Bernie Killian in his kitchen in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. (Daniel Allott)
WHEN BARACK OBAMA WON the 2008 presidential election, exit polls showed that he had captured 95 percent of black voters amid record-high black turnout.1 And whereas the number of white voters remained roughly unchanged from 2004, black turnout grew by two million votes.2 Obama was America’s first black presidential nominee, so it wasn’t surprising that he should have attracted such overwhelming and enthusiastic support from black voters. Many of them surely hadn’t expected to see a black man reach such heights only a few decades removed from the Jim Crow era.
Obama’s first term produced mixed results for black Americans. For instance, black unemployment rose by nearly two points, from 11.5 percent on the day Obama was elected to 13.3 percent on the day of his reelection.3 Some prominent African Americans also complained that Obama was downplaying his race and reacting too cautiously to racist attacks. They included in this his calm handling of the birther conspiracy theory, which posited that Obama had not been born in the United States and was thus ineligible to become president. Obama often dismissed these attacks as having as much to do with ideological differences as racial animus, frustrating some black supporters.
As the 2012 election approached, professor and activist Cornell West and broadcaster Tavis Smiley emerged as prominent black critics of Obama, whom they saw as too willing to compromise on matters of racial justice. West and Smiley embarked on an eighteen-city tour to draw attention to issues surrounding race and poverty and Obama’s unwillingness to address them.4
But when election day arrived, Obama’s support among black voters dipped only slightly, to 93 percent. And turnout among black voters actually rose above 2008 levels, to a record 66 percent, eclipsing the share of whites who voted for the first time in history.5 That worked out to an additional 1.7 million black voters, whose overwhelming support for Obama proved critical in swing states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Florida—states Hillary Clinton would lose four years later, due in part to low turnout among black voters.
Working on the assumption that black turnout would not match the levels of Obama’s historic first election, the campaign of Obama’s opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, was caught by surprise by Obama’s continued ability to energize black voters. “The surprise was some of the turnout…especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,” Romney running mate Paul Ryan said a few days after the election.6
When the 2008 presidential campaign began, African American voters didn’t immediately embrace Obama, a mixed-race intellectual and son of an African father, whose ancestors had not been slaves. He sometimes seemed a stranger to black American struggles. An October 2007 poll showed then Sen. Hillary Clinton with a twenty-four-point lead over Obama among black Democrats.7 But Obama gradually forged a bond with black voters that would not be broken. His win in Iowa convinced them that he was for real—he could also win white voters, and he was clearly a strong bet to win the election. With his victory, Obama achieved something monumental for all black Americans. His election, the culmination of centuries of struggle, gave all black Americans a sense of dignity, pride in their race, and hope for the future.
Yes, African Americans might have grumbled about some of Obama’s policies or actions. But generally, there was no chance they wouldn’t show up for him on election day, much less vote for a different candidate. The bond of identity and solidarity was too strong. This president had their backs for once, and the viciousness of some of the Right’s attacks on Obama only added to their resolve.
A similar dynamic is at play with Donald Trump and the support he receives from many rural and working-class white voters. A constant feature of the media’s coverage of the Trump presidency has been the question of whether and under what circumstances these voters would abandon him. With each new development in Trump’s trade war with China, with each new impeachment-related story, and with every errant tweet demonstrating Trump’s flawed character, reporters have been deployed to Middle America to predict an erosion of support for Trump. But for the most part, it hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it ever will. After dozens of visits and many months in the rural and industrial heartland, I have come to believe that those who think Trump will lose his supporters here over volatile commodity prices, a dubious impeachment narrative, or a few (or a few hundred) offensive tweets simply fail to understand the nature of Trump’s support base.
Many of these voters were not immediately drawn to Trump and voted for other candidates in the 2016 primaries. But over the course of the 2016 campaign, Trump forged a durable bond with millions of people that has only strengthened over the course of his first term in office. And as with Obama, the persistent and nasty attacks against Trump (this time coming from the Left) have only added to their resolve to support him. That bond has been portrayed as being rooted in racial resentment, cultural victimhood, and economic grievance. But it is also rooted in something more edifying: a reclaiming of dignity.
Nearly 70 percent of farmers voted for Donald Trump in 2016.8 This baffled many journalists, who wondered how a billionaire with soft hands and New York values could win over Heartland voters. After the election, the media consensus seemed to be that farmers and other rural people would renounce their support for the president once they figured out that he was a fraud. But I had my doubts, so I sought out farmers, ranchers, and others working in agriculture whenever I could. Almost without exception, those who voted for him in 2016 are sticking with Trump because they believe he has their backs.
Black voters didn’t abandon Obama in 2012 because their unemployment rate ticked up a couple of points or because they thought he’d been a little timid on racial matters. In the same way, these white, conservative farmers weren’t going to abandon Trump because his tariff battle with China was temporarily hurting their crop prices. For one thing, declining commodity prices had preceded Trump and his tariffs. Still, the many farmers I met were unhappy with how the tariffs were affecting their bottom lines, yet they didn’t mind. They still appreciated that Trump was taking on China and other countries. Some even seemed to regard the damage from the tariffs as something of a patriotic sacrifice. They reasoned that for decades, US presidents refused to stand up to China as it stole American intellectual property, manipulated its currency, protected its home market by placing tariffs on US imports, and dismissed environmental, health, and safety standards by which most other countries abide.
Farmers I talked to saw the tariffs as a way to hold accountable an adversary who had exploited the system. As one of the farmers in Lime Springs had told me, “I think we’ve been giving our wealth away for way too many years.” I heard something similar in August 2019 when I visited Henry and Noel Filla at their family farm in Osseo, Wisconsin. Osseo is located in the northeast corner of Trempealeau County (pronounced TREM-pa-loh), which sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Trempealeau Rivers in west-central Wisconsin.
