The post Flipped: A Short Documentary appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

“See these hands,” Buehler volunteers to the diverse journalism students who wander in from Milwaukee one night shortly after the presidential election and to whom he chats as if they are long lost kin. “Working hands. I’ve worked all my life. Paid taxes out the yin-yang. And that’s what I want, people working.”

Buehler straddles two states, so he is the perfect person to start this story. He is from Iowa but lives in Wisconsin. He has a big lit up “Vote Trump” sign in the lawn before his garage/house, although the “T” has fallen off one side, and he voted for Donald Trump. He previously voted for President Barack Obama because he thought it was time for an African-American president. He would vote for Michelle Obama. Now he says of the president, though: “He promised the moon and gave you the shaft.”

He’s included his phone number on the Trump sign, although it’s unclear why. In the distant background, churns the major landmark that unites this corner of the Midwest and its idiosyncratic and independent people: The Mississippi River, touching Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and northwestern Illinois. Ferryville, population 174, the closest town to Buehler’s home, is where you cross into Iowa; it’s an almost entirely white Norwegian enclave perched along the Great River Road that still touts a 1939 visit from Crown Prince Olav and Princess Martha. The county it’s in, Crawford, has mostly German heritage.

Ferryville was an anomaly here; it stuck with Hillary Clinton, but in many of the little villages and towns in Crawford County, Wisconsin, people like Buehler flipped their communities to the Republican for the first time since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In so doing, they helped throw their state to Trump, and, along with other Midwestern states, the White House.

“I think people just got sick of the same ol’ same ol’ and wanted something changed,” says Larry Lange, 86, a Trump voter who lives in nearby Steuben, Wisconsin. “Like Trump says, what’ve you got to lose? You’re already at the bottom.”

Trump improved on Mitt Romney’s share of the vote in every single community in Crawford, per Clerk of Courts data.

People worry that their votes won’t count but in an election that turned on margins like these (a 22,000-vote margin for Trump in Wisconsin, just over 10,000 votes in Michigan), white rural working class voters like Buehler – the members of the former Obama and Reagan coalitions – helped write the ending. Contributing to Trump’s victory: Lower turnout and enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton in the cities and here, where her voters seemed more likely to just stay home or go third party and, for the first time, voters had to produce an ID. Voter turnout was at a 20-year low.

However, the people who didn’t vote usually confided that they liked Clinton slightly more but hated both candidates and didn’t feel like their vote would change anything anyway. Example: Wisconsinite Jenny Donlon, who wrote in Betty White for president because she thinks White has more knowledge than both Clinton and Trump. Donlon, who thinks the media don’t understand the Heartland or what it’s like to milk a cow, unplugged her television so she didn’t have to hear the media talk about either candidate anymore.

Crawford County, where Buehler and Donlon live, switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump by 25 percentage points. Buehler’s original state, Iowa, dramatically switched from Obama to Trump; 45 minutes away stands Howard County, Iowa, which switched by the most in the nation (42 percent) and just 20 minutes up the road from that is Fillmore County, Minnesota, where the flip was a similar 29 percent. The region flipped to Trump by the highest percentages in the country, although other areas flipped to him in larger aggregate numbers.

These counties, if you look at the map, form a crimson cluster in the heart of the Mississippi River Valley, lands hotly contested by Chief Blackhawk (those wars still echo in place names like Soldier’s Grove) and settled by German and Norwegian immigrants fond of public displays of religion (“Need God?” asks the sign in bright red letters on one house) and who appreciate order and endless hard work. Today, it’s an almost entirely white and homogenous land of dairy farms, abandoned factories, decaying downtowns, canoe landings, and antique shops.

Its people are individualists. You can find people who listen to both Minnesota Public Radio and Rush Limbaugh. One laundromat has hundreds of dolls dangling from its ceiling, and an old man has a rusted-out plane in his garage. Almost to a one, these folks detest government and politicians (and the big media), even though they might both own the local bar and serve as town clerk. They feel very disconnected from the narratives in Washington and obsessed over in New York news studios. They barely mention race unless asked and could care less about Trump’s sex talk and alleged gropes. However, a few let comments slip that are against Muslims, and they’re quite unhappy with unrest in the cities.

Trump? They liked that he was something different, a non-politician and businessman, a change, and taking it to the elites they hate. They hope he improves the economy. And if they couldn’t stomach some of Trump’s rhetoric, a bunch of them voted for Bernie, Mickey Mouse (or their mother or themselves), or just stayed home. One woman in her 80s walking past the library in Mabel, Minnesota insisted she had never voted – ever. Clinton – despite her historic candidacy in a gender sense – seemed like the status quo. That was unacceptable.

“People are getting tired of working; you know, what used to be a 40-hour week, and now it takes 60-80 hours a week,” said Lime Springs Mayor Kevin Bill, who works on an 800-acre farm and used to own a bar/restaurant. His town is in Howard County, Iowa, which flipped by the highest percentage in the country. “The working guy is just tired of enabling people to do nothing, it boils down to economics, and it makes your blood boil when you pay your taxes and see how it was spent. There has not been any significant growth in Howard County at all.”

Vickie Ator, 61, the bartender at the local tavern, flipped to Trump after 40 years of voting for Democrats, in part because she couldn’t stand Clinton. She voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary. The guy she’s serving at the bar wrote Bernie in for the general election. “Nobody liked Hillary, so they went to Trump,” said Ator, who laments the town’s declining trajectory and reminisces about the John Deere plant that once was. It left about 45 years ago, confides the mayor.

Around the Mississippi River Valley, you taste, hear and see such sights of post-industrial America that are replicated hundreds of times across the clichéd ‘Rust Belt’ region of the United States. Although the populations are small (some towns have 34 voters), they symbolize the trend, where, from Iowa to Ohio to Pennsylvania to Michigan, white working class voters like Buehler and Ator switched their allegiance from the Chicago community organizer to the New York magnate, casting Trump as their latest populist superhero and channeling into him their seemingly never-ending thirst for “change,” a concept that they struggle to define but often boils down to economics, especially stagnant wages, job loss, Obamacare increases, and regulation.

If you line up the government maps for weekly wages in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, the counties that flipped for Trump have some of the lowest numbers in their respective states despite a strong work ethic honed from farming. They are isolated places that not many move into, but some move out.

It’s easy to run into people working two or even three jobs; the pony-tailed waitress in her 50s serving warm apple pie that she had just baked at one Wisconsin diner in Crawford County says she makes $9 an hour, up from $7.50 some 30 years ago. Her boyfriend tried to get a job, but, as a result, they lost their FoodShare Wisconsin eligibility, making it not worth it.

The waitress said she would have favored Clinton but was too busy to vote and didn’t see the point of it besides. Her elderly mother, sitting next to her at the counter of the otherwise empty establishment, didn’t vote either, even though she lives next door to the polling place.

In Crawford and Howard, the weekly wage is under $650. Compare that to the wealthiest counties where folks make at least $200 per week more. Out here, you might have to drive 28 miles to the closest grocery store, cell phone service is hard to come by, colleges are few, and the nearest hospital may be a county away.

Up the road only a short distance, in Harmony, Minnesota, economic duress similarly dominates conversations. Reuben Hershberger, 51, a former member of the Amish Community and Trump voter who also once voted for Obama, pauses from selling wooden furniture to explain that his government healthcare premiums are jumping from $300 to $900 a month. Asked whether the Muslim refugee influx to Minnesota drove his vote (since Trump made a big deal of that), Hershberger says he’s fine with the Somali refugees in the state, “If they abide by the law and pay taxes.” He’s more interested in talking about jobs and wages.

As for Buehler, his affection for Trump also comes from a position very specific to his own life. “I am the Forgotten Man,” he says, echoing a Trump post-election tweet. He voted for Trump in part because he wants order back overseas, at the border, and in the cities. Prior to retirement, Buehler worked in a local factory that produced the vents put in Chicago’s Sears Tower before the factory moved to Mexico. He accompanies that story with a wave toward such a ceiling vent in his garage.

