Are Iowa’s Democratic Days Gone for Good?
Presidents, senators, and first ladies doted on the Simpson children. Now they’re struggling to face their state’s post-Trump reality.
www.theatlantic.com
DUBUQUE, Iowa—Megan Simpson was 3 years old when her family strapped her in a stroller and took her door-knocking for the first time. She was in elementary school when she began stuffing mailers for get-out-the-vote campaigns. Every Election Day during the 1990s and 2000s, Megan and her five brothers and sisters stayed home from school as the house was transformed into a staging area for the precinct. Her parents would blast Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business,” and their living room would fill up with volunteers and stacks of walk packets.
In Dubuque County, full of Irish and German Catholics and dotted with manufacturing plants, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by the thousands. These were blue-collar people, most of them white, who voted for politicians allied with unions. The county hadn’t backed a Republican presidential candidate since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956. It was the seat of Democratic politics in northeast Iowa, maybe the strongest concentration of Democrats in the entire state. And the Simpsons were its first family.
The Simpsons had a passion for politics, and a family history of state and local political involvement that stretched back decades. The clan was a “political machine,” Greg Simpson, Megan’s father, told me. Led by their parents, or sometimes alone, the kids would trek around town, showing up on people’s porches to talk about health care and register them to vote. They marched and toddled in parades for Iowa candidates such as Tom Harkin, Tom Vilsack, and their own aunt and uncle, the well-known state lawmakers Pam and Tom Jochum. “Whoever the Simpsons were working for was who [people in town] wanted to be behind,” Kelly Simpson, Megan’s mother, told me.
John Kerry doted on Megan’s sister, little Madi Simpson, letting her ride along on his northeast-Iowa bus tour in 2004 when she was 5. A few years later, Michelle Obama told a group of supporters she hoped that Sasha and Malia would turn out as well as the Simpson girls. In 2007, Megan was an organizer on Barack Obama’s Iowa caucus campaign. She spent her days driving through town, and out to the county’s rural areas, trying to persuade thousands of white people to elect the country’s first Black president. When Obama won the caucuses, and later swept the county and the state, the Simpson family was thrilled. But they weren’t surprised: Dubuque County always chose Democrats. That was true, at least, until 2016.
On the evening of November 8, Megan and her siblings gathered at Happy’s Place, the local Democratic bar, to watch the results roll in. When they realized what was about to happen, Megan’s sisters began to cry. At home, Greg poured himself a glass of bourbon. By morning, Donald Trump had become the first Republican presidential nominee to win Dubuque County in Greg’s lifetime. Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton by roughly one percentage point in the county, but the swing away from Democrats was enormous: Obama had won by 15 points just four years before. Dubuque was one of 206 U.S. counties that pivoted hard and fast from Obama to Trump—and one of 31 in Iowa. At Happy’s, Kelly was sick to her stomach. “I felt like I had lost a connection with Dubuque,” she told me. “I felt like, Who are the people living in this town?” Four years later, Trump won Dubuque County again, this time by seven points, even as he lost the election to Joe Biden. The Simpson family faced a devastating reality: A Democrat was headed to the White House, but a Republican had won their home turf by an even bigger margin than before.
The Simpsons remain hopeful. Most of the clan insists that the party can still turn things around, maybe not in this year’s midterm elections—for which today’s primaries are being held—but in the next cycle, or the one after that. Megan wonders if Dubuque’s support for Trump was simply a Halley’s Comet that most Americans won’t witness again in their lifetime. Greg sees the GOP’s progress as the natural motion of the country’s political pendulum. “I don’t think [the county] is irretrievably gone. A lot of the people who voted for Trump might come around,” he told me. It makes sense that the Simpson family is optimistic. They’ve spent decades working to keep Democrats in power in Iowa. But Dubuque County has changed, and so has its once-ruling party. The voters who formed this reliable blue bastion on the Mississippi now seem to be sprinting away from it as fast as they can.
People say iowa is flat, but Dubuque County is all lush, rolling fields and open sky. Your ears pop when you drive into the city’s downtown. A rickety funicular makes trips up and down the bluff, offering stunning views of the snaking Mississippi. Growing up three hours downriver, the only thing I knew about Dubuque was that a lot of Catholics lived there, and that’s still true. The county is home to three Catholic colleges, two seminaries, and six religious orders. (Joe Biden, during his various bids for president, used to take ice cream to the nuns.) John Deere employs nearly 3,000 locals at its factory in Dubuque, making backhoes and crawlers. For decades, this was a region full of progressive labor leaders and pro-life Democrats, a place where you could actually find people who identified as “socially conservative but fiscally liberal.” The county’s rural voters were always more conservative, but their votes were usually outweighed by the Democrats in town.
The Simpsons used to live on Prince Street in Dubuque, near Comiskey Park. It was a mostly Catholic neighborhood where many residents were active in unions, such as the local United Auto Workers and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. During Obama’s 2007 caucus campaign, Megan would go door-to-door in the area and talk with her neighbors about the Illinois senator. They’d tell her how much they liked him, and how excited they were to vote. Some of those same people became precinct captains, and reliable Obama volunteers. The Comiskey Park neighborhood went overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008; lines on Election Day at nearby precincts were longer than the Simpsons had ever seen.
By the fall of 2016, Megan had moved away. But during the general election, she traveled home to Dubuque with a few friends to volunteer for Clinton. They drove over to Comiskey Park to start knocking on doors. This time, though, few of her former neighbors seemed excited. Most didn’t answer, and the ones who did told her different versions of the same thing: We don’t like Clinton, and we don’t trust the Democrats anymore. They were deflated. One man’s words are cemented in Megan’s memory: “No one cares; none of them are good,” he told her with a shrug. “I’m over it.”