The Fillas grow crops and own a herd of buffalo and a dairy farm that they rent out to another farmer. When I asked them about the effect the more than year-old trade war was having, their first reaction was to talk not about commodity prices or their own finances, but rather about their belief that America was getting cheated. “Well we’re getting cheated by all these countries,” Henry said. “Sending money to all these countries anyway. Why don’t we cut the money out and make it right? That’s what I think about the trade thing anyway. It’s going to hurt us for a little while, but hopefully in the long run, it’s going to all straighten out.”
“Have you been hurt by tariffs?” I asked.
“The grain prices had gone down,” Henry said. “Also milk, but that predated Trump. That’s been going on since there is so much overproduction worldwide, because the dairies keep getting bigger and bigger. It’s gonna hurt, but it’s going to be a tough time in the short term, but the end result will be good, I think. This problem (of China’s unfair trade practices) needed to be dealt with a long time ago, so we can’t just keep kicking the can down the road because then how are our kids going to survive? So maybe if the can would have been picked up thirty years ago, maybe we’d have more rural farmers. Right? Because we’d have a real price.”
Bernie Killian in his kitchen in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin. (Daniel Allott)
I heard this same assessment again and again from farmers I met, including from Democrats who otherwise had nothing nice to say about the president.
A few days after speaking with Henry Filla, I met a chicken and soybean farmer named Bernie Killian. As he waited for a delivery of more than 150,000 chickens, Bernie invited me into his kitchen for a chat. Anticipating my arrival, he had jotted down some notes on a piece of paper, and occasionally glanced at them during our interview. A lifelong Democrat, Bernie had nothing positive to say about Trump—except when it came to China.
I asked: “Do you think Trump was right to challenge China with the tariffs?”
“Oh, yes,” Bernie replied. “That’s the thing he took on that every president should have at least addressed. It was long overdue.”
“The trade practices that were unfair, the stealing of intellectual property, currency manipulation, and all that?”
“Oh, that’s terrible!”
Bear in mind: Farmers are the American constituency most committed to free trade and its greatest beneficiaries. By the summer of 2019, Trump’s trade war with China was in its second year, causing massive problems for farmers wanting to export their products. And yet Trump’s standing with farmers hadn’t worsened; if anything, it had improved. A Farm Journal poll of nearly 1,000 farmers in the summer of 2018 found that 62 percent supported Trump. A year later, a similar poll found that 71 percent approved of Trump’s job performance.9 In August 2018, a poll of 1,000 farmers conducted by Farm Futures magazine found that 60 percent said they would vote for Trump; a year later, that share had risen to 67 percent.10 Again—and this bears repeating—this surge in support came just as Trump was taking specific actions that farmers understood to undermine their livelihood.
Yet polling found that most farmers supported Trump not despite his trade policies, but because of them. An August 2019 Iowa State University survey of more than 700 Midwest farmers found that 56 percent were still “somewhat or strongly supportive” of Trump’s trade dispute with China.11 It would be easy to say that these farmers were acting against their self-interest. And that’s often the way it’s reported in the media. As a Politico sub-headline put it: “There’s a disconnect between the negative effects of Trump’s policies in farm country and their unwavering support for him.”12 But the real disconnect was happening between a blinkered media and a part of America where most reporters rarely deign to set foot for more than a few hours at a time.
Most farmers were giving Trump the benefit of the doubt because they trusted him and agreed with his underlying strategy. They also believed he had their backs.
“He acknowledged that we’re here,” Henry Filla said. “Trump said, ‘We love our farmers.’ He understands that farms are businesses. And that’s why farmers voted for him. He thinks a little bit like we do.”
Henry’s wife, Noel, added, “I definitely feel like (Trump) made the rural people feel that they were being listened to and that they are important. That made us trust him.”
As a token of the bond of trust between Trump and farmers, in 2018 and 2019 the Trump administration paid out more than $28 billion in trade-related aid to farmers.13 The $16 billion in subsidies in 2019 was the highest amount in fourteen years, all of it paid without any action by Congress. And Trump wasn’t above bragging about the largesse he’d provided to farmers, mentioning it in tweets and at campaign rallies. In April 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic entered its second month, President Trump announced a $19 billion economic rescue package for farmers and ranchers.14 The aid, in the form of cash payments as well as the purchasing and redistribution of farm products to food banks, was a response to the sudden shift in the ways consumers were buying food as a result of the near shutdown of schools and restaurants. Again, Trump touted the decision, tweeting that he had ordered his agriculture secretary to “use all of the funds and authorities at his disposal … to expedite help to our farmers, especially to the smaller farmers who are hurting right now.”15
***
Trempealeau County is home to quiet towns and quaint villages nestled among rolling hills in the rugged Upper Mississippi River Valley. Most of the county’s 30,000 residents are white, churchgoing, employed, and fond of outdoor activities such as hunting, fishing, snowmobiling, camping, and canoeing. Despite its conservative makeup, Trempealeau has historically voted for Democratic candidates for president. Barack Obama won the county twice by double digits.16, 17
A view of the Mississippi River from Main Street in Trempealeau, Wisconsin. (Jordan Allott)
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was expected to win there too. As election day approached, almost every poll had her ahead comfortably, and pundits mocked the Trump campaign for the attention it was giving the region. “If the Trump campaign believes flipping southwestern Wisconsin could happen this year,” wrote Daily Beast columnist and Wisconsin native Erin Gloria Ryan, “I’d like a slice of whatever cheese it is they’re eating.”18
The Clinton campaign took a similarly cavalier approach to Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton never visited the state during the 102-day period between the Democratic convention and the election. This “was something that got people angry,” Andrew Dannehy, managing editor of the Trempealeau County Times, told me when I visited him at his office in 2017. “That ticked people off, like she didn’t care about Wisconsin.” Meanwhile, Trump appeared in the state five times during the general election campaign.
