Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
identities (see table 1-2). Since FDR’s first victory in 1932, the town of Johnston had supported only three Republican nominees: Eisenhower in 1956, Nixon in 1972, and Reagan in 1984 (with a bare 50.2 percent of the vote). Notably, all three elections were Republican landslides. Eisenhower carried forty-one states in 1956, and those he lost were mostly located in the Deep South. Nixon’s victory was even more impressive: he won all states except for Massachusetts in 1972. And Reagan won forty-nine states in 1984.
Wapello County’s record of Democratic presidential voting is even more spotless. Between 1938 and 2012, it voted for Republican candidates only twice: Eisenhower in 1952 and Nixon in 1972. Notably, Reagan failed to carry the county in 1984, when he crushed Walter Mondale nationally. In fact, 60 percent of Wapello’s citizens voted for Mondale in 1984—a margin of victory that far exceeded Mondale’s narrow victory in his home state of Minnesota, the only state he carried. Since the 1990s, support for Democratic presidential candidates declined moderately in Wapello, though it never dipped below 54 percent until the 2016 election.
Johnston and Wapello look like competitive two-party polities compared to Elliott County. No other county in the nation has been as loyal to a party. Until the 2016 election, it had never supported a Republican presidential candidate. For more than a century, its citizens voted Democratic, election after election. The size of Democratic majorities is also notable, especially in years when the party ran weak candidates. Remarkably, three out of four Elliott County voters supported Mondale, and this in an election in which Reagan won nearly 60 percent of the vote nationally. Obama, however, suffered a sharp drop in support in 2012. We will have more to say about that change in chapter 5. For now, we would simply emphasize that few observers—either in Elliott or elsewhere—imagined that a Republican candidate could win 70 percent of the county’s vote.
| TABLE 1-2. Democratic Vote for President, 1932–2012 (%) | |||
| Johnston | Wapello | Elliott | |
| 1932 | 54 | 57 | 85 |
| 1936 | 55 | 57 | 76 |
| 1940 | 58 | 57 | 76 |
| 1944 | 61 | 56 | 77 |
| 1948 | 66 | 58 | 83 |
| 1952 | 53 | 47 | 77 |
| 1956 | 45 | 51 | 68 |
| 1960 | 70 | 50 | 69 |
| 1964 | 85 | 72 | 86 |
| 1968 | 73 | 50 | 63 |
| 1972 | 48 | 46 | 66 |
| 1976 | 61 | 60 | 81 |
| 1980 | 58 | 51 | 75 |
| 1984 | 50 | 60 | 74 |
| 1988 | 56 | 66 | 77 |
| 1992 | 46* | 54 | 71 |
| 1996 | 65 | 57 | 65 |
| 2000 | 66 | 57 | 65 |
| 2004 | 57 | 55 | 70 |
| 2008 | 55 | 57 | 63 |
| 2012 | 57 | 56 | 51 |
| *Perot’s candidacy prevented Clinton from winning majority. | |||
| SOURCE: Iowa, Rhode Island, and Kentucky board of elections websites (https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/results/index.html; www.ri.gov/election/results/; https://elect.ky.gov/results/Pages/default.aspx); Malcolm E. Jewell, Kentucky Votes, vol. 1 (University of Kentucky Press, 1963), 2, 4, 6; Richard R. Scammon, America at the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential Election Statistics, 1920–1964 (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 178–83. Wapello: www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/REDBK/860893.pdf; Wapello (1940): www.legis.iowa.gov/docs/publications/REDBK/860897.pdf; Elliott (1964 and 1968): https://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/index.html. | |||
The locales we studied offered little evidence to support theories that Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 or Pat Buchanan’s in 1996 were harbingers of Trump’s victory. Perot performed below his national average in Wapello and Elliott, though somewhat above in Johnston. If we expand our analysis to include the ninety-five long-standing Democratic counties that flipped for Trump (listed in appendix), we find that Perot performed quite well in some. Overall, however, Perot’s performance in these Democratic counties (21.6 percent) was only moderately better than his national average (18.9 percent).17 The significance of Pat Buchanan’s performance in the 1996 Republican primaries is more difficult to interpret. In Elliott, only sixteen voters participated in the Republican primary, two of whom supported Buchanan.18 He was not on the ballot in Rhode Island, which renders his popularity in Johnston hard to assess.19 In Wapello County, Buchanan made a stronger impression, winning 23.3 percent of the vote. Even so, he did worse in Wapello than in the state as a whole. And, in any case, GOP caucus voters in Iowa are hard Republicans, not Democrats. When we asked the people we spoke with whether any past presidential candidates rivaled Trump in their estimation, no one mentioned either Perot or Buchanan. In fact, poring over all of our notes, we found only one person who ever mentioned either candidate. Thus it is difficult to identify historical signposts that pointed to a Trump victory in Johnston, Ottumwa, or Elliott County.
The 2016 Election
The outcome of the Democratic primaries in 2016 offered little indication that Trump would win these deep blue communities in November. The leftist firebrand Bernie Sanders won Johnston and Elliott County handily (table 1-3). In Johnston, Sanders beat Hillary Clinton by ten percentage points.20 In Elliott County, Sanders defeated Clinton by a wider margin. In Wapello, however, Clinton emerged victorious. These results are congruent with the entire group of long-standing Democratic counties that flipped for Trump (see the table in the appendix), some 56 percent of which preferred Sanders.21
If the Democratic primary results were unremarkable, there were other signs that something unusual was afoot in 2016. Johnston’s small town government, for example, was overwhelmed by citizens seeking to change their party registration to Republican so they could vote for Trump in the primary. Karen, a town employee, could not recall any prior wave of voters seeking to change their party affiliation. “This is the most different election I have ever seen,” she told us. Karen had to turn hundreds of disappointed Trump Democrats away, since Rhode Island requires citizens to be registered ninety days prior to voting in their party’s primary.
| TABLE 1-3. Democratic Primary, 2016 (%) | ||
| Sanders | Clinton | |
| Johnston | 55 | 43 |
| Wapello | 47 | 53 |
| Elliott | 53 | 36 |
| SOURCE: Data for Johnston can be found on the website of the Rhode Island Board of Elections (www.ri.gov/election/results/2016/presidential_preference_primary/; data for Wapello can be found on the website of the Iowa Secretary of State (https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/results/index.html); “Kentucky Results,” New York Times, October 4, 2016 (www.nytimes.com/elections/2016/results/primaries/kentucky). | ||
Some Trump supporters assumed this law was the work of unscrupulous Democratic officials. They thought it was “the [Democratic] state house trying to suppress their vote,” Karen recalled. Others accused her of inventing the law as an excuse to weaken their political independence. She said some phoned repeatedly, believing that she might change her answer, as if state election laws could be bent like local regulations. Karen found that the Trump Democrats were often aggressive and belligerent. “When someone came in with a bad attitude,” she told us, there was a “hundred percent chance they were for Trump.” Karen encountered so much discontent that she plans to retire before the 2020 presidential election. “I cannot do it again. I can’t believe the amount of vitriol. I didn’t even recognize my townspeople.” The outcome in Johnston’s Republican primary confirms these reports: turnout increased by more than 600 percent since 2012 (table 1-4), with Trump winning nearly 80 percent of the vote.22
In Ottumwa, the local political establishment noticed a similar pro-Trump movement. Trudy Caviness, the chair of the Wapello County Republican Party, recalled the local caucuses: “Our turnout was just phenomenal.… And we had so many new people,” she told us. Many of these new people were also eager to