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.

The 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.”

Image

Mr. 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.

‘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.

Mr. 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.”

Republicans on the rise

In 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.”

Like 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.

‘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.’’

Image

The 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.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/us/politics/iowa-democrats-republicans.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359448)

not D vs R politics, but politics nonetheless. it was political actors who were/are responsible for this happening

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359493)

these people dutifully supported pro-union democrats for generations, and were COMPLETELY fucked over and had the rug ripped out from under them. they should feel betrayed and angry, which they do and why trump is so popular. coastal neolibs don't care about this, because they don't consider rural folks "people".

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359573)

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.’”"

Wow these people are so full of dangerous disinformation

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359478)

"Why won't the rural white people vote for us?"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359486)

these rust bult and rural folks have been so fucked by gc. they did everything they were told to do, and were fucked by forces beyond their control by the leaders that were supposed to protect them. it's heartbreaking.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359590)

they would do the same thing to the poc communities that make up their current base if they turned on them. just look at their rhetoric towards poc conservatives (as i bet you've experienced).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359657)

100% demon possession requiring exorcism level stuff.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359713)

most of the elites above a certain level have literally sold their soul to satan, whether it be via jesuit oath, freemason oath, any of the dozens of other secret society oaths, or by signing a hollywood contract (ive spoken with ex-hollywood lawyers, very eye opening). additionally they have extensive blackmail on them, whether real or engineered (made to do certain things on tape) - if they want to progress up past a certain level in the pyramid.

because of moral societal decay and proliferation of photoshop, deepfakes and the like, blackmail inflation has reached a point where the only actionable blackmail has to be so horrific that is almost unimaginable to a normal human being. it used to be enough that a few people knew Rock Hudson and Marlon Brando hooked up. now noone will give a shit if someone's gay, or cheated on their wife or whatever else.

all the lower/mid level ppl in liberal circles are of course just useful idiots, TRYING to get up higher. some have what it takes (are willing to sell their soul), some do not and are cast out.

and then you have the true believers, the obeezys of the world. while satan rules their life, they have not expressly signed off on any dotted lines. those people are in limbo, and i sincerely hope they see the light (I believe many will, but some surely are lost forever, unfortunately).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359794)

we are in a season of revival now - even though it may not seem that way to many.

i dont know about your church, but my church is always packed now, it always had a good amount of people, but now its next level.

many pastors i follow on youtube are saying they are converting hundreds/thousands of people - one of them is in california.

i believe this is only going to get bigger as the year goes on, God willing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359862)

something is afoot.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359890)

"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."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359669)

why is the painfully simple and dull reality of american "politics" still so hard for people here to understand?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359724)

you should untether yourself from woke extremely online twitter "leftsts" (who are just neolibs with preferred pronouns and other woke nonsense) and leftists that focus on class and shit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359746)

i don't know if you actually live in the united states or in a shitlib city where political activity and orgs are now a part of everyday life, but i'm guessing not. this stuff is not some kind of internet abstraction. it's real and it's everywhere IRL. your comment about "leftists who focus on class" is why i suspect you don't actually live here. these people no longer exist in any significant numbers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359802)

Not all of them - but a significant proportion , the psychology is obvious if you get to know them at all

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360557)

My real world experience is that libs in urban areas (who are far more nuanced than mentally ill twitter libs) do openly despise white working class people and dismiss anyone not in an urban area as being a backwards redneck hick. They will scoff at any mention of an area that is not a hip urban area “yikes haha imagine living *there*”. They literally think there are like KKK meetings and lynchings everywhere outside of the city.

The exception is some Bernie bros but those are a very small minority

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359859)

i consume a lot of leftist/populist shit like rising, xo glen, taibbi; so perhaps that's skewing my view. these people do seem to be in the vast minority. i see a lot of 2015 bernie sentiment too. maybe trump broke all their brains and it's completely woke bullshit now. or maybe it's just wishful thinking.

when i talk to folks, even on the left, they often seem sympathetic to more populist positions. i'm not one to hide my views, and i've had plenty of left people approach me and admit that all the wokeness on the left is becoming out of control. maybe i'm naive and think there's a silent majority out there that doesn't subscribe to this shit, because i can't imagine these views maintaining broad support. maybe i'm out of touch. sometimes i do get blackpilled and think it's all over.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359914)

trump was elected and bernie was almost nominated for a big reason: people realize the establishments of both parties do not have the interests of ordinary people in mind. i think the establishment left is creating a culture war with woke nonsense to keep people fighting along those lines and instead of the real issues. i guess time will tell on whether this shit receives actual broad support (or whether it already exists).

