs, a city of 485 people located a couple of miles south of the Minnesota border. “There’s a legal way to come to this country, and they’re not doing it. And we’re supposed to put out all the stops? We have twenty-two veterans a day committing suicide, probably because they can’t get proper care at the VA. But yet, we’re supposed to take in everybody who gets across the border and breaks the law? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“We need to quit worrying about everybody else first, and we need to focus here,” Chris’s wife, Sandy, a registered Democrat who voted for Trump, added. “It’s fine to help other people, but we need to have our house in order first. We can’t let every Tom, Dick, and Harry just come in because they want to. There’s a process and there always has been a process, and that process works because people do it and become naturalized citizens, so I don’t think we need to open those gates wide open.”
The Walter brothers were similarly unmoved. “Those children who are locked up in those cages, they’ve got three meals a day, they’ve got fans, televisions, they’ve got gymnasiums, games,” Lee Walter said. “They’ve got more benefits in them jails they’re keeping them in than they ever had from where they came from. And the Democrats are screaming how terrible it is? B.S.!”
The brothers then fantasized about what they’d do if the president asked for armed volunteers to guard the border. “Bring your own gun and ammunition. You give me my fifty feet, then I’ll go protect it,” Ernie mused.
“I’ll take more than fifty feet,” Larry said.
“With Larry and me, we could at least protect half a mile real easy,” Lee added. “Real easy, with our scopes, oh yeah. The first shot would be a warning shot. That’s it. They don’t belong here. They know they don’t belong here. There is a legal way to get here. Let’s do it.”
“Do you feel animosity toward immigrants here in Cresco?” I asked.
“The ones here have green cards, and by God they work twenty-four hours a day. That’s hard work,” Lee said. “When we see them we smile and have a fine time. We don’t have a hatred for these people.”
“We just want them to do it the right way,” Ernie said.
Coastal liberals tend to conflate legal and illegal immigration, while most conservatives consider the distinction crucial. Ernie Martin and his brothers’ emphasis on immigrants doing things “the right way” underscores a core value that informs conservatives’ policy positions—a deeply ingrained sense of fairness. The feeling that certain people—immigrants, welfare recipients, foreign governments—are not doing things the right way, that they’re exploiting the system, jumping the line, or otherwise getting away with something, is pervasive in Howard County and places like it. So pervasive, in fact, that it was making Todd Mensink seriously consider moving away.
“I firmly believe that if you give everybody an opportunity to do their best, the vast majority of people are going to use that opportunity to the best of their abilities,” said Mensink, who lives a few doors down from the Chilsons in Lime Springs. “Other people have the ideology that if you give someone that opportunity, they will just take advantage of it.” As we sat in deck chairs beside the Lime Springs Municipal Swimming Pool on a sweltering day, I asked Mensink, a sociology professor and Bernie Sanders supporter, whether he felt that ideology prevailed in Howard County.
“Absolutely I do,” he said. “That everyone’s out to milk the system, which is unfortunate because these communities are exactly the ones that need these programs. What happens if the student loan program is done away with? What’s going to happen to this area, where the average household income is thirty-some thousand dollars? That’s the one thing that bugs me, is that I see people voting against their own self-interests.”
Mensink was repeating Thomas Frank’s standard critique of Heartland and Rust Belt residents who vote for Republican candidates opposed to government programs that could benefit them.2 But this critique has its limitations. Political scientists have found that self-interest is a very poor predictor of policy preferences and political attitudes.3 One reason is that one’s interests, translated to align with a particular candidate or policy, can be highly subjective. Are one’s “interests” defined only by the economic benefits one accrues from a particular policy? Or, can those interests also be related to some social good, system of belief, or higher principle? Shouldn’t we commend those who vote out of principle, perhaps even against their own self-interest, as opposed to those who view their votes as more-or-less transactional on an economic or financial level?
But there’s something else. Rural and working class people do want things like cheaper health care and better schools, but they don’t trust the government to provide them. They don’t want to send their hard-earned tax dollars to fund what they see as a corrupt system that pays people who don’t want to work. Mensink understood these counterarguments, at least tacitly. For despite his exasperation with his conservative neighbors, he couldn’t help but admire the ones who had voted for Trump because of his promise to nominate conservative judges to the US Supreme Court.