Now he stays in a garage that he’s converted into living quarters, with his TV spewing Fox News a few feet from his car, not far from a cross affixed to his wall and a sign making fun of Osama bin Laden. He also supported Trump because he felt that Trump would bring jobs—like his own—back from abroad. Like many of his neighbors, he’s a ticket splitter and independent voter. He left the U.S. Senate race spot on his ballot blank. Democrats might take future heart in the fact that it doesn’t seem like many of these people are firmly fixed in one partisan position. To them, Trump was appealing because he promised change that echoed the past. It was, ironically, hope that motivated them.

Asked what connects such different states, Buehler said it’s not the water that unites. “It’s the land.” The people of the region tend to work with their hands and stay connected to the earth, he says; they are farmers, deer hunters, loggers, and cement mixers.

Their towns are graying; their younger generations have gone. It’s a youth flight if you will (Census data backs this up as many of the communities have aged since 2012). In Lime Springs, Iowa, the woman with the Budweiser at the end of the bar is 93, and business has dropped because people are too old to go out much anymore. You can spend hours in some of these places without ever seeing a child. This area, with its scarce population and decaying infrastructure, looks sort of like Cuba, one student notes, frozen in the amber of the 50s, with economic advancement never arriving, although out here, people just want government to leave them alone.

The areas also tilt male. In Mabel, Minnesota, the kindergarten class has more than 20 boys and three girls. They are as white now as they were 100 years ago. Mabel has a working phone booth that can only make local calls, and the room where Charles Lindbergh slept in the downtown hotel looks virtually untouched (patrons are entrusted with the key to the lobby). The Somali refugees who have flooded into Minnesota are in Rochester, the big city (although the African-American man and woman pumping gas in small town Harmony, Minnesota say they’ve never faced racism in town).

These hamlets are time capsules of the past right down to the Viking statue honoring Norwegian ancestors in the middle of one of them, and histories of these villages tend to paint their economic high points as 1912.

It’s all the perfect petri dish for Trump with his rhetoric about making America great… again.

The Trump Triangle

If one were to travel the length of Madison’s ‘beltline’ far beyond city limits, that person would eventually reach Crawford County. Two hours from Madison, the Wisconsin state Capitol, three hours from Iowa City and four hours from Minneapolis, the county is in striking distance to many of the Midwest’s major cities, but it looks anything but. Nestled far away from clustered buildings and busy city streets, Crawford County is a land of dairy farms, deep valleys, and spacious country roads.

Within Crawford County is an area that might be dubbed the “Trump Triangle.”

It’s a set of five towns that flipped the most in the county that flipped among the most in the state, which is part of the region that flipped the most in the entire country percentage wise from Obama to Trump. The central point of this triangle (in geography, not in stature) is the town of Steuben, population 131 (at least six years ago). It flipped most in the state of any community. The maximum population of Steuben in the last 100 years hit 321 in 1940, a 22-percent increase from 1930. In 2012, about one-third of Steuben’s small population voted for Romney. In 2016, about two-thirds picked Trump (although in a town that small, the shift in numerical terms is about the size of two families.)

The town is 99.2 percent white and the other .8 is Native American. According to Bob Atkinson, a local bar owner there, the census number includes “Dogs, cats, and the kitchen sink.”

The road directly into Steuben is surrounded by low marshes and broken trees. The roads are curvy; the rock ledges go up high on the left side of the road as the Kickapoo River flows on the right. Ears of travelers’ pop on these winding roads that culminate in Steuben. The highway into town was sponsored by a gun silencer gun company, and there are signs for guided cave tours. The roads are lined with what seem like abandoned cars, but it’s just people out hunting. Forget trying to use GPS.

Small and isolated Steuben gets its name from Baron Friedrich von Steuben, a Prussian soldier who helped George Washington restore order at Valley Forge. One blog dubbed it among the top 10 Wisconsin small towns where you’d never want to live, saying it had 25 people per square mile.

But the people here are friendly and like the place. It’s a “good” place with “good” people, you hear again and again. This is where you find Jo Bunders, a grandmotherly woman who serves chili and burgers out of her family-owned tavern, Jo’s Kountry Bar (bars, churches, and high school sporting events are about the only communal activities around here, except for the ritual of hunting.)

“I personally vote for who I like. I’m independent, I voted for Obama twice, and I voted for Trump just because I’m sick of the politicians who are out for themselves,” Bunders says, as she serves a tavern-full of orange-clad deer hunters, many of whom rant against government and politicians but most of whom didn’t bother to vote (there’s a similar disenfranchisement, economic stress, and disconnect among non-voters in Milwaukee, as it turns out.)

Jody Martin, 56 is a semi driver and Jo’s patron who did not vote because he thought it doesn’t do any good. Martin could not recall the last time that he voted. Brian Haworth, 53, has been coming to town for 30 years from Green Bay to hunt. Brian and his son 23-year-old son, Josh, both did not vote. Brian was quick to remark that his wife voted “for the guy with the fake toupee.”

Josh said he had a gut feeling that Trump would win because so many people he knew liked him and because a lot of people criticized Obama. He said he didn’t vote because there wasn’t anyone good to vote for.

Bunders, a small business owner like many out here, said she had a strong reason to vote: Her Obamacare costs are going up by $86. That might not sound like a lot to some people, but it puts her monthly healthcare costs at an entire full week’s wages.

“I’m self-employed,” said Bunders, who lives in a county without a hospital. “That’s one week’s pay check. Literally out of pocket.”

Steuben, like the rest of the triangle (or maybe it’s more of a pyramid with Steuben in the middle) is an intimate community where people skew old and know each other’s names and the names of each other’s dogs. There are two establishments in town, both bars, and both owned by middle-aged women with male sounding names, Jo and Lou. You might think women in non-traditional fields might favor Clinton, but Jo and Lou diverged: Jo went Trump, and Lou stuck with Hillary Clinton (the female bar owner in Lime Springs, Iowa, says she wants a female president, just a different one.)

Jo, who is also the town clerk, reveals that there used to be a post office in Steuben a few years ago, but a flood closed it for good. There was a factory in nearby Boscobel that lots of people worked at until a few years ago, when it moved overseas. Steuben remains so white that Jo can name the only non-white people off the top of her head (African-American boys who live with their mother down the road, a woman who never seems to be home.)

Race doesn’t come up first here, although the media have focused on it. The media felt that the sexual assault allegations and the Billy Bush tapes would be a big deal with the people…the media got that wrong too. The media thought that Clinton would win in a landslide…and obviously, the media got it wrong. Sensing a theme, here? The people of the Mississippi River Valley didn’t trust the media and felt ignored by it. Guess who got the last laugh? Not the media.

Bunders was one of those voters who seemed unbothered by Trump’s sex talk. She said that a lot of “misogynist sh-t” happens at her bar. She didn’t bring up race until she was asked about it, but when she was, she was candid.

Racial mentions are most likely broached only when an interviewer digs into the topic. When you dig further, many offer nuances. They might support Trump’s wall, for example, but they don’t want all illegal immigrants kicked out, just those who commit crimes. They don’t want all Muslims banned, just those who are terrorists. They’re unhappy with unrest in America cities, but they didn’t like anti Scott Walker union protests, either, even though some of them were union workers years ago… when they were also Democrats. They pop out a few comments that raise eyebrows, though.

Bunders is bothered by people who are in the United States illegally, not all immigrants. She said they need to do the paperwork and become citizens. Bunders believes that we do need those immigrants, though. “I’m not going to pick apples, tomatoes,” she said.

However, she focused on economics and change.

“Because he’s not a politician,” Bunders said of Trump, when asked to boil down why she liked him. “He’s just a businessman who started small, just a businessman and a regular person looks at that. He talked a lot of sh–t the first year, and he’d have a good week and then say something stupid, and I would think, ‘Oh my God,’ but the last month maybe of the candidacy, he really looked in the camera and looked like he was talking right at you.”

It may have been marketing savvy, but Trump managed to capture the “voice” of these people, in a way that made them feel like he was speaking authentically and to them directly, perhaps on the next bar stool over.

Bunders introduced a new theme that became part of the lexicon:The idea that Trump was the best option of two less than desirable choices. Some people were not completely sold on Trump, although they were sold on the idea of an outsider. However, Hillary they hated. Her emails did matter to them, but they felt that way before James Comey.

