'I’m more for Trump than I was before': president clings to narrow lead in Iowa as Biden closes in
When Aaron Schatz surveys the wreckage of 2020, he finds himself doing surprisingly well.
Profits on his Iowa dairy farm are up thanks to coronavirus. The pandemic feels a distant threat, and Schatz has yet to wear a mask. Black Lives Matter protests are an annoyance but really someone else’s problem.
But Schatz is worried that Donald Trump, the man he hesitantly backed four years ago after twice voting for Barack Obama, may be in trouble.
“I’m more for Trump than I was before. As a dairy farmer, I feel like I’m sitting better than I have in 10 years,” said the fifth-generation farmer in Howard county, north-eastern Iowa.
“But I’m a little scared for Trump. It’s gonna be a tough battle. A year ago I wasn’t worried. I thought he’d have it.”
Schatz was among voters instrumental in flipping Howard county from Obama to Trump four years ago by the largest margin of any county in the US. That swing, of more than 40 points in the rural and heavily white county, contributed to the president winning Iowa with the biggest Republican victory since Ronald Reagan in 1980. Just four months ago, the Democrats saw little reason to think the outcome would be any different this year.
A Des Moines Register poll in March gave Trump a 10-point lead over his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden.
But an election turned upside down by a pandemic that has created even more chaos than a president famed for disruption has put Iowa into contention. Now Trump is fighting to cling to a narrow lead over Biden. Just 45% of Iowans approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic and only 37% think he has provided the right leadership on the Black Lives Matter protests.
Perhaps most worrying for Trump, 45% of Republican voters in Iowa say the nation is on the wrong track.
Neil Shaffer, who is in charge of the president’s campaign in Howard county as chair of the local Republican party, is only too aware of the numbers. His county falls within Iowa’s first congressional district, which flipped from Republican to Democratic in the 2018 midterms. Polls give Biden a fivepoint lead in the district.
“Ronald Reagan asked in ’84, are you better off today than you were four years ago? Well, it’s gonna be awful hard for the president to use that, especially now with the economy. We were on a very strong economy, and now we’re limping along and we’re trying to avert financial disaster,” said Shaffer, a former farmer who works in river conservation.
“It’s gonna be a referendum on his handling of the last few months. Not so much his presidency as a whole like a normal election, which I think Democrats probably would have a harder time with.”Trump can at least count on Schatz. The 37-year-old farmer had plenty of doubts when he voted for the president last time but had become disillusioned by Obama and found Hillary Clinton alienating. In time, he grew to like Trump, not least for taking on what he regarded as an inevitable showdown with China over agriculture, even if sanctions hurt farmers in the short term. Plus, the economy looked good.
Then came coronavirus, which redefined the election within weeks.
In Howard county, opinion is divided between those who think Trump’s chaotic and divisive style of leadership has made the pandemic worse, and those who believe the president is unfairly blamed for events he had no real control over. Schatz is in the second camp, although he recognises he’s in a minority.
“I’m upset with our media. I think all they do is portray him as being such an evil man. There’s still things about Trump that bug you and stuff but I hate seeing some of these news stations. They don’t cover anything decent that he does. It’s just everything they can to put him down,” he said.
“Take coronavirus, which is not in his control. I feel like he’s doing all right. I guess it’s a lot of unknowns that nobody really knew about. He had how many people giving all their different opinions? Which one is the right one?”
Schatz is not bothered by Trump’s questioning of his experts on the necessity of masks to limit the spread of Covid-19, or the rush to reopen businesses before the virus was contained.
“I never have wore a mask yet. I guess I don’t feel a threat out here on the farm away from people. I know we’ve been getting more cases in our county here, but I feel if I’m gonna get it, I’m gonna get it,” he said.
“I know we had to shut some stuff down but we needed to start opening stuff back up because if our economy stayed that low for longer, that was just gonna be a bigger disaster. I’m more worried about what it was gonna do to the economy than I was about getting sick.”
That’s not an uncommon view in the midwest, where the pandemic’s toll has been relatively low – although it is now climbing – and so the cure of shutdown often looked worse than the disease, particularly in rural areas.
But other Trump voters have drawn a different lesson from the past few months.
A businesswoman who voted for Obama and then Trump said coronavirus exposed the president.
“I voted Republican my whole life going back to Reagan. I voted for Trump without really thinking about it because Hilary Clinton represented the worst of the Democratic party. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about people out here. And to be honest, I didn’t think Trump could be that bad,” said the woman, who did not want to be named for fear of alienating customers.
“Coronavirus finished me with him. It’s revealed him for what he is. He thinks of no one but himself even when people are dying. The briefings were insane.”
Shaffer thinks Trump’s chaotic and frequently confusing daily pandemic briefings did him damage with a lot of voters.
“He should have left it to the experts. Those daily briefings were painful because there were mixed messages,” he said. “Trump’s never been a calming person to begin with, so in a time of emergency he just doesn’t come across as soothing.”
That same instinct kicked in when Black Lives Matter protests erupted following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
Kelli Gosch describes herself as “one of less than 10 black people in Cresco”, Howard county’s chief town.
