Burlington (Iowa)

BURLINGTON, Iowa — Tom Courtney and Terry Davis are former factory workers in Des Moines County along the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa, two men of similar age who skipped college but thrived in a community where blue-collar jobs used to be an engine of upward mobility.In 2008, Mr. Courtney’s daughter Shawna married Mr. Davis’s son Shannon. They celebrated at a rehearsal dinner at the Drake, a steak restaurant on the riverfront in Burlington. The two men are grandparents to Shawna’s daughters from her first marriage, and they occasionally met on the sidelines of Little League games.But as economic decline and social malaise overtook Des Moines County, and Donald J. Trump was embraced by many as an answer, the two men moved in opposite directions. Today they rarely speak. Mr. Davis has become the chairman of the county Republican Party. Mr. Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. He faced an opponent recruited by Mr. Davis.“This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” Mr. Davis said.Mr. Courtney, who expected a close race, was stunned by the depth of his loss on election night. “As I looked around the state, there were lots of people like me,” he said.“Iowans have changed.”For decades, this state was a reliable wind vane of American politics. In six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, its voters never deviated by more than one percentage point from the national results.Then in 2016, Mr. Trump pulled Iowa more sharply to the right than any state in the country. The trend continued in 2020, when he ran up wider margins against President Biden than he had against Hillary Clinton in most Iowa counties.Some Democrats believe there are pathways to winning back the working-class voters the party has lost here and in places like it. They point to Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the subject of tense negotiations in Washington, which would bring a surge of spending on roads, bridges, child care and clean energy. In Iowa, there are more structurally deficient bridges than any state in the country. Yet, few local Democrats have such high hopes for a political realignment. “There is no short-term elixir,” said Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist in the state.Tom Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in Iowa in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. Soon after the polls closed, he knew he had no chance. “Iowans have changed,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe 2020 carnage for Iowa Democrats was wide and deep. The party lost a Senate race, gave up two congressional seats and lost half a dozen seats in the state legislature. Unified Republican rule in state government has led Gov. Kim Reynolds to sign permissive gun laws and new restrictions on voting this year, and lawmakers are moving to add a constitutional ban on abortion.Many Democrats now believe that Iowa is all but lost to the party, and that it is time to let go, a view driving a fierce debate over whether to drop the state’s presidential caucuses from their leadoff role in 2024 and beyond. Iowa is small and unrepresentative, more than 90 percent white, and the 2020 election showed that Democrats’ future is in the Sun Belt, with its racially diverse electorate and college-educated suburbanites.Other party strategists are quick to note that Mr. Biden barely won his two Sun Belt pickup states last year, Georgia and Arizona, and that the party can’t afford to bleed more of its traditional voters while making only tenuous inroads with a new constituency.What’s the matter with Iowa, and by extension much of the northern Midwest, for Democrats? Many officials say the party’s cataclysmic losses stem from the erosion in quality of life in rural places like Des Moines County and small cities like Burlington, which are a microcosm for a hollowing out that has led to sweeping political realignments in parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.Schools have closed, rural hospitals are cutting all but bare-bones care, and young people with college degrees have fled for opportunities in Des Moines or Chicago. Employers have backfilled jobs with immigrants, often after weakening unions and cutting pay.“There’s just a discontent, an unhappiness here seeing communities shrink,” said Patty Judge, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Iowa. “That makes people very vulnerable to a quick fix. Donald Trump offered that: ‘Let’s make America great again, you’ve lost your voice, let’s have a voice again.’ People have bought into that.”Angela Pforts at her shop in Burlington, Barber and Style. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney, who is one of eight children of a farm couple he called “strong Roosevelt Democrats,” said that most of his nieces and nephews were “Trumpers,” which confounds him. “They’re not millionaires, most of the family works for wages,” he said. “I don’t understand them.”Mr. Davis’s 95-year-old father is a Democrat. He told his son he always votes for who he thinks will do the best job. “I said, ‘Dad, have you ever voted for a Republican?’” