Steuben is named after Friedrich von Steuben, a long-dead Frenchman who was recruited by Benjamin Franklin to lend his brilliance in military organization and strategy to the Continental Army during the American Revolution in the late 1700s. Von Steuben arrived in the North America in 1777 and quickly realized that the Continental Army was full of a bunch of dirty dudes. He taught them basic hygiene, how to organize their camps to keep their waste away from where they cooked, and how to build proper bathrooms, among other things. He showed up in time to spend the winter at Valley Forge and, due to his expertise, the majority of the Continental Army survived the harsh winter.

Set to the southeast of the center of Crawford County, Steuben takes up six square miles and is home to 131 people, according to the 2010 census (177 in 2000) and the sign on the south side of town. The town is 99.2 percent white and the other .8 is Native American, though you wouldn’t know it if you didn’t look up the demographic data. According to Bob, the census number includes “Dogs, cats, and the kitchen sink.”

Crawford County is on the southwestern edge of Wisconsin and borders Minnesota. The county flipped from voting for Obama (59%) in 2012 to Trump (50% to Clinton’s 45%) in 2016. Among the poorer counties in Wisconsin, the average weekly wage is $649 or lower, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ lowest category for weekly wages.

Lou Atkinson has thick gray hair that used to be black. It’s pulled back into a ponytail because she’s preparing meat for prime rib night at Lou’s R&R, the bar she’s owned for almost 30 years, since, as a single mother with kids, she came to Steuben, Wisconsin. She’s thin and taller than most other people in their 60s. Atkinson has intense, wise eyes that contrast with her reserved demeanor. Her husband, Bob, the other bartender is the opposite, he was a 70s part bro and isn’t shy about it.

Crawford is representative of many Midwestern rural counties that flipped from blue to red in the 2016 election. The polls and experts were wrong; so how did Donald Trump flip these counties that were critical to the election?

“People around here like what he [Donald Trump] says, but not the way he says it. They like the message he’s trying to put across,” Lou said.

Too, Donald Trump fought hard to win the votes that won him Wisconsin and the election. He visited Wisconsin five times between July and October, while Clinton didn’t visit Wisconsin, but once in April.

“A lot of people who I don’t normally see voting voted. An older, ‘redneck’ sort of crowd turned up for the election,” she said. Apparently all Trump’s visits caught the attention of a sort of hidden majority in rural counties.

Lou voted for Clinton because she’s always voted for the Democratic nominee. It’s as simple as that for her. Her husband, Bob, didn’t vote for the president, but voted for all the other offices.

“There’s an old saying: we have to pick between a crook or a liar, but which is which?” Bob said about his decision to not pick a presidential candidate.

“Most people around here? They voted for Trump,” he said. “There were a lot of people out I’ve never seen voting before – ever!”

Lou had some other ideas about how Trump won her town and county, Wisconsin, and the election.

“I think they were afraid of her,” she said about Hillary Clinton. According to Lou, Clinton is a career politician and Trump isn’t, that alone, was enough for some people to dump all their democratic loyalty and take the opportunity to vote for someone not part of the establishment – a common theme in towns and villages in the Mississippi River Valley.

“Everyone’s got problems. We’ll see what happens, but someone always gets left behind,” she said as she went on to tell me about how they missed the Obamacare cutoff by 30 bucks and now have a huge monthly amount to pay for their health care that they don’t even use.

After ranting for a little bit about getting left behind by Bush and Obama, Lou sighed and said that it’s fine and really doesn’t affect her, her business, or her life very much. She’ll still pay taxes, still work in her bar, and still love Bob, she said.

Lou returned to preparing meat for prime rib night and took a second to look at Bob and laugh at his contribution to the mostly-inappropriate conversation being shouted between everyone in the bar.

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The brown building holds up ramshackle signs, some are hand-written and some are hand-made, expressing some feature or service of the tiny store.

 From the ceiling, taking up every square inch, are hanging 2,700-plus dolls of all sizes that have been donated, purchased, acquired, and procured for the shop owner’s — Lucky’s — collection.