“People are just looking for change, something different than a politician,” Bunders added. “When I talk to people, he was the lesser of two evils. People were not impressed at all with Benghazi and the emails.”

From the doors of Jo’s, one can see Lou’s, the other establishment in town. In a county more populated by men, two powerful women own the city’s two taverns. The owner, Lou Atkinson, is the namesake of Steuben’s other business. There’s a watermark on the light post outside Lou’s R&R, where the Kickapoo River was once eight feet high, flooding the bar in 2007. Both Jo and Lou have run their bars for more than three decades.

“A lot of people who I don’t normally see voting voted,” Atkinson said. “An older, ‘redneck’ sort of crowd turned up for the election…People around here like what he [Donald Trump] says…They like the message he’s trying to put across.”

Lou 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.

Atkinson is a sort of town ambassador. She knows everyone who traverses the threshold. The place is so informal that a customer who grew up in town goes behind the bar to prepare her own drink. Lou’s husband, Bob Atkinson, who is of German/English/Norwegian descent, greeted everyone who came into the bar by name. He grew up four miles away on a farm. The Atkinsons live above the bar. Lou voted for Clinton, and Atkinson voted for all other offices but president, explaining, “There’s an old saying: we have to pick between a crook or a liar, but which is which?”

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.

A patron, Sheryl Groom, came into the bar ranting about Hillary. She suggested everyone read the emails and said people shouldn’t listen to the media. She believes television stations practice mind control. Another customer, Ted Groom, called Steuben and its neighboring villages “a quiet, little area to raise a family.” He was upset about Trump’s comments toward women, and voted Democratic, but he felt that others around town didn’t like Clinton and Obama’s comments on gun control.

Indeed, many of those sitting in both bars were hunters clad in orange for the first day of deer hunting (at Lou’s, there was a gun raffle going on too). They eat what they kill around here (one hunter who came into the bar said he’d shot the deer that had been turned into the venison jerky for sale there), and they don’t take kindly to people wanting to regulate their guns. They have that luxury because the areas are safe enough that you rarely see a cop and the local Sheriff’s Department advises one broken down motorist to leave her keys on the front seat with the car unlocked and a note for the tow truck driver.

But the hunters tend to bring up the economy before guns too. “Even though he (Trump) is bat sh-t crazy, hopefully he’ll fix the economy,” said one of the local hunters, Tim Bray, as he walked up to the highway down the road from Steuben, leaving his deer where he shot it. Bray flipped from Obama to Trump.

Lange, 86, is another Trump voter who epitomizes the close-knit aging nature of Steuben. Lange lives just down the road from Jo’s and Lou’s, literally surrounded by the past in a trailer near a shed that holds what can only be summarized as “stuff” he’s salvaged for decades from the town dump. He frequently visits Jo’s bar, especially for the early morning coffee klatsch (it’s the only place you can get coffee in the morning in several neighboring Trump Triangle towns). He and Jo were exuberant on election day and didn’t try to hide it.

Old gun magazines, toilet seats, and, most dramatically, the skeleton of an airplane, clutter the garage. Outside, a cow wanders around.

“Well, we all go down to Jo’s every morning for coffee with the boys,” Lange said from his trailer filled with what are now artifacts, but which – in Lange’s glory years – were modern technology. “I’m the oldest one but there’s a bunch that ain’t (sic) too far behind me.”

Lange moved to Steuben from Oconomowoc in the Milwaukee metropolitan area in the 1970s when the “yuppies” moved in. He recalls seeing a black man in town years ago but can’t quite remember his name. He was upset when he saw two Muslim women in the Walmart one day recently (it’s many miles away).

“The other day I was at Walmart, and I was walking down the aisle, and I turned around and there were three women – Muslim, I assume – dressed in all black,” Lange says, gesturing his hands from head to toe. “It took me back; I jumped. I have nothing against the Muslims, except, when they come to this country, I assume and expect them to assimilate to our society.”

He gets his news from an underground newspaper. When he inevitably says he voted for Trump because he wants change, he struggles to define what that means, but it becomes clear it’s a regressive change and, although he doesn’t spend much time on race, there’s some latent coding. He wants the way it used to be, at least for him. He keeps referencing American culture, and it becomes clear that, to him, that means Christian. He seems to skip over the negatives of the past – Jim Crow and so forth – by focusing on how it was better for him, economically.

“America was great in the 50’s,” Lange continued. “I was making $15 an hour; gas was only 27 cents. I want to get back to that.”

Lange also addressed the economic stress in Steuben today.

“If you look in the paper, you’re not looking at romantic jobs,” said Lange. “They’re drudgery jobs. Who wants to milk cows for a living, or farm work, or drive trucks or something like that? Not many people.”

Lange agrees that the village of Steuben is getting older.

“Young kids want the city life; I can’t blame them,” he said. “I was born and raised in the city, and I wanted the country. They just have the opposite frame of mind.”

He didn’t care about Trump’s sex talk. “It’s locker talk, I’ve been there – I know how guys talk when they are supposedly not being heard,” Lange chuckled.

From Lange’s trailer, the students decided to head to an outlier in the Triangle – Gays Mills, a town that stuck with Clinton a few miles away. Rumors flew that a commune existed near town, and the first thing you see are the apples on the signs (the fruit is the town theme) and a natural food store.

It turns out that Gays Mills is more female than the rest of Crawford, younger, and slightly more diverse, although that’s not saying much, but it is interesting in light of its Clinton tilt. The other way it differs from the towns around it: Lots of outsiders come in every fall to pick the apples in its organic orchards.

No one driving through the dreary, dark hillside north of Gays Mills, wishes for any technical problems on the road. But when the brakes fail entirely around 9 p.m. on a cool, Saturday night, anyone would love for someone who lives in the shadows of Crawford County to materialize next to their car.

Carlos Tinoco, 33, walked up to see what was wrong. The travelers had been following the loose rumors about a hippie commune called ‘Star Valley’ from the Gays Mills downtown area.

Tinoco quickly debunked the town’s folklore. He also revealed that he has been an employee at the farm Star Valley Flowers in nearby Soldier’s Grove for 14 years since he first came to the states illegally from Mexico.

According to statistics, 81.9 percent of the population in the Gays Mills area is of white descent while 6.6 percent are African American and another 6.6 percent are Hispanic. That might not sound like a lot of diversity, but, compared to surrounding towns, it is. Tinoco, who is Latino, says he can’t vote.

What’s it like to be non-white in such a white area? Tinoco said he has not experienced any racism while living in the county, although his daughter is worried about what will happen to her parents with Trump now in office.

From Steuben and Gays Mills, one ventures down the rolling hills of Highway 26 to Prairie Du Chien—the big city of the county. It’s about a 25-minute drive. Although the population difference between Steuben and Prairie du Chien is roughly 6,000, the sentiments among the people were similar. The town’s population has almost 600 veterans. It is 93 percent white. Prairie du Chien is Wisconsin’s second oldest town and was known for being the center of French fur trading.

Donlon, the Betty White write-in voter, stands at the back of Bob’s Bar on the main strip, Blackhawk Avenue, of Prairie du Chien. She expresses distrust in the media. Throughout the weekend, across the states, this theme returned quite often.

Donlon grew up in a small Iowa town, but she went away and earned a four-year degree from Iowa State University in Ames. Donlon has the unique perspective of being from a small town, living in a bigger town (Prairie du Chien) and attending a large university that, with 36,000 attendees, is six times bigger than Prairie du Chien and many times larger than her original hometown.

“Have they even seen cows?” Donlon, a dairy farmer, said of the national news media. “Corn, milk and beef prices are too low. It is horrible. Farmers are not making ends meet.”

Michael Paul Steven Jacobs works in a prison nearby that is filled with inmates from Milwaukee. He repeatedly insisted that Clinton was a crook when he joined the conversation. He despised Clinton, announcing that he was “Tired of Hillary’s little b-tch as-. She should have been indicted. If we did that we would be in prison. She has enough to bury her.” It makes one wonder if a different Democrat, say Joe Biden, could have retained these voters.