Earlier that day, Justice Anthony Kennedy had announced his retirement, giving Trump the chance to nudge the court to the right with a conservative replacement for the centrist justice. I asked Mensink for his reaction to the news. “I think a lot of Republicans kept their eyes on the prize (during the 2016 election),” he said. “The prize wasn’t the presidency, the White House. It was the Supreme Court. And they did well on that, they really did. They didn’t get too focused in on what (Trump) said. They focused on the thing that will be Trump’s legacy long after he’s gone.”
Mensink couldn’t think of a single positive thing Trump had done as president. “I think he’s done more to harm this country and harm to democracy than any president we’ve ever had,” he said. Still, Mensink didn’t support impeaching Trump. “I might be one of the only massive lefties who does not want to see Trump impeached. (Vice President) Pence is a skilled politician. If he gets into the White House, the Republican agenda will move a lot, lot faster. And I don’t want that. That scares me.”
“If the economy stays where it’s at, Trump has a very good chance of being reelected,” Mensink continued. “Democrats—one of the biggest mistakes they make—they talk about how Trump won Iowa not because of the economy but because there was a lot of racist people that voted for him. They’re still stuck on this identity politics.”
For all of the division and tribalistic attitudes I encountered in Howard County, the problem of identity politics seemed like something people agreed on from all perspectives.
The next day, I headed back to Cresco and struck up a conversation with David and Maxine, a middle-aged couple working the Tri-County Right to Life booth at the fair. The booth was full of pro-life paraphernalia: anti-abortion leaflets, fetal development models, and graphic depictions of late-term abortions. David and Maxine told me they were devout Christians and the parents of seven children. “One mother,” David said. “These days you have to specify that.”
Todd Mensink outside the Lime Springs Municipal Swimming Pool in 2018. (Daniel Allott)
Maxine asked me if I was aware of “the truth about Planned Parenthood.” I assured her that I knew the truth, prompting her to ask, “But you know who the capital T truth is, right?”
“Jesus, our Lord and savior,” I replied, eliciting a satisfied grin from Maxine.
I learned that David and Maxine were also ardent Trump supporters, so I asked them whether as Christians they were troubled by Trump’s lack of Christian virtue. David responded by simply pointing to a diagram of a late-term D&E abortion as if to say, “We’re focused on saving babies, not the president’s manners.”
I understood David’s logic—it’s the same logic many of my pro-life friends have used to explain to me their votes for Trump.
“I wouldn’t do that to an animal,” an elderly dairy farmer named Allen said as he stood beside me, looking at the picture.
“That’s what ticks you off about these Democrats,” David said. “They complain about treatment of kids coming across (the border) illegally and yet have no trouble killing kids (through abortion).”
Still, I wanted to see whether they could allow for any nuance in assessing Trump’s performance. The answer quickly became clear as Maxine began telling me what she likes most about Trump. “He doesn’t have a big ego—unlike Obama and Clinton,” she said. “He doesn’t talk about himself all the time at his rallies. It’s all about the people. It’s never about him.”
David then began to expound on the high abortion rate among black women. The abortion rate for black women is nearly five times higher than that of white women.4 “People don’t like it when we compare abortion to slavery, but you see it right there in that statistic—abortion’s worse for blacks,” David said.
I often asked interviewees to describe race relations in their community. In rural places, that question was sometimes met with bland assurances that things are fine. Other times it was met with a quizzical look or a chuckle. Or, as one perplexed rural resident of a nearly all-white county put it, “What race relations?”
Liberals are wrong when they claim that whites who live in racially isolated places are, as a consequence of their isolation, necessarily racist. That said, racial isolation makes people less aware of the experiences of people of other races. It can lead to a certain callousness that sometimes edges into or is at least interpreted as racism.
When I suggested to David that perhaps Russian meddling had played a role in Trump’s victory, he insisted that President Obama was behind the Russian interference but that “they’ll never admit it because he’s black.” Then the following bizarre exchange took place.