Trump won Trempealeau County by thirteen points. He swung twenty-two Wisconsin counties that had voted for Obama in 2012, including eleven in the rural western part of the state. This helped him become the first Republican to win Wisconsin in thirty-two years.19 Here was the odd part: Trump received about the same number of votes in the state as the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. But whereas Romney had done well in the suburbs, Trump thrived in rural places like Trempealeau.
Trump’s uncouthness may have actually helped him there, according to University of Wisconsin-La Crosse political scientist Joe Heim. “Rural people are not terribly sophisticated in a general way,” he told me. “You hear people criticize him for his lack of vocabulary. That didn’t bother rural people. They understood him and knew what he was trying to get at. He gets down to very basic things and that’s exactly what they want to hear.”
***
Geography, more than race or class, has become the crucial dividing line in politics today. That’s partly because rural and urban Americans embrace different values and increasingly live lives that are wholly removed from one another. Rural people tend to value tradition, familiarity, and having deep community ties. They will often forgo more lucrative job opportunities in cities to be closer to family. There’s a welcoming spirit to rural places that’s mostly lacking in cities. As Bryan Ward, sheriff of Hardy County on West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, put it about the charms of rural life compared the city in which he grew up:
When you can go into a restaurant anywhere in the county and know and be able to call by name 50 percent of the people that are seated, that’s just hometown. I went to the barber and sat down, and 10 people came into the barber shop while I was seated, and I could call nine of them by name. Striking up a conversation was effortless. Folks were anonymous in the city. You could be a strange creature and people two doors down in Baltimore city might not know who you are.
If your car breaks down and you need help fixing it; if you’re feeling a little lonely and wish someone would take a few unhurried minutes to chat with you; if you like greeting your neighbors with a friendly “hello” and having them reply instead of looking down at their phones as they walk past you, you want to be in rural America. I know this because that’s what I experienced at various times during my travels. In the media’s portrayal, rural America is backward, boring, and unpleasant—a place where you live only if you have no other options, a place you want to escape from if at all possible. The countryside has its challenges. It can be hard to get a decent cell phone signal, a good cup of coffee, or much variety in terms of cuisine or culture. And, as I’ll chronicle in the chapter from Grant County, West Virginia, the opioid crisis has had a particularly devastating impact on rural America. But there’s a reason why just 15 percent of Americans live in rural areas, but nearly twice as many would prefer to live there.20 People tend to be happier there.
Why don’t they move? It’s mainly because there are fewer opportunities in rural America. Good health care and schools are harder to come by, which makes it difficult to attract new residents. The result is that there is a huge gap between rural and urban America, with each side hardly recognizing the other. I was reminded of this while visiting the dairy farm of Ken Jereczek and his son, Paul, in Dodge, Wisconsin, in 2018.
As Paul showed me around their barn and explained some of their farm’s innovations—the Fitbit-like sensory devices that signal when the cows are in heat; the water beds that keep the cows comfortable while lying down; and the mechanical brushes that allow the cows to groom themselves—it struck me how unfamiliar I was with farming life. I’m not alone. Two hundred years ago, farmers made up nearly three-quarters of America’s workforce. One hundred years later, the share had dropped to under a third.21 Today, less than 2 percent of Americans live on farms.22 The average age of a farmer is fifty-eight.23 Ken told me there were forty-five dairy farms in his township thirty-five years ago. Theirs is the only one left today.
“There’s a reason why people are selling off,” said Paul. “This isn’t an easy lifestyle.” Paul’s days begin shortly after 3 a.m. and end after 8 p.m. Dairy farming is a seven-days-a-week job, and the cows must be milked twice a day.
When you add in the decline in dairy consumption and the trade war, it’s not hard to understand why 600 Wisconsin dairy farms shuttered in 2018, the biggest decline since records started in 2004.24 In 2018 and 2019, Wisconsin led the nation in family-farm bankruptcies.25 Henry and Noel Filla told a similar story. “We do a little of everything,” Henry said. “We’re trying to do as much as we can to survive.”
Like the Jereczeks, the Fillas are their town’s sole surviving farmers. Henry told me there were six working farms in Osseo when he and Noel moved to the area twenty-five years ago. Their farm is the only one left today.
“In rural areas, there are no kids left who know how to work or understand the farm,” Henry said. “Not that kids in town don’t know how to work, but it’s a different mindset.”
Today, ambitious kids in rural areas often leave home for schools located in another part of the state or region, where they’re enticed by more lucrative and less physically demanding careers and frequently also inculcated with liberal values. They rarely return. One of the Filla’s daughters is studying environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, one of the most progressive cities in America. Henry lamented that she’d been “brainwashed quite a bit about ‘equal and fair.’”
“She voted for (Democratic Governor Tony) Evers, and I was so upset,” Noel added.
Mike Gooder of Howard County, Iowa, talked about how difficult it can be to attract new talent. Gooder owns an international plant business with more than 100 employees. “One of the greatest challenges running a small business in rural areas is finding people,” he once told me.