Jacobs felt that Bernie Sanders appealed to a lot of voters who think the system is “rigged” and switched to Trump (especially as Sanders tagged Clinton for months as a corporate elite insider making money off Goldman Sachs speeches). Jacobs also thinks the system is “rigged.” Many people repeated Trump’s endlessly repeated and boiled-down phrases. They all knew them. Hillary was a criminal. The system was rigged. Make America great again. Drain the swamp.

But Jacobs also added, returning to the underlying refrain: “People are tired. Milk farmers are not making any money.”

Iowa Beckons

From Prairie du Chien, it takes five minutes to reach Marquette, Iowa. Although the journey is short, it seems to be a journey through time rather than simply down West Iowa Road. Marquette and its sister city McGregor resemble a West Virginia mining town of the 1850s.

The rolling, developing bluffs that the town is dug into play the role of the Appalachian Mountains that form the old mining towns up and down its axis. The buildings are brick, symmetrical, similar in height and close enough to touch. The main street, so named, is long and straight but elevates up and down with the varying gradient of the land.

From Marquette-McGregor, the students traveled to Lime Springs, Iowa, a mostly flat and barren drive, although along the way was an Iowan farm field with two Trump signs stuck into bales of hay. The town of Lime Springs – located in the county that flipped by the highest percentage to Trump in the nation – itself was depressing, at least on a Sunday night. There were few cars, few establishments and even fewer humans. The ones who were reachable had plenty to say.

Ator, 61, the bartender who’d switched to Trump after 40 years of voting for Democrats, owns KCD’s in Lime Springs. She is a strong and notable. Trump was the first Republican candidate this former welder and farmer ever voted for. The only other businesses apparent on the Main Street were another bar (closed) and an antique store. The town stands in the shadow of granaries. The average age of the patrons in her bar that Sunday night seemed to hover around 80.

Ator felt that both candidates “sucked” but voted for Trump because he seemed more authentic than Clinton. She also swooned to the Trump tune because Lime Springs has seen its fair share of jobs head overseas. Ator said the town used to buzz, and streets used to be packed. In the past, it was difficult to find a parking spot for a car; today, it is difficult to find a car for the parking spots.

“This used to be a booming​ ​town​ ​to​ ​grow​ ​up​ ​in. You couldn’t find a place to park in Lime Springs because it was so busy and wild,” said Ator.

Lime Springs was named after a spring that continues to produce fresh water today. Most of the jobs in town are related to agriculture. The historical site of the Lidtke Mill is known for its buckwheat flour that used to provide 100 barrels of flour a day. Besides being known for agriculture, Welsh heritage is deeply seeded in the community in an otherwise Norwegian and German region.

“There has not been any significant growth in Howard County at all,” said Mayor Bill.

Howard County’s population estimate was 9,410 in 2015. The unemployment rate has declined since Obama’s two terms in office (that’s true also in some of the other counties in the project), yet Howard County also has one of the lowest weekly wages in the entire state, averaging about $642 a week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  The Labor force is increasing as the wages are continuing to stay low.  If there are more jobs, people aren’t making very much at them.

Why did she switch to Trump? “Number one, he isn’t into politics,” Ator said of Trump, echoing the mistrust of the “establishment” and government also found in the other states. She sounded a lot like Bunders, one state over. “He used his own money. Nobody could bribe him.”

She added, “How can I be called a racist for voting for Trump when I voted for Obama?”

Michelle Stockman, 36, sat on her porch not far from the bar smoking a cigarette while her daughter stood behind the screen door. She had short blond hair and wore a dark hoodie. At first she was very hesitant to talk about politics and said “I don’t know” frequently. Eventually, she grew comfortable and said she voted for Donald Trump.

“At least he’s not a criminal,” Stockman said.

Stockman lives on Willard Street in Lime Springs, Iowa. It was quiet that Sunday evening. Many people were in their houses, hiding away from the chilling weather. The small dog next door to Stockman was chained outside barking happily at passersby.

Stockman previously voted for President Obama. She also liked Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders.

In reaction to accusations that Trump supporters are all racist bigots, she said that is false, and people who think that are the bigots.

Trump’s comments about women did not bother her.

“I’ve worked with men and they’re all like that,” said Stockman, who works for Dr. Pepper.

Stockman thought that Trump’s phrase, “Make America Great Again” was dumb. Her 16-year-old daughter wore a hat with the phrase, and Stockman told her to take it off. She didn’t want her daughter to get harassed.

She also didn’t like the protests after Trump had won. “A lot of people in their 20s don’t know how to take rejection,” said Stockman. There were no specific policies that Trump and Clinton talked about that Stockman thought were important.

“I didn’t give a sh-t, I went to go to bed,” said Stockman about election night. She said the election was like a T.V show.

Stockman’s neighbor, Todd Mensink, 40, came out of his home in a hoodie and plaid pajama pants. He shivered a bit as he held a cigarette between his fingers.

Mensink is a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Iowa. He voted for Jill Stein this year and in 2012. Mensink did vote for Obama in 2008. He listens to both Minnesota Public Radio and Rush Limbaugh.

“Do you keep voting for the lesser of two evils or take a stand?” Mensink said.

Amish Country

About a half hour north from Iowa, on the way into the small town of Harmony, Minnesota, the click clack of an Amish horse drawn carriage can be heard as it makes its way into town. The downtown strip is peppered with wooden hand carved statues that are Norwegian themed, yet, oddly resemble gnomes. On a Sunday afternoon, purple Vikings jerseys are visible through the store fronts and bar windows. The further north you go, the more Scandinavian it all looks, right down to the early Christmas decorations.

While some Harmony natives were out and about Sunday grocery shopping, the heart of the neighborhood was mostly still, although some residents were out tidying their lawns in preparation for the harsh Minnesota winter (or in neighboring Mabel, they were in the local school gymnasium playing Bingo).

Fraying infrastructure and all that associates with it was replaced by something more bustling and refined. The streets were newer, clean, well paved and recently painted. When one travels laterally off the main-strip of southern Minnesota hamlets into the residential areas, one sees manicured lawns. However, the wage maps show a similar story to the rest: This county, Fillmore, like Crawford and Howard before it, hosts some of the lowest weekly wages in its state. And it flipped dramatically to Trump (although Trump made Minnesota far more competitive than anyone expected, he did lose that state).

A history of Harmony says it used to be an important trading point in southern Minnesota for corn and grain. It had a litany of businesses back then, including a rolling mill, lumber yard, and “three general stores which are also important enough to deserve the name of department stores,” says the history. It was also known for its “moral and progressive spirit,” says the article.

What the people of Southern Minnesota expressed about the election was nearly identical to that of their Wisconsin and Iowan neighbors.

Robert David-Schmidt invited a couple of reporters into his garage, a garage whose centerpiece was the bloody corpse of a deer, a fresh kill. Before approaching the garage, Schmidt introduced the trio to “Captain Little,” the man’s semi-truck he uses for work as a trucker. He is the quintessential hard-nosed “rub some dirt on it” American. He voted for Trump and has voted Republican all his life.

“I was happy with the outcome, but not with how the other side took it,” Schmidt said. “Black lives matter changed it. What’re they whining about? What do they want?”

He also continued the narrative regarding national news and how the pre-election projections focused on the urban areas and avoided the common man.

“Media ran the election,” Schmidt said. “Twin cities are heavy blue…you need to go to small places.”

A few blocks away, some of the group sat down with Reuben Hershberger, the former Amish man with the wood furniture store. He was shunned by the Amish community in Harmony just down the road for leaving it, and now must travel to Ohio to refurnish his furniture store. The students were directed to him by an anguished Amish tour guide, Rich Bishop, 66, who voted for Clinton and informed them about Trump voters, “There’s a group of people who are very reactionary. (Democrats) didn’t emphasize how well America was doing now, and we didn’t need to make America great again. I didn’t believe people were so uninformed.” He thinks education matters and that too many people in these areas are limited educationally, not only when it comes to college but also travel.

Cleaning his hands off with a nearby rag, Hershberger, 51, takes time out of his day at work to talk with students about his Amish upbringing and thoughts on the election.