it's worth noting that none of the woke potus candidates received much support. kamala and warren both sucked. bernie rejects these views. biden seems to embrace them as much as his handlers tell him to, but he's an old man that voted for all kinds of boomer garbage that is the polar opposite of wokeness, so who knows where his head is really at.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359986)

the "silent majority" masses are basically non-persons in any kind of political discussion. these people never do anything and will always be spectators and bystanders in political conflicts. what they think literally does not matter - they will always end up going along with whatever political organization/group wins

think about how many white proles collectively got fucked over by the past several decades of globalism. like 200 million maybe? and yet none of these people actually did anything to stop themselves from getting abused, destroyed, and frankly genocided by a group of maybe 50k "elites" total. i mean they could have all just driven to DC and killed these people at any time. but they didn't, of course, they just bent over and took it

this is what spurred me to respond to the original comment in the sub-thread above, about how the "only hope" for these people is for some...other people who hate them to gain political power. no, their only hope is to take political power themselves, and to assert their will directly. not through "donald trump" or "the republican party" or "class-conscious leftists," but through either direct material force or secession into a separate political body

this is the only kind of "politics" that actually matters going forward in this society

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360058)

my concern is that all those things happened because the poor were often in horrible conditions while the elites lived in opulence. our poorest will likely always live in relative comfort. some sort of techno dystopia where they're hooked up to a playstation 35 and fed mcdonalds all day or something.

i think that there are a lot of signs we're reaching a breaking point. trump and bernie, primarily. NO ONE was excited for biden and it was a close race. his platform right now has been 10x more progressive than it would have been otherwise. they're trying to sate the masses, or maybe caving to their demonstrated political power.

secession into a separate political body would be great. so far we've seen these forces get by by transforming their party, while the establishment kicks and screams. the populist right and left have a lot more common than the fringes of the parties. it would be nice to see some unity. idk how things will shape out, but it'll be interesting (or perhaps the elites will crush us and leave people fighting an asinine culture war over gendered bathrooms).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360228)

"It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences."

https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15

"Published this week in Science, the paper describes an online experiment in which researchers sought to determine what percentage of total population a minority needs to reach the critical mass necessary to reverse a majority viewpoint. The tipping point, they found, is just 25 percent. At and slightly above that level, contrarians were able to “convert” anywhere from 72 to 100 percent of the population of their respective groups. Prior to the efforts of the minority, the population had been in 100 percent agreement about their original position."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-25-revolution-how-big-does-a-minority-have-to-be-to-reshape-society/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360098)

just look at how quickly "the squad" got co-opted into neoliberalism and are now staunchly behind pelosi and the democratic establishment they campaigned on fighting.

they're way too wound up in woke bullshit to *EVER* be effective in passing real policies. and they're way too dumb to avoid getting outmaneuvered and roped in by establishment veterans. tlaib is a fucking cooley grad who advocated for ABOLISHING police and prisons, for fucks sake.

these people are just there so that progressives can be persuaded to continue to vote democrat.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359762)

“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.’’

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359858)

*Mexican laborer beheads Molly Tibbets in a field*

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42359887)

xo'ers are too young or politically naïve to grasp that left "moderates" like Obama (and the scores of (((moderates))) who preceded him ) are always playing a trojan horse "long game".

do you think Obama the "moderate" was struck by a thunderclap during his 2nd admin that suddenly made him *veer left* on race, gay marriage, immigration? really? does that seem likely? or is it possible he held these radical views all along, and like a good Saul Alinksyite was playing a placating game with whites to get elected (while whites still had electoral clout enough to matter in the left's calculations?)

we got to where we are today (Clown World) incrementally. we got to white minority status despite generations of "moderates" like Bill Clinton pounding podiums and promising "tough border security." it wasn't by accident.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360126)

This election was literally between two white guys.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42363255)

1) justify to Dems that rural whites deserve to be fucked over by their elites

2) the basis for number 1 is that they are irredeemably racist

3) are elites are not at fault for fucking them over, they simply refused to adapt to the times

4) are elites should not feel guilty for breaking their unspoken agreement with the white rural rubes of America

FYSA - this "unspoken agreement" is that lower class whites will fight the nations wars, dutifully pay their taxes, buy homes, invest their money wisely, not take on too much debt, and raise their own children, all in exchange for ceding complete political power to a relatively small group who will use that power somewhat benevolently to look out for the lower class whites interests at home and abroad.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4820939&forum_id=2#42360733)