When recruiting for our leadership roles, getting college graduates and young professionals excited about opportunities with our company is the easy part. Convincing them to move to and integrate into a rural community is often the conversation killer. We recruit heavily from Iowa State University and area community colleges, but even though a majority of the students come from rural communities, they see college as the opportunity to move to an urban lifestyle, whereas those that come from larger communities just can’t imagine living in a town of 4,000 people.
When young people leave the countryside, it deepens the divide between rural and urban America. So does the perception that the cities ignore the countryside.
“Look at the roads,” Ken Jereczek said of the disparity in resources available to address infrastructure in urban and rural Wisconsin. “If you go to Green Bay, Madison, or Milwaukee, you see all these overpasses and all that, and their roads are getting fixed and ours are just patched. But our milk truck has to get down the road.” Trempealeau County roads are some of the worst in the state. They are bruised and cracked from decades of farm equipment and tractor trailers rolling over them without repaving. According to one estimate, the county needs $60 million to $80 million worth of road repairs. The county also has the worst bridges in the state, with the highest share having a D safety rating.26
Ken Jerezcek was echoing the sentiment that Katherine Cramer found was common throughout rural Wisconsin while researching her 2016 book The Politics of Resentment. “Ignored by government and by the news media,” Cramer wrote about rural Wisconsinites, “these folks felt neglected by the powers that be.”27 Cramer continued: “They weren’t getting their fair share. They felt nobody in the cities was listening to them. They didn’t like that their money was going to prop up bad schools in Milwaukee.”
As Cramer put it, “In their eyes, decisions about funding for schools mean that small communities are the victims of distributive injustice.”28 I’d often ask people in rural areas whether they resented people in the cities. Typically they’d respond with an emphatic “yes!” or a quick “Hell yeah I do.” It’s easy to see why rural Americans feel resentful. It often seems that people in the power centers don’t appreciate the knowledge they have or the work that they do—whether it’s the farmers who produce the food we eat, the manufacturers who make the products we buy, or the truckers who deliver those products to our doorsteps.
“You know what upsets me the most?” said Jeff Praxel, a milk hauler I met at the Jereczek’s farm.
When I became a milk hauler, I never realized how much comes off this farm. It’s not just the milk. It’s all the byproducts—the creamery, the powdered milk, the candy bars, the syrups. (People who live in cities) just don’t realize everything that comes off a dairy farm. Let alone every fricken’ hamburger. Every fast food burger comes from places like this. Not a beef farm. From a dairy farm, because (dairy beef) is cheaper and leaner.
This sentiment was echoed by Dave Neubauer, the Iowa corn farmer from Chapter 1. When I asked him whether a divide exists between urban and rural America, he said “Absolutely. It pisses us off a lot that we feel people don’t know where their food comes from.”
“We feel we are villains—we are (seen as) villains in the big city,” he said. “They think all we do is get welfare.”
Later, during the coronavirus pandemic, there seemed to be a newfound appreciation for the farmers and truckers who represent the beginning of the food supply chain. But for the most part, rural Americans feel taken for granted. They feel like the knowledge they have and values they hold are mocked and disparaged by the urban elite, the opinion makers, the people who decide where resources are spent. They feel like they don’t get their fair share of resources, respect, or power. They’re making the things that make America work, but nobody listens or seems to care. They’re witnessing more and more of their land being taken over by extractive, predatory corporations, and more and more of their jobs leaving. As people leave, the school funding dries up.
Rural folks also resent being labeled racists and ignorant for voting for Donald Trump and other Republicans, or simply for living in the countryside. In much of the media, rural America is seen as violently inhospitable to anyone who’s nonwhite. Many racial minorities in cities might fear for their lives if they ventured into rural America.
Racism does exist, or course, and I encountered it in my travels. I heard it in the casual use of the “N-word” on several occasions by older white people. I saw it in rural West Virginia, where a man who gave me a ride in his Trump bumper sticker-clad truck answered my question about why he likes living in the area with, “Cuz there ain’t no black people here.”
But racism doesn’t always take the form one expects. One evening in North Carolina in 2019, I met a young woman named Lilith for a dinner date. During our conversation, I mentioned that I had once been engaged to a black woman. This prompted Lilith to double over in mock revulsion. She then launched into the vilest and most racist rant I had ever heard. In essence, her argument was that whites were genetically and culturally superior to other races, and that blacks were at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. At the end of our hastily-eaten dinner, Lilith gave me some advice: Don’t ever tell a white woman that I’d dated or been engaged to a black woman.
The interesting thing about Lilith wasn’t her hatred of black people, or even the astonishing ignorance that formed the basis of her view. Rather, it was that Lilith is black.
Most of my conversations about race were much more edifying and nuanced. One of the most illuminating was with Narren Brown, the black pro-gun, progressive college professor I introduced in Chapter 1.
“Most folks I meet here, I might be the first black person they’ve ever met,” he once told me. “Most of them are hardworking, decent folks, which boggles my mind that (Rep.) Steve King continues to get elected when I would assume that most of his (voters in the adjacent) district are hardworking, decent folks too.” (When King, who has a history of making racist comments, lost a primary bid for reelection in 2020, Brown said he wasn’t really surprised.)
Ask a white conservative in a rural area if they feel that they benefit from white privilege, the idea that societal privilege benefits white people over nonwhite people living under the same circumstances, and they’re likely to say no. They may also suggest instead that people of color benefit more from racial privilege. Again, it can be difficult for whites living in almost exclusively white areas to understand the experiences of other races.