Hershberger grew up Amish but left the community when he was 18. Despite his father being the bishop, Hershberger expressed that religion in the Amish community was unappealing. The church oversees telling you how to live and what you can and can’t do (another former Amish woman down the road tells the students she asked God to put the right person to vote for into her head. She ended up not voting). The area is largely filled with Lutheran and other churches; the Old Order Amish in the area are separatist from the already isolated community and most don’t vote.

Amish are also required to pray eight times a day, not wear bright clothing, wear hair a certain way and have clothing be a certain length. In the Amish community, the church takes the role of the government.

Wearing a beige colored jacket with his name embroidered into it with navy blue thread, Hershberger stepped out of his small office that was filled with papers of furniture orders hanging on the walls. Standing in front of the furniture products that are painstakingly made by his Amish friends, Hershberger told the students that he voted for Obama in 2008. Hershberger voted Obama for the change that he promised. After not seeing the change that he wanted, he voted for Romney in 2012.

Living in Fillmore county, which flipped from Obama to Trump, Hershberger said he and a lot of his friends voted Trump. While Hershberger said he has no problem with a woman being president, he has a hard time believing Hillary Clinton would commit to her promises – a trust issue that could stem back to his trust in Obama for change and his subsequent letdown when he felt he didn’t see enough.

Still wanting to see a change, which he defines as largely economic, Hershberger voted for Trump because he wanted to see something different since Trump is a businessman. Hershberger does not want to be so dependent on the government.

While Hershberger did say that he wants the government to be stricter on letting people into the United States, he isn’t opposed to letting immigrants in. He thinks deporting so many people wouldn’t be a good thing for the country.

“We’re all from different nations; I don’t think we should keep them out,” said Reuben. “If we send them back, who would take their jobs?”

Hershberger still has the faint look of the Amish. His blond hair dangles past his ears. His baseball cap has a fish on it. He doesn’t think he was uninformed; he just preferred Trump. He didn’t mind a woman being president, just not Hillary. He and many of his friends voted for Trump. The Old Order Amish community he left seems just a few notches more separatist than the other anti-government folks in these areas.

Minnesota is wrestling with the fourth-highest Obamacare premium increases in the country (thrust on them in late October, right before the election), leading even the Democratic governor there to call it unaffordable. And don’t forget it’s a state that once elected a wrestler as governor. Hershberger highlights his large premium increase ($600 a month, a lot for a small businessman).

In nearby Mabel, Minnesota, it’s also easy to find Trump voters, even though the state hasn’t voted Republican since 1972.

Its quaint main street has a post office, American Legion, barber and a liquor store. Named for a railroad man’s daughter, the town’s website says it was quite thriving – more than 100 years ago. “In 1912 thriving businesses lined both sides of Main Street for two blocks,” says the site. On nights after around 9 p.m. now, the town falls deadly silent and the headlights of cars are seldom seen. There is one restaurant that feeds the town’s appetite for food and drink, but also entertainment. The Highway 44 Bar & Grill, beyond normal restaurant amenities, hosts concerts and meat raffles. There, the group met a man who prides himself for being off the grid.

Ron Gerard is 60 and was having breakfast before a day of hunting.  He voted for Trump.

“I’m not in a city,” said Gerard, clad in orange. He sat next to a friend from Alaska, and it was hard not to see the similarity.

“I’m not around people all the time. I’m here where I am alone. It’s slower. I can think for a little bit. We don’t have 6 million people like New York City. We are all rural. A lot of these people that live in cities are sheep. They don’t have a mind of their own.”

Gerard maintains his privacy and individuality. He doesn’t use ATM’s, does not have a credit card, doesn’t own a smartphone or computer, and does not use the internet. He says he hasn’t used email for 25 years, oblivious to the fact that it didn’t yet exist.

“Politicians are in it for the money,” said Gerard, sounding exactly like an echo of his neighbors in the nearby states.

“Everybody in the country is against politicians,” he concludes.

“I just don’t care for politicians at all.”

This story was written by Keaton Walkowski, with reporting from the UWM reporting team, including Jordan Garcia, Sabrina Johnkins, Brandon Anderegg, Nicole Frechette, Jenna Gaidosh, Ana Martinez-Ortiz, Christina Luick, Madison Goldbeck, Kaliice Waker, Nyesha Stone, Aubryana Bowen, Jenna Daroszewski.

The post It’s Not the Water appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

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.

The post Lou appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

The post Inside the Minds and Homes of Voters in Prairie du Chien, WI (Video) appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

Beyond the piles of worn furniture and old filing cabinets he salvaged from the town dump, resides a plane in the making, which Lange has been working on since 1975. Lacking almost all but the pilot’s seat and a windshield, the plane is nothing more than a rough-edged metal skeleton that he hopes to get flying before he dies.

Standing in Lange’s shed was like taking a step back into time. The space was consumed with rusted tools, tattered gloves and stock piles of magazine that dated back decades.

While some would question his incessant need to hold on to this seemingly useless clutter, Lange is sure that every last piece has its purpose.

“Some would call it junk; I call it projects.”

But it’s not just the literal past that he clings to; he is also clinging in a sense, to the metaphorical past as he explains why he voted for Donald Trump.

Reflecting on a time of economic prosperity, Lange reminisces about the good ol’ days.

“America was great in the 50’s,” said Lange. “I was making $15 an hour, gas was only 27 cents. I want to get back to that.”

While Lange prides himself on being proponent of change and progress, which he believes resides in a Trump presidency, you can’t help but wonder if his idea of progress is nothing more than a form of unconscious regression.

As Lange repeatedly references change to justify his vote for Trump, the change he describes when pressed, seems to be nostalgic in nature.

Raised on the fringe of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Area, Lange was born and grew up in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. It wasn’t until 1996, just a year after his retirement, that he made the move to the small rural village of Steuben, on western Wisconsin’s edge. Lange noted that he made the move in an attempt to evade the “Yuppie” infiltration.

Lange has become somewhat of local legend in Steuben, Wisconsin, always prepared with a form of political discourse at the ready.

It was his good friend and local bar owner, Jo Bunders, who pointed the student journalists in his direction. She explained that if you wanted to talk politics, Larry was your guy. With shared support for the Republican candidate, the two always had a lot to talk about.

“I had my mind made up as soon as he got the nomination,” said Lange. “Jo and I – we cheered like hell when he won it; we didn’t care who knew.”

Despite his candidate’s victory, Lange admits that he was surprised Wisconsin flipped red this last election.

“I was amazed Wisconsin went Republican. I really thought Hillary had this state,” said Lange. “I felt like nobody talked about Trump. If you talked about Trump you were a jerk, so, we just kept our mouths shut.” Turns out there were a lot of people doing that. Steuben flipped by the highest percentage from Obama to Trump in Crawford County, Wisconsin, which flipped among the highest percentages in the country.

Lange voiced his political insights illustriously, mentioning that the famous, “Make America Great Again” campaign spoke to him in volumes. For Lange, immigration was a driving force behind his decision.

“Immigrants that didn’t assimilate took over the country and ruined it,” said Lange. “I don’t know if the wall will ever get built, but at least he will take care of this immigration problem, one way or another.”

But for Lange, Mexican immigrants aren’t the only issue. Shedding some light on his thoughts about the Muslim ban, Lange recalled a shopping excursion he took the week before.

“The other day I was at Walmart and I was walking down the aisle and I turned around and there were three women – Muslim, I assume – dressed in all black,” Lange said, gesturing his hands from head to toe. “It took me back; I jumped. I have nothing against the Muslims, except when they come to this country, I assume and expect them to assimilate to our society.”

Lange admits that he hasn’t favored a Democratic candidate since the Kennedy administration.

“I didn’t like his womanizing, but goddamn he got things done,” said Lange.

However, when Trump’s notorious rhetoric came into question, Lange was not disturbed by his lewd comments.

“It’s locker talk, I’ve been there – I know how guys talk when they are supposedly not being heard,” Lange chuckled.

The sexual assault accusations had no effect on Lange’s decision.

“Cripes almighty, I think some of them were even a setup,” said Lange. “I mean, it’s a case of he said she said. All you can do is hope it ruins a guy’s reputation enough where they won’t vote for him. Man, I’ve had women put their hands on me, and I’ve hands on women – nothing is said, nothing is done.”