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said, ‘Hell no!’”According to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency, 1,700 jobs were shed statewide in 2019 outside Iowa’s major cities. It was the third loss in four years, the agency said, “and highlights a trend that is not uncommon in most of the country.”On top of economic factors, other forces forged the Trump coalition in Iowa, as they did elsewhere in places dominated by the white working class: a resentment of immigrants and people of color, and a narrowing of information sources that has pushed conservatives to radio and social media channels where lies and conspiracy theories flourish.A postal carrier in downtown Burlington. There are embers of a downtown revival, but most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘Those were my voters’On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Courtney, 73, steered his white S.U.V. around Burlington, a riverfront city with a population of 25,600, which is down by 3.5 percent since 2010. A slender figure with a mustache, silver hair and a soft-pitched voice, Mr. Courtney joined the Air Force out of high school and returned home to work at a Case backhoe plant in Burlington. He rose to become the leader of the union bargaining team before he retired and was elected to the State Senate in 2002.“When I worked there and was bargaining chair, we had 2,300 rank-and-file members,” he said as he drove near the Case plant beside the pewter-colored Mississippi. Today the shop floor is down to 350 workers.“Those were my voters,” he said, passing a nearly empty employee parking lot and a shuttered bar that was once crowded at shift changes. “The last five or six years I worked there, it was nothing to make $70,000 a year. Cars and boats — everybody had all that kind of stuff.” Today, starting wages are about $17 an hour. Burlington rose as a railroad and manufacturing center, and the stone mansions of its 19th-century barons still stand on a bluff above the river. The population peaked around 1970. Although there are embers of a downtown renewal, including a yoga studio and a brew pub, Jefferson Street, the main thoroughfare, was largely deserted on a recent weekday. Most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns that are themselves losing their economic cores.The visitor’s entrance at the Case factory in Burlington, Iowa. Case’s backhoe plant used to have more than 3,000 employees. Now it has about 350.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney harks back to a golden era for local Democrats. Des Moines County — not to be confused with the state’s capital city — voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 10 straight elections before 2016, when Mr. Trump flipped it. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Courtney, who was the majority whip in the State Senate, escorted Mr. Biden, then embarking on his second bid for the presidency, to an interview with editors of The Hawk Eye. In the middle of it, Mr. Courtney’s cellphone buzzed: It was Bill Clinton, pestering him to endorse the former president’s wife. (Mr. Courtney remained neutral.)Mr. Courtney grew up in the rural town of Wapello, 25 miles north of Burlington. He recalled how in 2018 he knocked on doors there for Democrats. “I’d go into neighborhoods that when I was a kid were nice middle-income neighborhoods with nice homes,” he said. “Now today there’s old cars in the yards, there’s trash everywhere. People come to the doors who are obviously poor. Those are Trump people. We’re not reaching those people.”He could not think of a single new factory that opened in Burlington during the Trump years. To Democrats, the fact that Iowans did not punish Mr. Trump in November for failing to bring a renewal of blue-collar jobs speaks to the power of perception over reality.“It’s just this constant slide and they don’t feel like anybody’s doing anything for them, but they believe that Trump was trying,” said Mr. Link, the Democratic strategist. “More than anything, Trump resonated with them in that he was indignant and angry about the status quo, and angry about elites. They’re not getting that same perception from Democrats.”High school students hanging out in the parking lot of the abandoned Shopko in Burlington. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesRepublicans on the riseIn many ways, Mr. Davis, 72, is the obverse of Mr. Courtney. Although he, too, started as a blue-collar worker, an electrician for railroads, Mr. Davis climbed the ranks of management. By the early 2000s he was the superintendent of a Burlington Northern locomotive plant. When the railroad shut down the operation, idling hundreds of union workers in Burlington, Mr. Davis helped with the downsizing. He took early retirement.Mr. Davis had promised his own driving tour of Burlington, but instead sat in his double-cab pickup with a reporter for two hours in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods. He wore khaki work pants and a black golf pullover. He spoke in a forceful, folksy voice.Once a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton, Mr. Davis said he became a Republican because he disagreed with Democrats on abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as what he called handouts to the undeserving.He recalled chatting at a railroad reunion with one of his former electricians who had taken a job at Case. The man told him that he, and many other union workers at the plant, had voted for Mr. Trump.Mr. Davis recalled him saying: “We pay 140 bucks a month to the union, every one of us does. They take that money and give it to a political