The last time she voted Republican was for George W Bush in 2004, while her husband was serving on the frontline in Afghanistan. Then she backed Obama twice.
Four years ago, Gosch briefly toyed with voting for Trump.
“When Trump first came on the scene, I’m like, hell yeah,” she said.
But Gosch, a dance teacher, quickly backed off upon hearing how he spoke about Mexicans during the campaign, which she regarded as provocatively racist. Since then, Gosch, who is mixed African American and Aborigine, has grown increasingly alarmed at Trump emboldening overt bigotry. She said it has played a part in the vicious racist taunts her 14-year-old daughter has repeatedly endured in school.
So following Floyd’s death, Gosch helped organise a rally for racial justice in downtown Cresco. She avoided using the name Black Lives Matter, which she thought would be too divisive in a small, overwhelmingly white town. The organisers described the rally as “a conversation”.
“It was not a protest. We had a fantastic turnout. People wanting to know what was going on, people wanting to know how they can get involved to help move us forward. It was a lot of people there. I thought it was great,” she said.
Not everyone did. When Laura Hubka, chair of the Howard county Democrats, promoted the event on Facebook, some Cresco residents accused her of bringing anarchy to town.
“There were people saying I was bringing riots here. I said no, we’re calling it a conversation. But they didn’t want to hear it. All these people were saying, ‘I’m bringing my gun.’ So then the cops called me wanting to know what was going on. I told them we’re trying to bring people together in town to talk and said, ‘Why don’t you come and talk?,’” she said.
The local police chief spoke to the meeting alongside Gosch’s daughter, which greatly reduced tensions.
Gosch saw the rally as a repudiation of Trump’s attempts to divide Americans over Floyd’s death, even if, she said, she didn’t think it would make much difference to how people vote. That, she said, would be defined by coronavirus.
Through all of this, it is Shaffer’s job to sell the president to Howard county’s voters.
Earlier this year, the local party chair praised what he said was a wellorganised local re-election strategy by the national Republican party. Unlike the haphazard campaign four years ago, when Shaffer struggled to get Trump signs for supporters, by February the party’s county chairs were receiving detailed instructions on how to target voters and lists of potential new Trump supporters.
Shaffer said all of that had fallen apart.
“Nowhere. We’re nowhere. Our local group hasn’t met since January. We had the caucuses in February and then pretty much the wheels fall off the bus,” he said.
Shaffer is not a Trump enthusiast. He was as surprised as anyone that his county voted so overwhelmingly for the president four years ago.
“It still amazes me. In a country with over 300 million people, this is our choice again? I’m not ashamed to say I don’t think many Republicans would have thought those were good choices in 2016,” he said. “I’m just not impressed with Joe Biden. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and all, but I think it’s still politics of the past. I just don’t understand why a better candidate couldn’t have been surfaced by the Democrats. I would say the same thing about Republicans four years ago.”
A stream of Republican political adverts questioning Biden’s mental faculties, and showing him losing his train of thought or struggling to remember words, has had the intended effect on Schatz.
“I’m still not a 100% fan of Trump but have you seen Biden? He’s delusional. Listen to the guy talk. That’s one of the things that pushed me more to Trump. There is no way that guy can govern for four years,” he said.
Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate did nothing to reassure Schatz but it excited Gosch, although she doesn’t think it will make much difference to how voters in Howard county see the Democratic candidate.
“If it does swing Trump’s way again, I honestly, wholeheartedly believe that people would vote for him again just because they don’t want to admit they’re wrong. They’re gonna stick by their choice because they’ve been defending him through all of his hatred, all of his admitted wrongdoing.”But Hubka, the county Democratic chair, is acutely aware that Clinton’s campaign serves as a warning about being pitched primarily as the anti-Trump candidate.
“I don’t think the Democrats can run on ‘we’re not Trump’. Hillary was up to 16 points at this time. So don’t count him out,” she said.
The idea that Trump can pull off a dramatic policy coup just before the election scares a lot of Democrats. Hubka paints a scenario in which the president announces some kind of government medical insurance scheme, given that healthcare was a major election issue before coronavirus that has been accentuated by the pandemic, and goes to Republicans in Congress with an ultimatum.
“If Trump told them, look, we’re gonna lose the presidency, we’re gonna lose the Senate unless you do this, they’d go along. And the Democrats in the House, what are they going to do? Reject public healthcare?” she said.
In the meantime, Shaffer is disturbed by what the president is already doing. He is disparaging of Trump’s efforts to undermine the credibility of the election before it happens, particularly by questioning the security of postal ballots.
“I know there’s people that just are totally against mail-in ballots. I am not. I’ve been an election worker for over 30 years and our system is now so solid that I would have absolutely no qualms whatsoever about having anyone mailing their ballot,” he said.
Hubka has another concern.
“I’m nervous that those people that
are so staunchly for Trump will be angry because he’s stirring them up to be angry,” she said.
“I am testing out a few guns. I haven’t really shot a gun in earnest in probably 30 years. I don’t want to shoot anybody. But if someone’s gonna try to kill me because of my political beliefs, then I probably should be able to defend myself.”
Hubka decided to buy a .45 handgun.