Lange became almost sentimental about the issue.

“It’s actually a sign of affection in my interpretation,” said Lange. “But, they want to turn it around. I don’t doubt that he said all that crap, but like I said, it’s just words. It’s not like what Bill did.”

While immigration certainly played a roll Lange’s selection, economic advancement was settled at forefront of his Trump allegiance.

“I hope he [Trump] lowers the corporate tax and gets the business back in the country and puts a tariff on what’s coming in,” said Lange. “Our trade deficit is $3 billion – that’s bologna. Man oh man, we’ve been doing it for years and years and it’s killing us.”

Lange also addressed the economic stress on a local level.

“If you look in the paper, you’re not looking at romantic jobs,” said Lange. “They’re drudgery jobs. Who wants to milk cows for a living, or farm work, or drive trucks or something like that? Not many people.”

Lange alluded to the fact that the lack of appealing jobs may have had an effect on the Crawford County demographic. He admits that village of Steuben is getting older.

“We go down to Jo’s every morning for coffee with the boys and I’m the oldest one, but there’s a bunch of ‘em that ain’t too far behind me,” said Lange. “Young kids want the city life; I can’t blame them. I was born and raised in the city, and I wanted the country. They just have the opposite frame of mind.”

Lange is sure that the county’s flip should not be credited to a shortage of jobs, but rather an overall demand of transformation.

“I think people just got sick of the same ol’ same ol’ and wanted something changed. Like Trump says, what’ve you got to lose? You’re already at the bottom.”

The post Old Man Time appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

There’s not much to do in these rural areas, but people make do. They even create a competition out of who can catch the biggest buck.

This is the time of year these towns wait for. With grocery stores miles apart, a 150-pound white-tailed deer could last a three-member family a few months. People actually eat what they kill. You might even see a coyote lying in the back of a hunter’s pickup truck, but the deer are the main prize. It’s only two hours and 30 minutes out of the inner-city of Milwaukee, but you enter into a new dimension. As the animals are hiding, the hunters are preparing for their next meal. Hunters are everywhere: in garages, gas stations and in bars. Their cars line the highways and are tucked away along side roads.

By 11:12 a.m. on the opening day of deer season, Tim and Jacob Bray had already killed their first prey. With the dead whitetail on the side of the road, and a pocket full of bullets, the 44-year-old father and his 15-year-old son reflected on the new president-elect.

“Even though he’s bat sh-t crazy, hopefully he’ll fix the economy,” said Tim as he walked up to the western Wisconsin highway leaving his deer where he shot it.

Despite his concerns, Tim voted for Donald Trump after backing Barack Obama in 2012.  He’s part of a trend in this area of western Wisconsin, where white working class voters like Tim flipped in dramatic percentages from Obama to Trump.

“Hopefully [Trump] brings in jobs back to the United States.”

Hunters in general – at least those out here – favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton because they think he understands them more than she does. She doesn’t understand the importance of guns in their lives, they say; it’s not for violence, but for a means to survive.

Although Jacob couldn’t vote, just like his father he would have voted for Trump. They hope Trump brings economic relief, but Tim is scared Trump’s going to bring other things into the office.

“I worry about things getting worse, like the racism. All the cops, they’re shooting people. Hopefully a lot of it changes.”

Tim and Bray were found hunting in Marietta, Wisconsin next to an isolated road with their bolt-action rifles.

Hunting is a bonding experience that brings an entire town together. Everyone knows everyone and if their guns were taken away, they fear they would be losing a part of themselves.

And in the bars, you’ll often find hunters passing out venison sticks. The deer was likely hunted, killed, processed and eaten within 15 miles. People here stick closely together and they seemed to vote in a pack this time around too.

Tim just wants to hunt without having to worry about his safety, but he’s not sure if Trump can help with that even though he’s a white male, in a majority white county, who’s armed with a gun.

“The way people treat each other, it’s not as friendly as it should be. Anybody should be able to walk down the street and not have to worry about being harassed.”

Tim, Jacob and other hunters believe Trump will be the change they need economically. They were willingly to take a chance on a man with no background in politics.

If Trump disappoints him like Obama did, Tim says the voters will just throw him out too. Then he jokingly adds that Trump might be killed anyway.

In the meantime, they’ll keep hunting. Up here, even the houses are part of the dress code. From the camouflage shades to the rugs, it always clear when a hunter resides there. It’s safe to say, the rural areas of Wisconsin chose Trump in hopes he’ll bring the change Obama promised them in 2012.

-With contributions from Jordan Garcia

The post The Hunters appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

Buehler opened up his metal shed of a home to two complete strangers: a professor and her student. The white door pulled inward and a new world was exposed.

“I am one of the Forgotten Men,” he said. “These are calluses on these hands.”

Trump’s face was on the screen on FOX News straight ahead on the flat screen; Buehler was standing to the left and, on the right, was his $60,000 car, which he doesn’t use since has everything he needs in his garage.

At age 73, Buehler’s retired and living in his garage. With 10 Donald Trump signs in his possession, Buehler’s 4×8 foot bright neon sign of Trump outside his home tops them all. He’s located near the Mississippi River on a barren road. There are no street lights, but that’s okay, as you’ll still see his Trump sign or in this case, “rump.” Somehow the “T” went missing. Buehler’s sign contains its own lights, showcasing his support for the new president-elect. He even includes his phone number, although it’s unclear why.

He’s from Iowa, but lives in Wisconsin, and he flipped his vote from Barack Obama in 2008 to Mitt Romney and then Trump. He lives in Crawford County, Wisconsin, which has among the highest percentage of voters in the country who flipped from Obama to Trump.

His clothing fit the scenery of Western Wisconsin, worn out and dull. He had on a grey hoodie, blue jeans with grey strands of hair reaching for the ceiling of his garage.

“I wasn’t into this politics sh-t, until Trump.”

Buehler believes Trump’s businessman demeanor is the change America needs.

After the first four years, he felt Obama turned on everyone.

“He promised the moon and gave you the shaft.”

Back then he thought it was time for a black president; America needed change.

Buehler’s worked two-three jobs at once, his entire life.

“We haven’t got a social security raise for how many years?” Even if he was to receive a raise, he said it’s used to pay back Medicaid.

He’s been a farmer and owner of a grocery store. Buehler worked in a factory for 15 years and was even a part of the union. He used to make register vents for Sears Tower, until his job moved to Mexico. He believes Trump will bring jobs back to America; he’s a businessman not a politician, according to Buehler.

His family originally came from Norway to Iowa for labor (factory jobs). His dad was German and he had a family of farmers, so it’s not surprising he voted for Trump. Farmers seem to love Trump because he promises to get rid of farm restrictions.

In 1988, Buhler moved to Ferryville, Wisconsin, where he opened a store, that he now lives in. It doubles as a garage, cars and all, right next to the corner where he’s created his living room. He sold guns, ammunition, liquor, hardware, plus he tagged and registered deer. He sold out of his garage for 20-30 years, but now he spends his time watching FOX news. Buehler still has old cases of things he used to sell. He has everything he needs in his garage, even a bed to sleep in.

Buehler has a 72-year old wife, who still works. She lives inside in their home, while Buehler lives in his garage surrounded by cars, with a cross on the wall. They’ve been married for 52 years, and they’re a happily married couple, according to him.

When asked why he voted for Trump, Buehler made it clear he wasn’t prejudiced. He voted for Trump in hopes the President-elect will secure the borders and enforce the law. Obama didn’t do enough when it came to protecting the police, said Buehler. He doesn’t like disorder, and protesters bother him a lot. He didn’t like the anti-police protests in the cities, and he wasn’t happy about the Act 10 protests in Madison over Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining law.

Just like many other Trump voters in the area, Buehler also voted for Trump because he dislikes Hillary Clinton.

“She actually killed four people,” he said, referring to Benghazi and the people who died there. “Trump is only accused of cuddling women.”

Buehler wasn’t bothered by Trump’s comments about women.

“Locker room talk is locker room talk. If guys don’t talk like that, they aren’t guys.”

