For half a century, Democrats owned Dubuque, Iowa, where blue-collar union workers built middle-class lives along the Mississippi River. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican to win Dubuque County since Dwight Eisenhower.
Two years later, those voters turned on Trump’s party, choosing Democrat Abby Finkenauer over Rep. Rod Blum (R).
In 2016, “people just wanted to shake things up. That’s their answer to it. Electing Trump was to shake things up,†said Mario Ruiz, the Iowa vice president of the Quad City Federation of Labor.
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Taken together, those 75 counties illustrate the contours of a new political battleground, on which Democrats and Republicans are fighting to win white working-class voters who handed Trump the White House — and then handed Democrats the Speaker’s gavel two years later.
