Trump's Democrats. Stephanie Muravchik
to change parties that night. And we had a lot of people who had never caucused before, or had not caucused in many, many years.” During the caucuses, Ottumwans not only packed into their new civic center’s auditorium to see Trump speak, they also crowded into the lobby outside, where they watched him live on video monitors. Here again, turnout for the Republican caucus soared, doubling over the previous election. Trump went on to comfortably defeat Ted Cruz in Wapello, even though he lost to Cruz statewide and barely edged out Marco Rubio.23
| TABLE 1-4. Number of Voters in Republican Primaries and Caucuses | ||
| 2012 | 2016 | |
| Johnston | 236 | 1,537 |
| Wapello | 843 | 1,603 |
| Elliott | 16 | 39 |
| NOTE: Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans held a caucus in Kentucky in 2016. | ||
| SOURCE: Data for Johnston can be found on the website of the Rhode Island Board of Elections (www.ri.gov/election/results/); data for Wapello can be found on the website of the Des Moines Register (https://data.desmoinesregister.com/iowa-caucus/history/#2012/gop/co/wapello); data for Elliott County can be found on the website of Kentucky’s State Board of Elections (https://elect.ky.gov/results/2010-2019/Pages/2012primaryandgeneralelectionresults.aspx). | ||
The Republican caucus in Elliott County was much quieter than the primary in Johnston or caucus in Ottumwa, largely because there are so few registered Republicans there. The stigma against voting for Republicans is also much stronger. Nonetheless, there was an uptick in participation in Elliott County’s Republican caucus: thirty-nine citizens voted, up from sixteen in 2012, with Trump garnering seventeen votes to Cruz’s fifteen.24
As the general election approached, some noticed a growing Trump mania as well. Mary Gaskill, Ottumwa’s local state representative, was especially concerned when she began canvassing heavily Democratic neighborhoods in Ottumwa. To her surprise, some Democrat households she knew well informed her that they were voting for Trump. “I was devastated, because they had been registered Democrats forever,” Gaskill recalled.
Local Republicans in Ottumwa also noticed the growing enthusiasm for Trump. The local Republican headquarters began to see more campaign volunteers than usual. We spoke with one Trump volunteer, a former truck driver and worker in a nearby corn processing plant, who had never donated her time to a presidential campaign. “I probably made over five thousand phone calls,” she estimated. Ottumwa’s Trump headquarters also ran out of Trump signs, which prompted some Ottumwans to make their own. “We could not keep Trump signs in. We were constantly running out,” Trudy Caviness told us. Trudy, who grew up in Ottumwa and has served as the county’s Republican chair for two decades, could not recall another election that generated this much enthusiasm for a GOP candidate. She was especially struck by the town’s annual fall parade. Typically, the Republicans will get only a “smattering of cheers.” But in 2016, Trudy told us with glee, “people [were] actually doing chants,” including “Trump, Trump, he’s our man!” and “Go Trump!” “So, at that point, I came out of that parade, and I said to several of our staff, ‘Wapello County is going for Trump.’ ”
As the general election approached, the story was similar in Johnston. In fact, many in town struggled to recognize their fellow townspeople. Hardly anyone could remember seeing yard signs for Republican presidents in the past. No one in town could recall seeing a sign for Bush, for example. Tim Forsberg, a local journalist, even noticed handmade signs for Trump and his name spray-painted on telephone poles. Driving around town in the summer of 2017, we saw one house still proudly boasting a giant sign many feet long, urging us to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. One local Democratic politician was stunned when he began noticing all the Trump signs on front lawns, especially since he knew the homeowners well—or at least thought he did. Shaking his head, he lamented: “Yeah, from people you would never imagine.” When we asked Stephen Ucci—Johnston’s state representative—whether he recalled ever noticing so much enthusiasm for a national election in town, he replied simply: “No, I don’t. I don’t at all.”