Narren had a more nuanced understanding. When I asked him about white privilege, he didn’t just complain about the unfairness of the privilege he saw all around him. Instead, Brown acknowledged that white privilege was real and talked about incidents where he felt he had been singled out by law enforcement or been discriminated against because he’s black. But he added some nuance, “I don’t even mind the privilege so much,” he said. “What I mind is when you don’t acknowledge it.” Then Brown spoke about how there’s a certain level of black privilege that he has experienced as one of the only black people in a community that’s more than 99 percent white. “I’ve gotten laid because I’m black,” he confessed with a smile.
Narren Brown outside The Pub in Cresco, Iowa, (Daniel Allott)
“I’ve always liked this bar,” Narren said as we moved to the outdoor patio in back of The Pub. “It’s the one where there’s no problems, in the sense of no drama. There’s definitely some political talk, and occasionally someone will use some off-color language. But this is the one place in town where it’s rare to find.”
Brown’s family back in Oakland, California, sometimes asked him how he managed to live in such an overwhelmingly white place. Part of it, Brown would explain to them, was his “I don’t give a fuck” approach to the looks he got when in public with his white wife and biracial children. Part of it was having close white friends he could count on to support him, even in a fight. “These parts, I have really good friends here, people I call family. I believe they’d have my back in a fight,” he said.
Brown’s insights are the result of his having to think deeply about race because it’s something he encounters every day. In contrast, when I questioned pro-life Dave at the Howard County Fair about his use of the term “black boy” to describe Alan Keyes, he seemed shocked that I’d even object to his use of the term, responding with stunned silence.
It’s not just policymakers who are removed from rural America. It’s also the media. With the demise of local news, it’s been left to national outlets to report for the entire country. But most people in the media work far away in coastal cities. According to one study, nine in ten internet publishing employees live in counties won by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.29 Very few of those counties are located in rural areas. The result is that people who have rarely if ever set foot on a farm are devising budgets and enacting rules and regulations that profoundly affect farmers, while journalists living in liberal urban enclaves are reporting on them. When people are so disconnected from the process of making the things they consume, they cannot fully appreciate the resources required to produce and maintain them.
As Neubauer put it, “Our biggest problem is we are not heard. We are not understood. Trump has brought some light to us. He talks about ag. He knows we are here.” When I asked him whether Trump, a wealthy New York City developer, understands rural America better than previous presidents, he said, “I think so. I cannot think of anyone who’s done a better job. Sure as hell wasn’t Obama. It wasn’t going to be Hillary Clinton.”
In the 2016 election, urban counties voted for Clinton by 32 percentage points, while rural areas supported Trump by 26 points. Trump’s margin was 10 points higher than Mitt Romney’s in 2012.30 The question for Democrats is whether their 2020 nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, will do any better. An August 2019 Politico piece summed up the Democrats’ predicament heading into 2020: “Dems fear another rural wipeout will reelect Trump.”31
At the time, there were some twenty candidates vying for the Democratic nomination, and most had made overtures to rural voters. Many rolled out rural policy proposals. But as the article noted:
Those individual pitches aren’t yet translating into a primary-wide conversation. During the first two Democratic National Committee debates, only one question focused on farmers, and candidates made only passing mentions of rural voters. (The word “rural” has been uttered 10 times over more than 10 hours of debates so far.) Meanwhile, decriminalizing border crossings and gun control have lately dominated the primary conversation.
Jeff Link, an Iowa-based political consultant, put things bluntly, telling Politico that if candidates are “talking about who is using what bathroom, we’re not going to get there with rural voters.”
The piece quoted Democratic strategist and pollster Mark Mellman, who said, “Unless a candidate can build bridges across that gap on the basis of values, it’s very difficult to make any policy proposal matter. Right now, no one is building those bridges.”
***
Ramon Romero doesn’t remember much about the first few years of his life, other than the carefree days he spent climbing mango trees outside his home in the village of Las Lajas, Honduras. His most vivid early memory is of the day he was told he would be leaving his birthplace.
When Ramon was seven years old, his grandmother told him that they would soon begin a journey to reunite with his mother in the United States—“El Norte,” she called it. Ramon’s mother and grandmother (he has never known his birth father) felt that only by moving to America would Ramon escape the lure of gang life and a likely early death.
Ramon and his grandmother set off on the perilous 2,500-mile trek to Texas with a group of about a dozen other migrants. “We walked a lot, jumped on and off trains,” Ramon recounted when I met him in early February 2018. “There was the fear of someone hurting me, of getting killed. Rape. Anything can happen.”
Then something did happen. Making their way through Guatemala, the group was kidnapped by a group of men posing as Guatemalan border patrol agents. Ramon later learned that their abductors were members of Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, who stole the captives’ passports and other valuable documents. Ramon spent the next two days cleaning gang members’ guns, handing out food, and fearing for his life. At one point, when Ramon refused to distribute food to the other hostages, a gang member pointed a gun at his grandmother’s head and threatened to kill her. “I was the only one that never got tied up,” Ramon said. “But I saw other people get hurt.”
After two days, Ramon and his grandmother were let go—he thinks it was because he was too young and his grandmother too old to be of much use to their abductors. Frightened but undaunted, they resumed their trek north. After nearly three months of travel, Ramon and his grandmother finally crossed the border into Texas, where they were apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Ramon’s grandmother was immediately deported, but Ramon spent ninety-two days with a host family in Texas before being reunited with his mother in Arcadia, the largest city in Trempealeau County.
When I met him early in 2018, Ramon was an energetic and smiling eighteen-year-old. On the brink of high school graduation and having recently been awarded academic and athletic scholarships to attend the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, Ramon had reason to smile—except that he lives in constant fear of being deported. Ramon is one of nearly 700,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as minors and subsequently granted temporary legal status under a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
President Trump ended DACA in September 2017, calling it an “unfair system,” and giving Congress until the following March to legislate a replacement. After that date, pending a court ruling, recipients—sometimes called “Dreamers”—could be subject to deportation, in many cases to countries they hardly know.32
“I’m feeling fear, but my mom always tells me, ‘Have hope,’” Ramon said.