DA: “Do you think race played a role in Donald Trump’s election?”
David: “No, I voted for the black boy in the primaries.”
DA: “Black boy? You mean black man?”
DA: “Ben Carson?”
David: “In the ’90s”
DA: “Alan Keyes?”
David: “Yeah.”
David’s casual use of the words “black boy” to describe a sixty-eight-year-old Harvard PhD really should not have shocked me, but it did. I felt like I knew David, or at least his type. I’ve spent a good part of the last twenty years involved in the pro-life cause, even manning pro-life booths like this one from time to time. I’ve known dozens of older, white Midwestern couples just like David and Maxine—decent, hardworking, community-minded, and unfailingly nice. But I had to wonder: How could someone who is clearly capable of deep compassion for one historically aggrieved group of people simultaneously demonstrate so little compassion for another?
There was a time in my life when I would have shrugged off David’s comment as little more than a poor choice of words. But now I suspected that David felt that his vote for Keyes insulated him from having to defend himself against charges of racism. It was as if David was saying, “Hey, I voted for a black guy for president, for crying out loud. So clearly I’m not a racist. Now let me say something racist.”
David had not voted for Obama, of course. But perhaps there was something similar going on with Obama-Trump voters like Carla Johnson, who felt that their vote for Obama gave them license to embrace racist conspiracy theories about him. Then again, perhaps I was just overthinking it.
A few minutes later, I asked Maxine to assess Trump’s performance. She gave him an eight out of ten. “I don’t know how he gets the strength to do what he does,” she said.
Of Obama, Maxine said, “I didn’t like his look. And he was always stuttering.” Perhaps recognizing the possible racial overtones of her comment, Maxine quickly added, “Have you interviewed Diamond and Silk?”
David and Maxine at the Tri-County Right to Life booth at the Howard County Fair in Cresco in 2018. (Daniel Allott)
I told her I had not interviewed those two black female pro-Trump social media personalities.
“Oh you have to!” Maxine said, her face brightening.
After all that talk of child murder and racism, I headed over to the beer garden in search of a beer.
With a $2 Budweiser in hand, I sat down at one of the Garden’s benches and was introduced to Jackson, a young intern at a local plant business. Jackson told me he was from Haiti, where he was due to return two days later. A few months earlier, President Trump had committed a diplomatic faux pas by referring to Haiti and several other poor nations as “shithole countries.” I asked Jackson whether he was bothered by what President Trump had said. Most Haitians were not offended, Jackson said. Instead, many saw Trump’s comment as an indication of “the work we must do to change the view of our country.”
Later, I walked by one of the concession stands at the fair. It contained an assortment of t-shirts, hats, trinkets, and flags. Several items were emblazoned with the Confederate flag. Remember—this was in Iowa, solidly union country. I asked the concession worker how the Confederate flag items were selling. She said they were doing pretty well, but that they had been in really high demand about five years earlier, when a controversy over the flag was raging.
“We used to sell the flags for about $10. Then it shot up to $35,” she said. “Now it’s $20 for a flag. A couple of years ago we sold an entire semi-truck full of (Confederate Flag) bed sheets.” She added that people in Minnesota and Iowa, where she sold most of her products, have no idea about the flag’s true meaning.
“Would it matter?” I asked.
“Maybe not.”
***
The rural Upper Midwest is a region of small towns and large vehicles. It’s a place where people like their religion strong and their coffee weak, a place where housing prices and crime rates are low and many people leave their front doors unlocked and their truck keys in the ignition. Spend any time in rural America, and you realize just how culturally conservative a place it is. Church and family are still the cornerstones of rural life. Ask anyone in rural America to explain the local values and sooner or later (probably sooner) they’ll mention guns and hunting. To many rural Americans, guns aren’t so much a hobby as a way of life. Guns are a symbol of freedom, but they’re also a tool, used for sport, self-defense, and food. And almost everybody—regardless of political affiliation—owns a gun and doesn’t want the government or city dwellers telling them they cannot. I lost count of how many times I heard rural Democrats tell me they wished the party would just leave the issue alone. It’s one thing to hear Ernie Martin, an elderly conservative white man, say that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because she wanted to “take away all the guns.”