There were far fewer signs of Trump’s impending victory in Elliott County, apparently because its citizens were fearful of openly expressing support for a Republican candidate in such a Democratic area. As one man put it, “It was kind of a silent majority.” Here and there, though, some heard whispers of a coming revolution. One minister told us that he heard some of his parishioners say, “First time in my life, I’m going to vote for a Republican.” Still, he did not make much of these conversations: “I thought they might stay at home.” It was simply a stretch to imagine that many of his parishioners would actually pull the lever for a Republican candidate.
These new pro-Republican enthusiasms sometimes boiled over into heated conflicts, wrenching communities that have been rarely polarized by partisan politics. In Ottumwa, some people reported that Trump signs were stomped on, burned, or otherwise destroyed. Meanwhile, in Johnston, a fistfight nearly broke out at the local coffee shop, and in Elliott County, the election triggered the dissolution of a marriage and led another citizen—after he had admitted to television reporters that he had voted for Trump—to field angry calls from his favorite aunt and uncle. Perhaps such conflicts should not surprise us, given the enduring Democratic loyalties in all three communities.
Despite the new Republican enthusiasm and partisan discord, few locals imagined that Trump would actually win these Democratic strongholds. As the sheriff in Wapello County put it, “I thought it was the most far-fetched notion in the world.” Hillary Clinton also aggressively courted these communities, visiting Wapello once and Johnston twice during the general election campaign. When she made a surprise campaign stop at Johnston’s Atwood Grill, a busy home-style Italian eatery not far from town hall, mayor Joseph Polisena confidently announced, “Johnston is Hillary country.”25
Not so, it turned out. Trump won Johnston by a large margin, beating Clinton by 54.6 to 40.8 percent of the vote (table 1-5). Not since 1924 had a Democratic presidential candidate performed so poorly in Johnston, back when the town—and much of New England—was still a Republican stronghold. Eleven other Democratic municipalities in Rhode Island flipped as well—this in a state with only thirty-nine municipalities. Neighboring Kent County also turned from blue to red for the first time since Reagan carried the county in 1984.
Trump’s victory in Wapello County was just as surprising. Clinton won a mere 37 percent of the vote there. Not since 1928, when Herbert Hoover crushed Al Smith, have the Democrats performed so poorly in Wapello.26 That election was the last in an era in which the Republican Party dominated the county and Iowa more generally. As historian Wilson Warren observed, “From the 1860 presidential election until 1928, Ottumwa and Wapello County were usually dependable Republican strongholds.”27 In 1932, it had flipped for FDR, and since then, the Democrats had suffered no defeat there comparable to 2016. Even in 1972, when the Democrats lost in one of the greatest landslides in American history, George McGovern still lost by only a narrow margin in Wapello.
| TABLE 1-5. Vote for President, 2016 (%) | |||
| Johnston | Wapello | Elliott | |
| Trump | 55 | 58 | 70 |
| Clinton | 41 | 37 | 26 |
| SOURCE: Data for Johnston can be found on the website of the Rhode Island Board of Elections (www.ri.gov/election/results/); data for Wapello can be found on the website of the Iowa Board of Elections (https://sos.iowa.gov/elections/results/index.html); data for Elliott County can be found on the website of the Kentucky State Board of Elections (https://elect.ky.gov/results/Pages/default.aspx). | |||
Local political observers were especially surprised that Trump did markedly well in the working-class precincts on the southside of Ottumwa, traditionally the most loyal Democratic neighborhoods. Trudy Caviness noted that the GOP can never win precincts 7 or 8. In 2012, Mitt Romney earned just 33 and 36 percent of the votes in these precincts. But Trump carried them, winning them with 53 and 54 percent of the vote, respectively.28
Trump’s victory in Elliott County is even more surprising, since unlike either Johnston or Wapello, it was a Democratic stronghold even before the New Deal. It had never voted for a Republican presidential candidate since the county was formed in 1869. Seemingly immune to Kentucky’s