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From the village of Hampton (423 inhabitants) in Nebraska, to the campus of Drake University in Iowa, there are 360 kilometers according to the Waze maps and traffic app . All covered by snow. And all below zero. Jennifer, 50, made them on Thursday night with her brother Aaron to see Donald Trump at the Knapp Sports Center at Drake University. Her husband could not go. "He kept the cows," Jennifer explained, smiling Friday morning in the dining room of the Holiday Inn hotel in the town of Urbandale, near Des Moines, capital of Iowa. She was wearing a shirt in which Trump appears urinating on the logo of CNN chain Aaron wore a sweater and cap with the legend "Make America Great Again", the "MAGA" for its acronym in English that has become the slogan of the US president.
But to see Trump it is not enough to drive 720 kilometers (round trip). You have to wait in the snow. How long? "Ten hours," Aaron explained. "We arrived at five in the morning and got in line." And that was not the first: "There were 83 people ahead of us. Until three in the afternoon they did not open the doors." At four o'clock, the 7,152 seats of the Knapp Center were occupied. Several thousand people stayed in the street to see Trump speak on a giant screen after half past seven. At that time, the temperature was below zero, so it was better not to think about how it had been at dawn, when Jennifer and Aaron waited. They themselves acknowledged not having been so cold in life, which, coming from someone from Nebraska, is a weighty affirmation. But the cold atmosphere was compensated by the heat of political affinity. The two brothers remembered the experience as very satisfying. "It was like a family. People shared the food. Everyone was respectful," they recalled. And on top was the music, to cheer people up. "A lot of rock, and a little record, things like YMCA and Macho Man from The Village People," Jennifer explained as she gave lazy laughter.
This is Iowa. The Midwest. Deep America, for some. Real America, for others. Donald Trump's America, for an Iraqi immigrant who asks that his name not be revealed and that he feels "scammed" after having put his life on the line of fire in Mosul working as an interpreter during the US occupation of his country, after having seen how his 19-year-old cousin was blown off while he was driving, to find that his fellow citizens - because he has American nationality - consider him a potential terrorist, as if the bullet he has in his left leg It won't mean anything.
But it is also Jennifer's America, which has seen how her farm's income - 300 hectares of soybeans and corn and 40 hectares of pasture for 100 cows of the Simmental Swiss race - have plummeted by 50% in five years by the Combining effect of market forces and trade war with China, but will vote again for Trump in November. The reason? "He needs to be in office four more years to put the country in the right direction."
And this is where the race for the Presidency begins, tomorrow, with the caucuses , an aboriginal word that means "assembly" and that, if in the Republican Party, to which Trump belongs, they are more or less a normal vote, in the Democrat They are such a complex process that people have to be trained so that they know what they have to do. Although many say that does not matter. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won by the hair in Iowa, in a process in which many saw an electoral fraud of the banana republic destined to steal the victory to the candidate of the left, Senator Bernie Sanders , who this year is one of the leaders In the polls, along with former Vice President with Obama, Joe Biden , Senator Elizabeth Warren , and former Mayor of the City of South Bend, Pete Buttigieg .
The primaries are the largest business that Iowa has done in its history , because they put this wasteland of decaying industries, pig farms and cows at the center of politics (also in decline because in the US of the 21st century people take soy or almond milk, not cow's milk, and with its trade war Trump has managed to close the pig market in China), and GM corn and soybeans at the center of the country's politics. "We are politically important for being the first in the primary, not that we are the first to be important," explains the professor of Political Science at Drake University and author of the book The Caucus of Iowa Rachel Paine Caufield in a telephone conversation.
Either the transfers that farmers receive in their current accounts to compensate them for the loss of the Chinese market - Trump has allocated more than 20,000 million to shield that segment of the population, key to their re-election - or the corn ethanol quotas that they must be processed by US refineries - another measure aimed at favoring the agricultural sector - Iowa lives by and for the primary ones. Caufield explains that "there are no reliable figures" of the money brought by the caucuses . But its a lot.
The caucus business
For a month, there are no rooms in the state. The luggage tapes at the Des Moines airport carry endless rows of cylinders on which television sets put the camera tripods. In the elevator of the hotel one meets young activists of the left-wing organization ACLU, and in the hamburger of the Five Guys chain, with the members of a Christian rock band who have been playing in the event that Vice President Mike Pence gave Thursday in Sioux City, north of the state.
There are many Iowas. Jennifer's rural Iowa. And the Iowa of university students. A couple of hundred of them demonstrated at the gates of the Knapp Sports Center while Trump spoke. For the most part, they were voters of Sanders, who is a social democrat, something that in American politics has not existed since the Great Depression, almost a century ago, which has placed him in open confrontation with the Democratic Party, of which he is only part to compete for the White House, since the rest of the time is formally an independent. That has earned him the hatred of the party apparatus. And he has replicated with the same currency. In 2016, an appreciable part of his followers stayed home on election day. For Hillary's followers, Sanders, like this, gave the White House to Trump.
Will the same thing happen again in 2020? It is best to ask Taylor, 28, a waitress and seller of vintage clothing. Taylor is a fan of Bernie , as his followers know him, and was among those who protested against Trump on Thursday. Imagine winning the Joe Biden nomination, which in a game that moves more left each day is starting to appear as a conservative. Will Taylor vote for you? "I don't want to, but I guess I would have to do it, in 2016 I already voted for Hillary," he says. Behind her, a girl carries a sign with the legend: "Trump is a cancer. You have to operate." Ahead, a group of pro and anti Trump middle-aged men and women face screaming. Only one fence separates them.
The old ideals of political citizenship have exploded. The US is a fractured country . Fractured by age, by gender, and by race. The Knapp Sports Center is in a black ghetto of Des Moines. But the concurrence, for or against the president, is all white. Only 500 meters away one begins to meet African-Americans who, oblivious to the entire political show , enter an alcohol store and another that announces "balances." They are two worlds that do not touch each other in a state that has immense political weight even though it is not representative of anything. Iowa is white. 87% of the population is of that race, compared to 5.5% Latino, 3.3% black, and 2.1% Asian. In the country as a whole, the proportion is 72% of whites, 27% of Latinos, 12.6% of blacks, and 5.3% of Asians. In the politics of the identity of the 21st century, Iowa, white, rural, blurs the Democratic prism, prisoner of colors, races, genders and rejection of "the binary." In the Republican, however, evangelical, white, rural and conservative, it is perfect.
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