Just a few months ago, Neil Shaffer thought Iowa was lost to Donald Trump.
“I was worried. We were in the midst of Covid and the economy wasn’t doing so good and Trump wasn’t handling the Covid interviews very well, and I was thinking this is gonna be a bloodbath,” said the farmer and chair of a county Republican party in the north-east of the state.
But on election day, rural Iowa turned out in force for Trump. He not only beat Joe Biden decisively in a state that opinion polls consistently predicted would be close, but the president significantly increased his vote in counties that put Barack Obama into the White House and which then flipped to Trump.
Howard county, where Shaffer lives, swung from Obama to Trump by a massive 42 points in 2016, the largest shift in the nation. This year, support for the president increased by another seven points to the horror of Democrats who hoped to reduce Trump’s share of the vote even if they did not expect to take back Howard.
In 2008, Obama won half of Iowa’s 99 counties. Two weeks ago, Biden took just six. That was a pattern repeated across midwestern farmlands as Trump solidified support in America’s rural heartland, deepening a divide with the region’s cities that delivered victory to Biden in key swing states.
“Out here, I think 2016 was less a vote for Trump than a vote against Hillary,” said Shaffer. “A lot of people were not sold on her and so they were willing to roll the dice on Trump. Now they are Trump people. They believe in him. They came out in force.”Shaffer said Trump commands a loyalty among a core of rural voters that he has not seen for a president before, and that it isn’t going away even when he leaves office.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