But every day I feel like I’m running out of hope. The news makes me angry, because not all of us are bad, not all of us are rapists, like (Trump) said. I don’t know Honduras. I have nothing there. I have nothing more than my birth there. I love this country. I feel like I’m between a country that doesn’t want me and a country I don’t know.
I met Ramon at the Arcadia Family Restaurant on a frigid Wisconsin Friday evening about a month before DACA was to be repealed. We were joined by Jon Schultz, Ramon’s cross-country coach, and Ashley, who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her family. Ashley graduated with Ramon from the Arcadia High School that spring.
Ashley was born in the United States to Mexican parents who are living in the country illegally. Ashley suffered from depression, which she said has worsened by President Trump’s harsh rhetoric. “I already don’t want to exist, and I hate hearing people say things that strengthen that idea that I shouldn’t exist,” she said. Ashley and Ramon channeled their anxiety into their schoolwork and earned partial scholarships to attend college. Ramon became one of the state’s top runners. As a senior, he finished fourth in the Division II cross-country state championships.
I asked Ramon and Ashley how other DACA recipients at school were handling the uncertainty about their status. “Everyone has fear,” Ramon said.
Fear is the defining emotion of America’s immigration debate. Both political parties stoke voters’ fears about immigration for partisan gain. Republicans argue that undocumented immigrants are simultaneously stealing their jobs and bleeding the welfare system by refusing to work. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump exploited conservatives’ fear that gang-banging illegal aliens would rape their daughters and murder their families. In Arcadia, nearly every immigrant I spoke with mentioned with anger and frustration Trump’s contention that Mexican immigrants are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists.
Ramon Romero at Arcadia Family Restaurant in Arcadia, Wisconsin. (Daniel Allott)
Democrats, meanwhile, exploit the fear of many immigrants that ICE officers are roaming the streets waiting to deport any unauthorized immigrant they can get their hands on. And Democrats regularly talk about Republican immigration proposals in explicitly racial terms. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi did just that when she said that Trump’s immigration proposals were an effort to “make America white again.”33
In the middle of this debate, immigrants and the communities they live in can sometimes feel like pawns in a high-stakes game of political brinksmanship. Arcadia has undergone one of the most rapid demographic transformations in the country. Two decades ago, according to Census Bureau data, less than 1 percent of Arcadia’s residents were Hispanic or Latino. Today, more than 40 percent of them are.34 Most came to work at Ashley Furniture, America’s largest furniture manufacturer, or Gold’n Plump, a chicken processor, both based in Arcadia.
At Arcadia High School, Hispanics make up a majority of the roughly 300 enrolled students.35 Once Hispanic students started to trickle in around 2007, Spanish teacher Olga Dedkova-Hasan began teaching English-language learner classes, the first time the school earnestly began teaching their Hispanic students. Soon, the school recruited more bilingual teachers and Hispanic administrators.
Dedkova-Hasan has overseen several mentoring and career readiness projects for Latino students, and launched a “parent college” to educate the parents of immigrants about the US school system and scholarship opportunities for their children.
Superintendent Louie Ferguson doesn’t know how many of his kids are DACA recipients because the school doesn’t ask about their legal status. “We have tried to assure (the immigrant students and their parents) that they are safe in school, and they don’t have to worry about officials coming and taking them out of school,” he told me. Dedkova-Hasan estimated that DACA recipients make up at least 10 percent of the high school class. Ferguson said the experience has made him more sensitive to the plight of the families and the legal and financial hurdles they must surmount to attain legal status. “The vast majority of these families just want to fit in, get a good job, and be contributing members of society,” he said.
Some pundits depicted Trump’s victory in Trempealeau County as a racist backlash to the influx of Hispanic immigrants. As a particularly egregious Daily Beast headline put it: “Trump is banking on Wisconsin being racist enough to go red for the first time since 1984.”36 But Hispanics have been settling in Arcadia for two decades, so it’s reasonable to ask why the electoral backlash didn’t occur much earlier—say, in 2012, when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney suggested unauthorized immigrants would “self-deport” under his presidency, or possibly even before that.37 And Trempealeau County wasn’t the only rural Wisconsin county that Trump won. In fact, he won more than a dozen rural Wisconsin counties that Obama had previously claimed. Most of them have not experienced such an inflow of immigrants.
Father Sebastian Kolodziejczyk, a Spanish-speaking Polish priest at Arcadia’s Holy Family Catholic Church, said one of his main challenges as a pastor is bringing the native-born community and Hispanic immigrant community together. “In Holy Family Parish, the ratio of Spanish baptisms to English baptisms is more or less six-to-one, so you know what that means in the future,” he said. “This is going to be a predominantly Hispanic community. The English-speaking community may feel a bit insecure because it happens so fast. And that’s why the parish, I think, plays an important role, to bring them together and make them realize that this actually could be good. It is good.”
Kolodziejczyk said it helps that although the two communities speak different languages, “We have the same common denominator, which is Christianity. We’re all Christians.”
Father Sebastian Kolodziejczyk preaches during Sunday Mass at Arcadia’s Holy Family Catholic Church in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
Carmen, a Mexican immigrant whom Kolodziejczyk introduced to me at Holy Family, said she was immediately welcomed when she arrived here a decade ago. “When I come here, people was really open with me,” she said. “I had really nice people. I had really nice friends. Everyone here is so friendly.” Carmen said that many newcomers don’t speak English. But the church and many businesses offer dual language and translation services, which is an immense help. “Our community, they are welcoming, so they open their arms for us, and this is why I am so happy to live in this place,” she said.