It’s another thing to hear Narren Brown say it. Brown doesn’t fit the image of a gun-toting country boy. For one thing, he’s a progressive college professor with a PhD. He’s also black—one of the only black residents in Howard County, which is more than 99 percent white.
“Everyone here owns guns—like, everyone,” Narren Brown told me when we meet at The Pub, a bar in Cresco, a couple of days after the county fair in 2018. “At that fair, there were more pistols in pockets than you would even think,” Brown informed me. “There was a pistol in my pocket. There’s a pistol in my pocket right now. It’s legal to carry it. And as long as (the police) don’t see it, I’m not breaking any laws.”
Brown moved to Cresco from Oakland twenty-five years ago for the cheap housing and slower pace of life. He’s a Bernie Sanders supporter who says he’d kneel every time he heard the National Anthem if he didn’t think his two sons, who play high school sports, would get punished for it. But he’s still very conservative on guns. “I actually think liberals would do themselves a favor if they got off the gun control,” he said.
It’s a sentiment I heard again and again in rural places: Vote Democratic and you’ll lose your guns. I found the same sentiment among residents of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, ninety miles north of Cresco. In the summer of 2017, I spoke with Kathy Vinehout, a Democrat who represented parts of Western Wisconsin in the state senate for a decade. “Hunting is just a huge part of my world,” Vinehout, a former dairy farmer, told me when I met her at her office in the Wisconsin state capitol. She believed guns played a crucial role in Trump’s strength in rural Wisconsin. She said:
I heard over and over again from the election judges that if Hillary won, people would not be able to fill their freezer. This is really important in a rural area because people do hunt for food, and they have for generations. It’s not just Republicans …That’s the way people live, so I think that’s an important part of the culture.
Then there was Erin Camp, the managing editor of the Grant County Press in Grant County, West Virginia. Erin described herself to me as “far more liberal than most people in the area” and supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. When I interviewed Erin in 2019, we had a lengthy chat about the appeal of rural life and the charms and challenges of small town journalism. Then, as I got up to leave, Erin stopped me—she had one more thing to say.
“I’ll tell you,” she said, “you want to lose an election in Grant County, take an anti-Second Amendment stance—Republican or Democratic.”
“Anyone tried it?” I asked.
“No, not local politicians”
“So all local people are pro-gun?”
“All the ones I know are. Myself included,” she said. “I don’t think people from New York City know enough to be pro- or anti-gun. It’s a lack of education.”
She said that most city folks only hear about guns when they’re used in inner-city gang violence or mass shootings in the suburbs. But that’s not how they’re used in the country. She said:
My father got me my first gun at the age of six. So I’ve had guns, been around guns, my whole life. And they’re not something that’s scary to me. That’s the difference. When we talk about guns, we’re talking about rifles and shotguns used to go kill a squirrel. We’re not talking about handguns, most of the time. I think there’s this weird disconnect between rural America and metropolitan America on an understanding of the way guns are used and the role they play in your life. Guns play a different role in people’s life here…. Guns play a really important role in rural America. People here get really defensive of that.
To Erin, this was more evidence of the disconnect between rural and urban America “My problems in Petersburg, West Virginia, are different than your problems in Washington, DC,” she said. “That doesn’t mean mine are more important or yours are more important. But they’re different.”
***
One day in summer 2018, I visited a Casey’s General Store on the outskirts of Lime Springs. While there, I chatted with a group of Howard County farmers who gather there early each morning. In the weeks leading up to this visit, the Trump administration had announced a series of import tariffs on goods from China, Mexico, and other countries. In retaliation, those countries imposed or threatened to impose tariffs on goods coming from the US, including on some of the Midwest’s most important exports—pork, dairy, soybeans, corn, and other agricultural commodities. With each new round of tariffs and counter-tariffs, media outlets deployed reporters to tell the story of how the White House’s protectionist policies could prompt a backlash among voters in these pivotal Trump states.