party that gives it to people that don’t work. The more we thought about it, we thought, ‘I ain’t doing that anymore.’”The electrician added, “You’d be surprised how many of those people voted for Trump.”Terry Davis, the chair of the Des Moines County Republican Party. “This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesLike Mr. Courtney, Mr. Davis expressed some puzzlement about why Mr. Trump had done so well despite not delivering on his promise to bring back blue-collar jobs. “It’s kind of hard to figure,” he said. Mr. Davis was born in Missouri and worked in Kansas City before being transferred to Burlington. He agreed that the quality of life in town was lackluster. “My wife — don’t take this wrong — she’s not going to buy clothes here,’’ he said. “We go to the Quad Cities or Iowa City or Chicago or St. Louis to shop and mainly to kind of get out of town.”He readily acknowledged that Mr. Biden had won the presidency. But he also said that most Republicans in Des Moines County probably believed Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election.Democrats say that conservative talk radio, even more than Fox News, has spread conspiracy theories and disinformation to Republican voters. In places like Des Moines County, people now must drive far to see a dentist or buy a pair of shoes, and all of those hours in their cars have increased the influence of right-wing radio.“People are driving all the time, they’ve got their radios on all the time,” Mr. Courtney said. He mentioned a local station, KBUR, “which used to be a nice friendly station.” It was known for a show “to auction things off” and another that was a call-in “question and answer thing,” Mr. Courtney said. Now it broadcasts Sean Hannity for hours each afternoon.Mr. Courtney passed a shuttered middle school. “It’s just hard for me to believe that 15 years ago, we had three big thriving middle schools,” he said, “and today we’re down to nothing like that.”“Folks have left town,” he added.The now-closed Siemens factory in Burlington.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘There was a racism card’But Mr. Courtney acknowledged another reason, too: white flight to schools in West Burlington. “People will tell you it’s not, but there’s no question it is,” he said. Burlington’s population is 8.2 percent Black. Public school enrollment is 19 percent Black.Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Mr. Trump flipped it. It is one of 31 Obama-Trump pivot counties in Iowa, which has more of them than any other state in the country. A study by sociologists at Iowa State University in 2019 concluded that the state’s hard pivot from Mr. Obama was not because of “economic distress.” It pointed instead to Mr. Trump’s “nativist narrative about ‘taking back America.’”The study found that the counties that gyrated most sharply away from Mr. Obama were almost entirely white.Mr. Courtney does not dispute that racism drove part of that swing, and he has his own theory of why some of the same voters had earlier backed Mr. Obama.“I think they wanted to say they voted for a Black man,” he said. After two terms with Mr. Obama in office, however, Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on Mexicans, Muslims and other racial and religious minorities gave people permission to indulge inner grievances, Mr. Courtney said. “There was a racism card that came out and people said, ‘I’m sick of this Black guy, I want to go back to a white guy,’” he said. “I hesitate to say that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’’Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Donald J. Trump flipped it in 2016.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe road back in Iowa for Democrats is long and complicated. The state once prided itself on having more registered independents than Republicans or Democrats, but since 2018, in keeping with national trends toward polarization, independents now rank behind both major parties. Democrats have suffered a net loss of 120,000 registered voters compared with Republicans. Those votes alone are 10 percent of turnout in nonpresidential years.The party’s setbacks have reheated the debate over whether to cancel Iowa’s caucuses as the leadoff nominating contest. Many national Democratic officials argue that a larger and more diverse state should go before either Iowa or New Hampshire. Even some Iowa Democratic strategists have supported killing off the caucuses to focus on local issues and reduce the influence of the national progressive wing of the party.Mr. Courtney said the voters he knew didn’t care much about cultural issues that Democrats elsewhere dwell on, like gun control and immigration. “All they really want to know is where can they get a good job that pays the most money so that they can take care of their family, and we’re not touching on that,” he said.He has cautious hopes for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposal. “If we can put people to work making good money building that stuff, it could be like the W.P.A. back in the day,” said Mr. Courtney, whose parents worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.Even Mr. Davis, the G.O.P. chair, conceded that a robust infrastructure plan that brought jobs to Burlington would make it harder for Republicans to continue their winning streak.“It probably will be tough in four years if things are good,” he said. More