This is not to say that Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and pledge to “build a wall” on America’s southern border didn’t resonate with some people here. Nor is it to suggest that there haven’t been some difficult moments. Carmen’s daughter Rossellin recounted that during the 2016 presidential campaign, some students at her high school expressed anti-immigrant sentiment and “were very rude towards the other Latino kids at our school.” When I asked residents for examples of anti-immigrant incidents, the same one kept popping up—a chant of “Build the wall!” at a football game several years ago. But that this was the only incident I kept hearing about spoke to the overall welcoming environment in Arcadia.
Granted, it’s easy to see why some immigrants would be reluctant to talk to me about racist incidents, and even easier to see why long-time white residents would be careful not to reveal racist views to an out-of-town reporter. This is something Chris Danou reminded me of every time I spoke with him. Danou is a former cop and Democratic state representative from Trempealeau County. After losing his bid for reelection in 2016, he moved to a suburban community south of Madison, in part because his wife had pursued a new job opportunity there and in part because he no longer felt comfortable living in a county that voted for Trump.
Each time we spoke, Danou was adamant that I was missing the bigotry in plain sight. In an email exchange, he criticized my “refusal to honestly reckon with the xenophobia, resentment and racism that are very real, and is an important component of the reason Trump received a lot of his support” in the county. “The Arcadia area is full of a lot of very nice people,” he said. “But it also contains a lot of people who are racists, or hold racist views. Period. I know. I spoke with them regularly and frequently. Some of them probably even voted for me.”
By and large, however, immigrants I spoke with felt welcomed. Laura Torres, a Mexican immigrant who moved to the area with her husband in 2010, said she loved Arcadia’s small town charm. Torres worked assembling furniture at Ashley, then as a teller at a local bank before opening her own tax preparation and insurance business on Main Street to cater to the Hispanic population. She said she was “really happy” that she had moved to Arcadia. There are certainly challenges, she said, “but I feel really comfortable and in a way safe because it’s a small town.”
“I don’t know how long I’m going to be here,” she continued, “but I know as long as I have a job, I don’t have a reason to move out.”
Jackie, who I met at a park as she waited for her daughter to leave a friend’s quinceañera, said Arcadia is “perfect” for her family of five because the city’s small size means they “won’t get lost. I like the people, they welcome us, and I have never had a bad experience with anybody,” she said. She also appreciates that Hispanic immigrants and the native-born residents are going out of their way to mingle. “A lot of people try to communicate with the Hispanic community,” she said. “I know there’s a lot of Hispanics who are going to English classes, and they’re trying also to get better with English.”
In the end, the fact that so many immigrants have settled here, and their alarm at the possibility of having to leave, is a strong indication of how welcoming Arcadia is. “I know a lot of people who have been here for years, so that’s something,” said Jackie. “I mean, if they didn’t like it, I don’t think they would be here.”
At Arcadia’s elementary school, Principal Paul Halverson was directing traffic amid the controlled chaos that is lunchtime on the day when I visited. Halverson praised Arcadia’s newcomers. “With Latino families, they don’t have the boats and the other nice things that better-off families have,” he said. “They have family.”
At a time when many rural towns are disappearing, Arcadia’s immigrants are not only a welcome presence here, but also a necessary one. They are keeping the place alive. “Everybody knows that many area businesses would not be able to exist the same way if it wasn’t for them,” Kolodziejczyk said of the immigrants.
Carmen and daughter Rossellin at Arcadia’s Holy Family Catholic Church in 2017. (Jordan Allott)
“Without the influx (of Hispanic immigrants), we would be cutting programs and staff, just like other districts,” Ferguson said. “Without them at our schools, we would be in a lot of trouble, cutting jobs left and right, so they’re definitely a plus for us and our economy. We have job openings in the community already. I can’t imagine what it’d be like without them here.” Ferguson estimated that 80 percent of elementary school students are Hispanic immigrants. “Makes me think, what would those classrooms look like without them here?” he asked. Without its Hispanic residents, Arcadia’s school district likely wouldn’t have undergone a $16 million expansion. Its largest employer, Ashley Furniture, likely would not have broken ground on a $30 million expansion.
After speaking with Ferguson and Halverson, I met with Arcadia’s mayor, Rob Reichwein, who gave me a tour of his city. As we drove down Main Street in Reichwein’s Ford F-150, I saw just how integral Arcadia’s Hispanic immigrants have become to the city. Hispanic-owned businesses line both sides of the road. There’s Don Juan Mexican and La Tapatia restaurants, MM San Juan grocery store, Ramos Tax and Services, and Laura Torres Services.
“I think it’s great,” Reichwein said of all the Hispanic-owned businesses. “I grew up here and I’ve seen the (demographic) change. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. A lot of small cities in America are dying.”
Reichwein is right. Rural towns across the country would be disappearing if not for inflows of immigrants. In Arcadia and places like it, immigrants have arrived in numbers substantial enough to offset the departure of many whites, extending the lives of towns that otherwise might have already vanished. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Arcadia’s population increased by about 25 percent between 2000 and 2018, from 2,412 people to 3,013. During that period, the number of whites living in Arcadia dropped by 25 percent, a net decrease of 564 people. But the Hispanic share of the population rose from 3 percent to 42 percent, a net increase of nearly 1,200 people.38, 39
Hispanic immigrants have also made Arcadia younger. The city’s average age dropped from thirty-seven to thirty-one over that eighteen-year period.