Buehler is a true Trump fan. He has a lot of faith in Trump and hopes he’s not disappointed in the next four years. Trump’s signature slogan, “Make America Great Again,” isn’t something Buehler agrees with, though.

“We’ve always been great. We’re paying everyone’s bill.”

Even though he doesn’t like Obama and is a fan of Trump, Buehler would’ve voted for Michelle Obama if she ran for president.

One thing Buehler wanted people to remember is, he is the person everyone pays no attention to. He wouldn’t stop talking to the strangers as they exited his shed home; he had lifetime of stories he wanted the world to finally hear and, until now, almost no one asking for them.

Buehler is a white man in America and feels he is forgotten. With Trump in office, Buehler is sure he will be noticed again.

The post The Forgotten Man appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

Offering their Saturday night prime rib special, Elinor, 73, is the only customer at the inn to accompany her daughter, Carolyn, 50, who is busy working at the inn. So eager to please her new customers, Carolyn directed the eight strangers towards the dining room. She had no idea that she was about to tell these strangers about her life.

Both Elinor and Carolyn weren’t eager to talk to the students when the topic of the election was brought up. They continued to reply to answers by saying, “I don’t know,” and shaking their heads (and wouldn’t give their last names, although they allowed their pictures to be taken).

Getting nowhere with the conversation, the students felt a sense of awkwardness and the questions began to dwindle off. After ordering a cup of warm coffee, Elinor and Carolyn began to open up to the students.

Elinor didn’t vote in the 2016 election because she said she wasn’t excited about either candidate. She labels herself as a Republican who voted for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and liked Republican candidate for the state Legislature, Dan Kapanke.

“I can’t complain about either one,” said Elinor.

Although she considers herself a Republican, Elinor said she would have voted for Clinton, as did the majority of Crawford County. She said she regrets not voting because she didn’t think the race would be so close.

In a town that prides itself on its apples and has an Annual Apple Festival in September, it’s no surprise to find a glowing red apple light plugged into the wall inside the inn.

Elinor said that people from all over, especially Iowa, come to pick the apples. Unlike the many other isolated Trump towns, this Clinton town has a lot of visitors coming in and out. Having the diverse outside visitors could have some influence on the town’s people. It’s a Hillary Clinton hold out town in the middle of areas that flipped for Trump. It’s anomalous in other ways; for one it has a natural foods store in town and rumors of a commune nearby.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Gays Mills is a town of 530 people that are getting younger. The median age decreased from 47.5 to 37.3 from 2010 to 2014. This is also different from the county around it, where the county as a whole aged.

The town has continued to have a more female population throughout the years, with females making up 51.6% of the total population in 2014. This, too, is different from the county it’s in, as Crawford County as a whole tilts male.

Gays Mills is also losing racial diversity. Only two non-white citizens identified themselves as American Indian and Alaska Native in 2014 compared to six Black or African American and six American Indian and Alaska Native in 2010. Still, that’s a bit more than other towns nearby.

Students hoped to find more excitement when they heard about a myth that hippies reside near Gays Mills in a community perfectly named, Star Valley. Unfortunately, this story of a couch in the middle of the woods where these hippies would drink oils seemed to be false. The quiet town of Gays Mills made the students feel like they were Ren McCormack in Footloose. No cars were zooming by on the dimly lit streets, no music was playing at the apple inn and no one was outside, strolling through the town.

With her red apron on to match the red apples and her sandy blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail for work, Carolyn brings over a fresh apple pie. She made it in the back.

Unlike her mother, Carolyn has never voted. She said her reason for not voting is because she never has the time. She’s always working. Either at the inn or busy raising her three grandkids.

“My life is pretty much work, go home, take care of kids,” said Carolyn of her constant life cycle.

Carolyn is used to hard work. She grew up on a dairy farm and her family has lived in the area for a long time. She has been working at the inn, baking pies for seven years. Before that, she was working at another restaurant for 10 years.

Starting at seven dollars an hour and working her way up to nine dollars an hour, Carolyn makes $550 every two weeks.

Carolyn and her boyfriend were on FoodShare until her boyfriend got a job, making them ineligible.

“Everything that Obama did with Obamacare, Trump is going to take away,” said Carolyn. “Every time you try to better yourself, they [the government] takes it away.”

For Carolyn, losing her FoodShare eligibility made her question, why work when she can live off the government instead?

Few comments were mentioned about Clinton, but Carolyn did share that she didn’t appreciate Trump’s “locker room talk.”

“For me, Trump was a womanizer,” said Carolyn.

As the students were finishing up eating Carolyn’s apple pie, an older gentleman came inside the inn. The customer was willing to share a quick thought on his feelings about Trump’s win.

Unlike his fellow county members, he voted Obama in 2012 and switched to Trump for the 2016 election. He votes for Republicans because in his words, “Republicans get things done.”

“Might as well live with it and see what he does,” said the man before he disappeared into the other room for his meal

Having hungry customers sitting in the dining room to attend to, Carolyn got straight back to work to please her new guests.

-With reporting from Christina Luick

The post Sharon’s Red Apple Inn appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

David Krier has been editor of The Boscobel Dial for 24 years; on Jan. 1, 2017, it’ll be 25.

He’s familiar with the town and its people so much that the election results didn’t surprise him in the slightest. When he entered the bar one day a few weeks after the election, he planned to do an article on electronic deer tagging and how it’s affecting local bar owners such as Bob Atkinson.

Hunters are now required to tag their deer electronically, and in a packed bar where the bartender doesn’t know the Wi-Fi password, it’s easier to stop in for a drink or two and then head home.

Krier wants to write the story, and Bob and his patrons are more than willing to talk to him about it. They trust him and his work.

Bob, for his part doesn’t seem too worried, but it’s still early and the possible effects on business haven’t settled in. Krier on the other hand is worried, not about bar business but about his own job as a journalist and what the future holds.

Krier grew up in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a town that has a population of 10,000, a number that’s especially colossal compared to Steuben’s population of 131. He attended UW-Madison but dropped out his sophomore year to go exploring. For a while, he hitchhiked across Canada and Mexico before deciding to re-enroll in school.

His traveling had left him with an abundance of stories, and journalism seemed like the right fit.

“It probably didn’t hurt that my grandfather was a weekly newspaper editor,” Krier said, “and my mother was an English major.”

Being in the business for as long as he has, Krier has seen a lot of changes.

According to Krier, there’s a lot of fake news circulating around, and the internet doesn’t always improve the situation. Still, he’s taking it in stride. For Krier, accurate reporting is now more important than ever.

He’s doing the best he can, but print news isn’t as popular as it used to be, Krier knows this. As editor, he’s well aware of the falling subscription numbers. This younger generation prefers the digital side of news, and it’s starting to take a toll.

“I like to say that every obituary is another lost subscriber,” Krier said.

While Krier spends time thinking of ways to boost subscriptions, he now has another worry to add to his list: President-elect Trump. It’s no secret that Trump does not support the media, especially journalists.

“Mr. Trump doesn’t tolerate criticism of any kind,” Krier said, “and I fear for the future of journalism in America.”

On Election Day, Krier knew Trump was going to win. Crawford County is small, and everyone knows everyone, including who they voted for and who flipped.

“I saw people at the polls who I had never seen there before,” he said.

Krier believes that while a great number of Trump supporters came out of the woodwork in time to cast their ballots, he also thinks there was a low turn-out for Democrats.

According to Krier, a lot of Democrats stayed home because they didn’t like Hillary’s message.

Atkinson, a longtime Democrat, didn’t vote at all because he didn’t like Hillary.

“Ever since the Bill Clinton Presidency,” he said.

Bob wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Hillary, Hillary for Prison signs were posted all around the roads. Sheryl Groom, David Krier’s wife, didn’t like Hillary either; in her mind, Hillary is a criminal who deserves to be in prison, and the only reason she isn’t is because of the media.

According to Groom, news stations practice monarch mind control; she believes everything from the sounds to the colors to what the news anchors are saying is designed with the intention to draw the viewer in and hypnotize them.

Groom said that even though Hillary knew that her emails could be hacked, she still did it, and more people weren’t mad because the news stations essentially tricked them.

Although his wife is inclined to believe in conspiracy theories, Krier believes a different set of factors led to more people voting for Trump.