“Trump’s tariff war threatens to erode support of farmers,” blared a Reuters headline.5 “As Trump visits Iowa, farmers warn ‘patience is wearing thin’ on tariff fight,” an ABC News headline reported.6 But that’s not what I found talking to farmers in Lime Springs. In fact, I couldn’t detect any erosion of support for Trump. These farmers were preaching patience, not losing it. None of the farmers I spoke with at Casey’s wished to be quoted by name, but all were happy to share their political opinions. They said they were nervous about the tariffs and had already seen significant drops in crop and livestock prices. When I asked if they were worried about how the tariffs would affect their prices, one farmer said, “It already is affecting us—in a big way.”
“Crop prices, grain, livestock prices. It’s had a tremendous effect,” another farmer said. “We’ve lost a dollar-and-a-half on the beans and seen a drop on the corn in the last month. It’s really affecting people that have to have that cash flow. For them, it’s traumatic.”
But I didn’t sense any anger at Trump or hear anything to suggest he’d lost their support. To the contrary, they all said they appreciated that a president was finally pushing back against other countries’ unfair trade practices.
“I think we’ve been giving our wealth away for way too many years,” said one farmer. “We’ve made terrible deals,” another said. “Terrible.”
I asked the group whether an ongoing trade war would affect their vote in 2020. “Last time there wasn’t much of a choice,” one elderly farmer said. “Depends on who’s running. If it’s a socialist, no.”
Another man chimed in, “You’d never vote for a Democrat, I know that.” To which the first guy replied with a chuckle, “I’d have to take my NRA hat off!”
“We were hoping with GW,” someone said, referring to George W. Bush. “And then along comes this young, good looking, charismatic black guy. Figured we’d give him a chance. Didn’t turn out to be like what he was.”
“I think he turned out exactly what he was,” another countered. “He was good friends with Bill Ayers, someone who hated this country from the first day.”
“We did have eight pretty good years under Obama. But we doubled the debt.”
All of the farmers saw the Democrats as devoid of ideas and viable presidential candidates. “I don’t think the Democrats have anything to run on,” one said. “Who’s going to beat (Trump)? Pocahontas?”
“For years we were told that 2 percent growth was the new normal,” someone said. “Now we’re at 4 percent. We have more jobs than workers. Everyone’s got a (help wanted) sign out.”
I asked the group whether they had been Trump supporters from the beginning.
“Not really,” one said. “A lot of arrogance. But once he started running and we saw the alternatives, I thought he was a breath of fresh air.”
Here are some of the other things this group of farmers said about Trump during our forty-five-minute discussion:
“Kind of a maverick.”
“Not afraid to speak his mind.”
“The only way I can see him losing is if the economy goes clear to shit.”
“He’s done so many things already that don’t get reported.”
“His tweets kind of let you know he’s still not a politician.”
“He’s not polished. But he’s doing what he said he would do.”
“I don’t think he’s lost his base at all.”
“No, the base is gaining.”
“The Democrats are all hard left, you know?”
Then the group started talking about immigration. A few mentioned their support for a wall along America’s border with Mexico. I asked them whether immigration affects them much locally.
“I know that the dairy industry would be in deep trouble, the packing industry would be in deep trouble, the vegetable, wine industry, the services would be in deep trouble without immigration,” one of the men said. “We need these people; we just don’t need bad ones. Isn’t that what Trump says too? He’s not against immigration. But we can’t just let anyone in here without checking them first. I just don’t know why Democrats don’t understand that.”
I’d come to talk about tariffs, but each time I tried to return to that topic, we’d end up on something else—guns or immigration or the media’s mistreatment of Trump.
When I asked the group whether there was something specific Trump could do for Howard County, their unanimous answer was … welfare reform. “I wouldn’t mind having welfare reform for the whole country,” one farmer said.
Another said, “My sister has had polio from the waist down since she was five years old, and she’s always held a job, raised a family. She didn’t get any welfare.”
“Do you know anyone who isn’t working but could be?” I asked.
“No, they’re not in my social circles,” one said. “They’re losers as far as I’m concerned. Like the little gal who comes in here every morning. She works two jobs to take care of her deadbeat boyfriend.”
“You can’t have open borders and have our welfare system,” another offered.
