Courtney Crowder

ccrowder@dmreg.com

Iowan Ruline Steininger scrunched down on her son’s couch, tossed her head back and pinched her eyes shut as CNN called Florida for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, surrounded by old campaign signs for Michael Dukakis, George McGovern and Barack Obama. “Goodness.”

In her 103 years on this earth, Steininger has lived through a pandemic, two World Wars, two international depressions, the discovery of a cure for polio, the first Catholic president, a man on the moon, the end of smallpox, two attacks on American soil, an African-American president and the digital revolution.

What she hasn’t seen is a woman ascend to the highest office in America.

Once the Election Day dust settled at about 1:30 a.m. Central Time, she still hadn’t.

“I’m disappointed and heartbroken,” the lifelong democrat said. “I am as disappointed as someone can be.”

Steininger, who lives in an assisted living home in Pleasant Hill, has been a supporter of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton since the caucus, even appearing in one of the candidate’s ads. She supported the former Secretary of State in 2008 as well.

When asked over and over why she was supporting Clinton, Steininger always had the same answer: experience. Clinton had the training and knowhow, she said, and Trump didn’t.

Trump’s presidency is “not going to affect me because I am going to die soon,” she said. “It’s my children and my grandchildren that I am concerned about. Because our country is going to be set back. That’s what Trump promised to do. A woman’s right to choose is out the window. Health insurance he’ll do away with. Same-sex marriage he is opposed to.

“We made a lot of progress in my lifetime and it looked like we’d make a lot more," she added. "Now, we are not.”

At the beginning of the evening, before the earliest polls closed, Steininger had been positively giddy, laughing and smiling as she remembered early voting on the first day polls opened in Iowa.

“When you are 103, you never know how many days you have left,” she said jovially. “I didn’t want to wait!”

A retired teacher who lived most of her life in Dubuque, Steininger has voted for Democrats in the past 20 elections. She cast her first vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940, helping him defeat Republican Wendell Willkie, who, ironically, was the only other major party candidate in history whose biggest qualification was succeeding in business, according to the New York Times.

103-year-old early voting Iowan: 'I am not taking any chances'

Clinton met with the centenarian privately a few times this cycle and even pointed her out from the stage during a recent speech.

“It’s a great honor to have Ruline supporting me,” the nominee said, waving. “I am so pleased.”

For Steininger, who has been sporting a handmade “Hillary ’16” sign on her walker since the caucus, early voting was the first milestone in her “plan,” as she called it. Beginning with her Christmas letter, she told her friends and family that she decided she had “to stay alive to vote for Hillary.”

With Clinton losing, Steininger said she isn’t sure she’d live long enough to complete that plan. And as the clock ticked past 11 p.m., then midnight and finally 1 a.m., Steininger’s hope faded and her body began folding in on itself.

“I want (Hillary) to know I did what I could and I am sorry,” she said. “There will be a woman voted president of the United States. It won’t be Hillary, but sooner or later there will be a woman voted president.”

She took an extended pause: “A woman got this far, so I think it will be easier the next time around. That’s progress.”