Lucky is thin with a slight limp, but still spry for a 70-something. The center of the main room is taken up by rows of washers and dryers. The walls feature tiny, locked curio cases displaying anything from lighters and binoculars to VHS tapes and knives for sale. Nothing here is new, everything is at least 20 years old and a lot of the larger items — a wagon wheel, a rusty garden tool — were made when things we now call antiques were new.

In this is charming haunt, Robert O’Brien is doing his laundry with his girlfriend. He’s 5-foot-7 with the ‘dad bod.’ Blonde with raggedy tattoos that were probably etched into his skin during his 14-year prison stint for attempted murder. He’s been out for three years. His most prominent ink is the faded tear drop under his right eye; the attempted murder was successful, according to O’Brien, the guy he tried to kill died later on — a technicality to those with teardrop tattoos, apparently. That means he couldn’t vote, but he’s happy Trump won.

Houston County, where Spring Grove is located, voted for Obama in 2012 (51%), but for Trump in 2016 (53%), so the county flipped from blue to red. The average weekly wage in Houston County is $585, almost 50% less than the national average, $974.

“I’m glad we got Trump. He needs to help us out here. There’s a better life and some of us want that,” O’Brien said.

He feels like poor people are ignored, no matter which politician wins. Donald Trump’s talk of creating jobs and fixing healthcare is what got O’Brien’s attention. He has three kids and wants to not have to worry about paying for checkups and braces.

Donald Trump won Houston County (and the election) by playing on the hopes of poor, white workers like O’Brien. He got their attention with his bold, abrasive speech, and earned their votes by speaking his mind and claiming to want the best for them, and, even better, according to O’Brien, “He’s not a politician.”

O’Brien works at Northern Engraving, making car parts.

“It’s for Cadillacs? Or some expensive fucking car,” he said. “Pays good.”

O’Brien lived in seven different states before he was 18, when he went to prison. From Louisiana as a child, he’s lived in Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and finally, Minnesota. As a child, he didn’t understand why they moved so much, but he says, once he was in his teens he realized why.

“My dad wasn’t a good guy.”

No matter where O’Brien lived, he could always find other kids to play with. From a young age, he was always following around the older boys, seeking their approval. At age 12, he started hanging out with some older kids that were part of a club called Growth and Development. After following them around for a while, they let him join, but he had to start stealing and committing other petty crimes. By the time he was 14, he was a full member of the Chicago-based gang called Gangster Disciples that has chapters in cities all across the United States. He could always easily find other GD family members after every move, he said.

Looking back on the time, O’Brien remembers a time when another rival gang in St. Louis, Missouri killed a younger boy that was shadowing the GDs — just as O’Brien had shadowed the older boys when he was too young to join. The other gang members smashed the boy’s head with a brick and threw his body into the Mississippi River.

“That was senseless. The kid was just hanging with us. Not even affiliated,” O’Brien said.

Donald Trump’s brash statements about race, deportations, and treating women poorly didn’t catch O’Brien’s fancy, but he had to look past that and stake his hopes on Trump’s economic promises.

“All of the racism, the hate, it doesn’t lead anywhere good – I didn’t like that,” he said.

O’Brien is staking a lot on Donald Trump, who has already drawn back on some of his more ridiculous statements, like repealing Obamacare and building a wall, but O’Brien feels like, even if the system is improved to include more people, poor people, it’ll all be for the best.

“We’re ignored. Sometimes we have no choice but to gangbang and sell drugs. There’s a better way and we want it,” he said.

O’Brien is a felon and can eventually vote again in Minnesota, but he’s still on probation – he got out of prison three years ago – so remains ineligible until probation is up in 2018. He has to go through the re-registration process and then he can vote again.

Donald Trump managed to win without O’Brien’s vote, but won because of the millions of votes from people of similar backgrounds and economic situations as Robert O’Brien from Spring Grove, Minnesota.

“We poor people are looked at like low-lives, maybe he’s [Trump] looking at us different,” said O’Brien. “We’re just trying to survive.”

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