In context, this conversation was really quite remarkable. As I noted earlier, it strikes at the heart of what people think when they discuss self-interest as a political motivator. As journalists reported on the devastating economic impact of Trump’s trade war and speculated that it could cost him the farm vote in 2020, these farmers wanted to talk about welfare reform. Their own ability to earn a living was at risk, but they were more perturbed by the idea that somebody was unfairly gaming the system and getting something for free.
I tried once more to steer the conversation back to the tariffs, but all of my efforts were to no avail. “We sure would like to see our prices improve,” one farmer said, “but we want better trade deals so we’re not giving away the store all the time.”
“We’re all hopeful, I guess,” another said, having the last word. “Hopeful that we’re going to get a wall built, that we’re going to get good fair trade deals, and we’re hopeful that we’re going to get welfare reform.”
My findings in Howard County contradicted what other journalists were reporting at the time. A May 2018 Washington Post piece reported finding “unease” among Trump voters in the Upper Midwest who were “increasingly concerned and conflicted” about their support for the president.7 Perhaps some of the Trump voters were conflicted, but I didn’t meet any of them. Among the scores of Trump voters I talked to in Howard County and throughout the Upper Midwest in 2018, his support hadn’t diminished at all. Or, at least, any unease, concern, or conflict felt by Trump’s voters was more than offset by the goodwill he had earned with them.
Reports predicting a Midwestern backlash to Trump’s policies reminded me of what happened throughout the 2016 campaign, when every Trump misstep or perceived scandal was predicted to trigger a fatal backlash to his candidacy. He had called illegal immigrants “rapists”; he had disparaged John McCain’s war service; he had disparaged the judge in his Trump University case as “Mexican” and therefore incapable of being fair; he had savaged Megyn Kelly for her period; he had raged on Twitter over all sorts of inappropriate things; he had proudly discussed his promiscuity in a loathsome taped conversation with Billy Bush. And that’s just scratching the surface. Yet as many times as it happened, the backlash never came. And it wasn’t happening in that part of Iowa in the summer of 2018, either.
If you look at county-level electoral maps of the United States from the early 1990s through 2012, you’ll notice a large blue spot in the Upper Midwest—a group of counties located along the Upper Mississippi River and its tributaries in northwest Illinois, northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and southwest Wisconsin. Democrats’ dominance in this cluster of 100 or so rural, religious, overwhelmingly white counties became known as the Upper Mississippi River Valley Anomaly.
But look at a map from the 2016 election, and the blue spot virtually disappears. Donald Trump turned scores of blue Obama counties red on his way to winning Iowa and Wisconsin (and nearly taking Minnesota as well). By the summer of 2018, support for Trump seemed so strong in this region that I wondered how in the world Obama had ever managed to win so convincingly in the first place. I wasn’t the only one who was perplexed. Most people I encountered weren’t clear either. “I have no idea,” was the response from Todd Mensink, the Sanders-supporting professor.
Carla Johnson outside the Howard County Courthouse in Cresco in 2018. (Daniel Allott)
In a week of reporting in Howard County, I failed to find a single Trump voter who regretted voting for him. What’s more, as I asked around, I couldn’t find anyone who knew of any Trump voters who regretted their decision. “I’ve never heard anyone who voted for him tell me they wish they hadn’t,” Carla Johnson said.
Some Trump supporters said he could do himself a favor by spending less time on Twitter. But many had nothing negative to say about the man. And all of them gave an upbeat overall assessment. Almost everyone I talked to, including most Democrats, predicted that Trump would meet or surpass his 20-point win in Howard County in 2020. Mensink told me he thought Trump will win by “25 points or more” in 2020.
Laura Hubka attributes her community’s political transformation in part to Democrats losing touch with rural voters. As chairwoman of the Howard County Democratic Party, Hubka got a front row seat to the Democrats’ 2016 debacle. She subsequently resigned her post out of frustration with her party’s neglect of rural voters. “We stopped talking to them and instead assumed they were ‘ours’ because, well, you know ‘people that vote Republican are deplorable,’” she complained in an open letter to her party in 2017.8 When I met up with Laura in 2018, she insisted Democrats wouldn’t win those voters back solely by resisting President Trump. “We need to come away from ‘We are not them’ and come forward with big, bold ideas,” she said.