Krier noted that the most of the town is white.

According to him, a lot of people fell for Trump’s blaming immigrants; additionally, in a town where most people spend their weekends hunting, it’s safe to say the Second Amendment played a huge role in how people decided to vote.

Given everything, Krier wasn’t surprised. At the end of it all, the county switched from blue to red and helped Trump secure the election.

Still, no matter what the future may bring, Krier feels positive about one thing: That he loves the Boscobel area, and he’ll do whatever it takes to keep writing, as long as he gets to keep his five minute commute.

The post They Hate the National Media, but There’s One Journalist They Like appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.

It was cold on day one of hunting season. People in big trucks parked in front of the large bar. Hunters bustled in, wearing matching orange hats and jackets. The customers turned and saw the new faces that obviously did not fit in with the neon orange attire. What at first was an awkward entry became a much friendlier environment.

Steuben is a village of about 132 residents in Crawford county that flipped by the highest percentage in the county from voting for Obama in 2012 to Trump this past election. According to the Crawford County voting tallies, out of 50 votes, 34 of them were for Trump.

It is part of what is called the Trump pyramid which also includes counties Wauzeka, Bell Center, Marietta, Eastman, and Freeman.

Jo Bunders, the bar owner and Trump supporter, was shocked by the county turning red.

“People are pretty closed mouthed,” said Bunders. “I was surprised that Trump won in Steuben. They weren’t talking about it. You only talked about it if you someone supporting Trump. Otherwise people were afraid of what people would think.”

Bunders made sure to greet everyone who came through the door. Her bar was the watering hole for visitors of Steuben that day.

The bar has been around for 30 years, and Bunders just got Wi-Fi recently. The walls were covered in lighted signs and posters. At the far end of the wall, there was a wooden sign that said “Red-necked Wind Chimes” with two dented beer cans dangling by strings. Bunders said there used to be more cans. In the corner, there was turkey feathers mounted to the wall with two bird feet giving “the bird.” Bunders said the decorations were from regular customers.

Bunders was born in Grant County, the county next door. She has lived in Steuben for about 33 years. Bunders, 56, has short white hair and square glasses. Bunders wore a simple V-neck shirt and pants. She seemed serious at first but once in a while she would give a big smile.

Bunders knows a lot of the people in town. Most people are about 30 to 50 years old. Bunders said that there were more people in town when she moved into town.

“I don’t know everybody’s dogs’ names, but I know most of them. I know everyone’s names and kids’ names; they just don’t lie, they are good people, hard-working people,” said Bunders.

It wasn’t rowdy or loud in the bar. Everyone chatted quietly while they drank and watched the silent T.V playing. Most of them did not vote at all but shared with Bunders similar views.

According to Bunders, the town hasn’t changed much since she’s lived in Steuben. She was born in Grant County, the county next door. She has lived in Steuben for about 33 years. Her daughter Jackie and grandchildren work in the bar with her.

People from Steuben and other places like Eastman come to Jo’s Kountry Bar for coffee at 7:30 in the morning. Bunders says that there is no place to get coffee in Eastman.

According to the bar owner, the town doesn’t have a post office anymore after a flood about eight years ago.

Bunders said she votes for who she likes and that she is an independent. She supported Obama because she thought he was a good speech maker. Bunders believed that Obama tried to do what he promised to do, but the Senate blocked it.

“I voted for Obama twice, and I voted for Trump because I’m sick of the politicians who are out for themselves.”

Bunders has Obamacare and it has risen $86, making it close to $300 a month. In the beginning the insurance worked for Bunders. She said it’s hard to pay that much when it’s coming out of their paycheck.

“I’m self-employed,” said Bunders. “That’s one week’s pay check. Literally out of pocket, I do get subsidies, I pay $191 out of pocket, now $86 more.”

Jo Bunders didn’t pay attention to the Democratic Party after Trump was nominated. She thought it was wrong what the Democratic National Committee did to Bernie Sanders.

Even though Trump is not a politician, he being a businessman is something that appealed to Bunders as a small business owner in Steuben.

“He’s just a businessman who started small, just a businessman and a regular person looks at that.”

Bunders said she and others are hoping that Trump will help the area economically. About six years ago a company called Advance Transformer moved from Boscobel, Grant County to Mexico. Some people in Steuben also worked there.

Some employees were older and retired early, according to Bunders. They picked up part time jobs until they could retire. Some went back to school.

“It hurts my business when the economy sucks,” said Bunders

Bunders said that Steuben is a farming community. There used to be a lot of dairy farms, but when milk prices are low, farmers struggle. Bunders said many farmers have turned to beef and crop farming.

There were some comments Trump made that Bunders thought wasn’t smart.

“He talked a lot of sh-t the first year, and he’d have a good week and then say something stupid and I would think, oh my God, but the last month maybe of the candidacy, he really looked in the camera and looked like he was talking right at you.

Bunders said that Steuben probably flipped for Trump because they were looking for change.  She talked to people who believed Trump was the lesser of two evils.

Bunders mentioned that people were not impressed with Benghazi and the emails.

“Whether she was the better political candidate or not, her track record was the bigger part against her,” said Bunders. “The lying – lying about emails and lying about Benghazi.”

Bunders was not bothered by the sexual allegations of Trump. She was not sure if they were telling the truth.

“Why wait until the last month to come forward?” said Bunders. “Maybe the Democrats knew about it and were waiting.”

Bunders said that a lot of “misogynist sh-t” happens at her bar.

When it comes to immigrants, Bunders is more bothered by people who are in the United States illegally. She said they need to do the paperwork and become citizens. Bunders believes that we do need those immigrants.

“I’m not going to pick apples, tomatoes.”

Bunders said that not everyone that voted for Trump are racists. She did not like Trump’s racist comments.

“I voted for Trump, and I’m not racist,” said Bunders.

As Jo spoke with customers and served hot bowls of chili and delicious burgers, attention is shifted in the direction of the nonchalant customers sipping beer. A father and son from Howard, Green Bay had come to Steuben to hunt and drink.

The father, Brian Haworth, 53, has been coming to the town for 30 years. Brian and his son 23-year-old son Josh both did not vote. Brian was quick to remark that his wife voted “for the guy with the fake toupee.”

Josh said he had a gut feeling that Trump would win and that a lot of people were hating on Obama. He said he didn’t vote because there wasn’t anyone good to vote for.

Brian said people probably didn’t want to vote for a lady. A lady that works for Jo quickly replied, “I didn’t want a liar.”

Jody Martin, 56 is a semi driver who also did not vote because he thought it doesn’t do any good. Martin didn’t vote for Obama. He could not recall the last time that he voted.

Martin said that he doesn’t believe in voting just Republican or Democrat.

He did not like either candidate, especially Hillary Clinton. Martin said he did not know how Clinton got away with the emails. He thought the last investigation was resolved too quickly.

One thing Martin disagreed with Clinton on is gun control. He was also one of many people that said she was a liar.

Despite his dislike for Clinton, Martin thought Trump was going to lose.

Across the bar was Richard Jacobson, 60, and his son-in-law Matt Montag from Pittsville, Wisconsin. They were bundled up in hunting clothes. Jacobson voted for himself and Montag voted for Trump. Jacobson however did prefer Trump over Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton is a criminal,” said Montag, who is in the National Guard, referring to the emails. “Any other person that would’ve dealt with classified information would be in prison.”

In the past, Montag voted for Mitt Romney and Bill Clinton.

Montag’s theory as to why Steuben flipped to Trump is that there are a lot of hunters there and Clinton wanted to take their guns away. Both Jacobson and Montag eat what they hunt.

They also agreed that there needs to be a ban on Islamic refugees. Jacobson said that the country didn’t have a problem with them until Obama was president. Montag replied that it’s because he let the refugees come into the United States.

Jacobson agrees with building a wall between the United States and Mexico. But they both said that not all refugees and immigrants are bad. Montag said he would support a ban now until there is background checks on them.

Montag and Jacobson did not agree with people calling Trump supporters racist.

“So does that mean if you support Clinton you support criminals?” said Montag.

The post Jo appeared first on Election 2016: How the Mississippi River Valley Turned Red.