Pulitzer Prize winner Art Cullen: An Electoral Map Awash in Red

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Dancing in the streets was sweet after a democracy on edge reclaimed itself by virtue of its great metroplexes. Come Monday, sobriety recalled four days spent glued to TV maps of great rural swaths of America awash in red. Iowa and Ohio, which Joe Biden himself thought were in play, went red again. The blue wall barely held in Wisconsin. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looms large.Poll after poll showed dead heats between Biden and Donald Trump in Iowa, and between Republican Sen. Joni Ernst and Democrat Theresa Greenfield. The pandemic was worsening. The economy was not well despite massive ag bailouts. Ernst flubbed the price of soybeans during a debate. It appeared Iowa could swing back to the Democrats. After all, Barack Obama is not that distant a memory.

The final Iowa Poll from The Des Moines Register on the Saturday before the election flummoxed Democrats when it showed Trump and Ernst with comfortable leads. Pollster Ann Selzer found a big shift among independents who wanted a GOP Senate to provide a check on the “socialists.”

Running against socialism when Trump larded $60 billion in payments on agribusiness in the past two years for disasters of his own making seemed like a thin soup. A rural electorate immersed in Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting and Facebook lapped it up.

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The urban-rural divide is vivid as ever. If it can’t be closed, the very idea of American democratic liberty remains challenged. There is a palpable resentment among those left behind from the economic coastal juggernauts that finds its expression in terrorist rubes from the sticks dressed in Hawaiian shirts planning to kidnap the governor of Michigan and execute her to start a civil war. Believe it. Most of us are not ready to pick up a gun. But it keeps racism bubbling. It erodes trust in institutions, like our courts or elections. It prevents us from solving existential crises like the pandemic or, even more threatening, global heating.

John Russell knows the back roads. He was Elizabeth Warren’s rural Iowa coordinator, a 30-something reared around Wellsville, Ohio, population 3,500, nestled in the corner of Appalachia that touches Pennsylvania and West Virginia, Like Dubuque, the Ohio River Valley used to be union country — steel, autos, kilns, dirty ­­­­hands. Those jobs are lost and the unions busted by President Reagan; no Mexican immigrant engineered it. Eight years ago, the Democratic state legislator from Russell’s county got 51% of the vote. This year, the Democrat got 26%. The margins were the same in rural Iowa. Turnout in rural precincts blew out the metros.

While in Iowa, Russell lived upstairs from a biker bar in Webster City, a typical county seat town of about 7,800 people that never really recovered from the Farm Crisis that snuffed out a generation of vitality in the 1980s. The Electrolux vacuum cleaner factory was moved to a maquiladora in Mexico. Retail trade bleeds to Amazon.com. Meantime, a new pork plant opened up nearby where the workforce is overwhelmingly Latino. Starting pay: $16 per hour, just enough to get by if you scrimp. Russell became friends in the bar with a foreman at the pork plant married to a teacher. Their household income would be well north of $100,000, big money in a small town. “He believes crap that would make your jaw drop,” Russell said. “White folks are buying what Fox and Sinclair Broadcasting are selling — it’s worldwide wrestling entertainment. Strong opinions loosely held.”

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