At the time, the Iowa Democratic Party seemed to be in disarray. “Not many people walk around saying they are proud to be Democrats,” she said. “Not many.” Hubka believed Trump was on track to win reelection. Despite low approval ratings, Trump still had the strong backing of rural Americans, she said. “Trump is the perpetual underdog. People in rural areas still say the ‘n-word’ and ‘Pocahontas,’ and they don’t want to be made to feel bad about it. They identify with ‘deplorables.’”
***
On subsequent trips to Howard County—I visited seven times over three years—people’s perceptions of President Trump and politics generally didn’t budge very much. The trade war, Supreme Court confirmation battles, the Mueller investigation, the Ukraine scandal, impeachment, and even the coronavirus pandemic—none of it had much of an effect on how people I spoke with perceived Trump. During each visit, I would stop in to see Joe Wacha and discover that he still supported Trump and remained frustrated by the Democrats’ unyielding opposition to him. I would meet up with Todd Mensink, who’d struggle to name anything redeeming about Trump while conceding that he would handily win the county again. I’d visit Laura Hubka, who in 2019 returned to her position as Democratic Party chairwoman but said she still didn’t believe the county would be competitive for Democrats in 2020. And I’d talk to Narren Brown, who maintained that Trump was a sure bet to win reelection. When I asked him in late 2019 whether he thought Trump would win nationally, he said, “Oh yeah—this tribalism is cold, man.”
Laura Hubka on her back porch in Riceville in 2017. (Daniel Allott)
I would talk to as many farmers as I could find. Most, while still concerned about what the trade war was doing to their commodity prices, were sticking with Trump, especially given what they viewed as a dearth of alternatives on the Democratic side.
The county’s economy stayed quite strong throughout most of Trump’s first term. Every time I visited, I would see “Now Hiring” and “Help Wanted” signs on the premises of local businesses, with some offering generous signing bonuses to new hires. Howard County’s challenge isn’t available jobs—it’s finding enough people to fill them. The plant business of Mike and Rachel Gooder, who hosted me during my visits, seemed to undergo one long expansion over the three years of my study. By the end of 2019, they were in the middle of a multi-million-dollar expansion that they were able to undertake in part because of tax cuts and easing of regulations ushered in by Trump.
I was always on the lookout for switchers—people who had voted one way in 2016 but planned to vote another in 2020. I’d ask around, and there would usually be someone who’d say something like, “I think my friend’s cousin’s neighbor might be starting to change her mind.” Then I’d check it out and discover that no, the person’s friend’s cousin’s neighbor still felt pretty much the same way she did in 2016. An example came during a trip to Howard County in November 2019. One day I found myself sitting in the banker’s seat of a corn combine harvester, talking to Dave Neubauer, a farmer in his early sixties.
I had been told that Dave, a Trump voter, was complaining loudly about some agriculture policy that the Trump administration had implemented and that it sure sounded as if Dave had changed his mind about the president. Neubauer owns nearly 2,000 acres of land on which he farms corn, soybeans, and some cattle. “Times are tough, real tough,” he said of the overall financial environment for farmers.
A lifelong Democrat who twice voted for Obama before turning to Trump in 2016, Dave was upset with the president for allowing the Environmental Protection Agency to undermine a recently announced ethanol proposal by changing the formula for determining how many gallons of ethanol refineries would be required to blend into their fuels. But he was still sticking with the president. “I can’t find a Democrat to vote for,” he said, his voice barely audible over the sound of corn being threshed. “And that’s what happened last time. I mean, if they don’t have anybody to vote for, what do you do?”
Dave said he doesn’t like the way Trump “handles social media,” but he appreciates that he went after China on trade and thinks Trump understands rural America better than any other recent president. He also likes that Trump is visible to the public. “He’s the most visible president we’ve ever had in the history of the country. He’s not hiding anything; he’s in the news every day. He’s not easily pushed around.”
I asked Dave if he thinks Trump will win Howard County again. “I think he will,” Dave said. “I think he will. Who are the Democrats going to come up with?”