Trempealeau County’s unemployment rate has trended downward during the time that immigrants have arrived. By the end of 2019, its unemployment rate sat at 2.7 percent, nearly a point lower than the national average.40 Reichwein said his biggest challenge is enticing people to move to Arcadia to fill vacant jobs. He said the Trempealeau County Times usually features two pages of “now hiring” ads. I saw several signs throughout town broadcasting the same message.
DACA had a particularly positive effect on unauthorized immigrants in rural towns like Arcadia. According to data compiled by the Joint Economic Committee, at the time 91 percent of DACA recipients living in rural areas were employed, and nearly two-thirds said DACA allowed them to pursue educational opportunities not previously open to them.41 Throughout 2018 and 2019, DACA remained in legal limbo. The Supreme Court took up the case and heard arguments as 2019 ended. In June, 2020, the Supreme Court blocked the administration’s plan to dismantle DACA, at least temporarily protecting recipients from deportation.
Ramon dreaded the moment during the university application process when he had to mention his uncertain legal status. No matter how American he might seem, his foreign nationality makes him ineligible for federal student aid. The University of Wisconsin-Parkside sidestepped the issue by designating Ramon as an international student and offering him academic and athletic scholarships. Ramon appreciates that Parkside accepted him for who he is. “I run fast, so they’re like, ‘We’ll help you as much as we can,’” he said. “That was the big worry—not knowing if I can study, with what’s been happening with DACA. But they accepted me with my status.”
Ashley, who is a US citizen, planned to take a gap year to save money by working at McDonald’s and improving her mental health. She wanted to use the year to establish Wisconsin residency as an adult so she could qualify for in-state tuition. Because her parents are unauthorized immigrants, she had not been able to qualify as a minor resident.
Ashley and Ramon would both be the first in their families to go to college. But America’s failure to adequately address its immigration problem is making that journey much more precarious than it would be otherwise. “I felt like DACA gave me wings to go to school and get a Social Security number,” Ramon said at the end of our meeting at the Arcadia Family Restaurant. “And now I feel like someone has come along to cut my wings.”
***
I was struck as I traveled through America how often I heard men say that they saw part of themselves in Donald Trump, or vice versa. “Like me, Trump is …” they’d start, or “Trump is sorta like me in that …”
“I’ve met Donald Trump and talked to him for a good five minutes and came away with the conclusion that he was a street guy, just like me,” Michigan State Sen. Jack Brandenburg, who owns an industrial supply business, once told me. “The only difference is about 18 billion dollars!”
“He’s a worker. He never quits, like me,” Clint Mongold, a forty-year-old chicken-farmer-turned-handyman who lives with his mother in Petersburg, West Virginia, told me. “Stubborn. Stubborn.”
“Didn’t it bother you that he went bankrupt?” I asked.
Nope! He was the richest man who was bankrupt. He fell, just like everybody else. He’s just a normal person. Makes him more like an everyday person to me. I mean, I fell. I feel like I fell. Growing chickens and stuff. But I didn’t quit. That’s what he taught me—not to quit. To me he’s a teacher. To me.
Many men identify with Trump because they imagine a shared plain-spokenness and chip-on-the-shoulder, get-it-done approach to life. There was something aspirational about Trump and his life. It’s almost like they felt that if a few things had gone a little differently in their lives, they could be in Trump’s place.
The first time I met Noel and Henry Filla, in 2018, I asked them why they’d voted for Trump. “For me, it was illegal immigrants and it was health care,” said Noel, who twice voted for Barack Obama before turning to Trump.
Then it was Henry’s turn. “And I liked him because he’s a little like me,” he said. “I’m pretty straight forward. I say it like it is, and I like to do things. I don’t like to talk about it. Oh, we should change the light bulb on the street corner, and then we talk about it for six weeks. On a farm, we just get it done and move on. In the political world, it wasn’t getting done. They just talk and talk.”
As a businessman, Trump was seen as coming from a world where results were all that mattered. He was seen as decisive. Or in Henry’s words, Trump is “a doer.” Henry used the word “doer” five times to describe Trump and his appeal.
“He’s always doing stuff,” he said. “He’s up early, when most people are sleeping. He’s doing the job of commander in chief … twenty-four hours a day.”
Later, Henry and Noel’s friend Jeff, an exotic farmer, dropped by and joined the conversation, letting his pet camel roam free in the yard as we chatted. Jeff said:
My wife grew up in New York City, and Trump would say, ‘I’m going to build this in Manhattan or do that in Atlantic City.’ And people would say, ‘You can’t do that.’ And goddamn it he’d do it. Of course, he went broke a few times, but he’s a doer, and he’s not afraid of it.
When I asked Henry if he thinks Trump will win Trempealeau again in 2020, he said, “I think so, because he’s a doer and a lot of people in rural areas are doers.”
Then we returned to the trade tariffs. “I can see Trump’s plan to straighten things out,” Henry said. “Well there are going to be some things along the way that make it difficult. People are gonna get mad, people are gonna jump ship. And the media are going to play it up to get people against it ’cause that seems to be a common thing they do. But the real die hard farmers … we’re kind of in it for the long haul.”
Henry and Noel Filla, their son Noah and friend Jeff and his pet camel on the Filla’s front porch in Osseo, Wisconsin. (Daniel Allott)
“Are you in for Trump for the long haul?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s what we do. At least the rest of the world knows where we stand now. Before, they could sort of do what they wanted with us. We’re not going to just bend over for you. We’re not going to give you money to solve this problem. You’re going to have to earn it.”
