Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.

Pepin County, Wisconsin—The morning after Donald Trump was elected president, Andrea Myklebust’s sheep needed new hay. Distraught by the results from the night before, feeling like this was the first day of a suddenly altered American reality, she walked down the driveway of her farm to meet the man who brings her feed for her flock. Myklebust didn’t know for sure, but she suspected he had voted for Trump, a person she considered odious, dangerous and unqualified for the job he had just won. She said nothing about the election, and neither did he, as they talked only about where to drop the bales of hay—a brief exchange during which, she told me, she tried to “rearrange” her facial expression into something “neutral,” “friendly.” She could do only so much, though, to mask her despair. The sculptor, shepherd and weaver had moved from Minnesota’s Twin Cities because she found this area’s rolling hills bucolic and welcoming—and now, and for the first time in her 11 years here, she felt uneasy.

When I met Myklebust, 51, in late November, these sentiments had not softened. She described the history-twisting election of 2016 in stark, before-and-after terms, unable to fathom how anybody could have voted for Trump, much less three-fifths of the people with whom she shares her adopted home in Pepin County. “There is sort of a baseline assumption of common sense and decency that’s been thrown into question in a way I never expected it to be,” she said. “And it’s a struggle. You have to continue to interact with people, and you have to wonder: Do you really have hate in your heart in this way? Really? At the core, I didn’t believe this about us.”


The population of the county is barely more than 7,000 people, which can give it an everybody-knows-everybody sort of allure. But in this tiny county, the smallest in Wisconsin, wedged against the east bank of the Mississippi River, Myklebust and so many other Democrats and progressives woke up November 9 jilted, deeply confused about where they lived—where they had lived for years, decades, even their entire lives. Wisconsin, after all, hadn’t voted for a Republican for president since 1984, and Pepin County itself had gone blue in every presidential election since 1972. This put it near the top of a sizeable, nationwide list of similarly flipped counties—the rural, out-of-the-way spots on the map that made Trump president. It left those on the losing end of the tally roundly stunned.

“Totally shocked,” said Wally Zick, 71.

“Blew me away,” said Jen Peterson, 36.

“My mom said, ‘What happened to our blue state?’” said Alex Johnson, 24. “I said, ‘Trump set it on fire.’”

Welcome to Pepin | Wisconsin’s smallest county is a mostly rural area that had voted blue in every presidential election since 1972. So Democrats were shocked when Pepin went for Donald Trump. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

Terry Mesch, 67, has lived here since 1976 and oversees the local historical society. He knows the story of the county better than practically anybody, and yet he was “dumbfounded,” he said, telling me he walked into his polling spot on the day of the election and voted alongside people whose names he knows. The results that rolled in later that evening were not at all what he was expecting. More than that, they came with an unsettling realization: “I said to myself, ‘I don’t know my own neighbors.’”

Democrats and progressives thought they lived in one kind of place. It turns out they live in another. That’s true in the nation as a whole, and it’s particularly, poignantly true here. Pepin County at first glance doesn’t seem like much of a microcosm of America—it’s 98 percent white, the overall population hasn’t changed in 120 years, and the unemployment rate this past fall was an infinitesimal 3 percent—but what I found in a week of talking to farmers and small-business owners, longtime residents and transplants, was a startlingly precise reflection of the national rift that animated Trump’s campaign. “Stronger Together” versus “Great Again.” Move-ins versus natives. Urban versus rural. The loss wrought by long-term change here isn’t so much a visible picture of a closed, rusted factory as it is a less measurable communal decline in morale, a slow seep of self-worth, a perceived slippage of relevance in the national conversation.

As Donald Trump takes the oath of office—a phrase that still has the power to make those on the left shudder in shock—an easy way to process the election is that people in rural areas all over America loathe Washington and New York and San Francisco and Hollywood and finally had a chance to show it in a big way. But Pepin County is one of those rural areas, and the resentment isn’t just directed at the coasts. It’s local. Here, the urban elite isn’t a faceless, distant other: It’s the enclave of liberal, mostly Twin Cities newcomers who have moved here over the past few decades—not just an abstract political imposition, but an actual physical presence. It has spawned anger and bitterness, a simmering undercurrent of alienation among many people locally born and raised. It has made “Democrat” mean something it didn’t mean a generation ago. And it was made manifest on November 8.

Pepin County represents not only the most compelling reasons Trump won but also the reasons so many liberals were so surprised. If more people from more places had been talking to the people of Pepin County—and if the people of Pepin County had been talking more to one another—the notion of a Trump victory wouldn’t have seemed farfetched in the least. But my interviews, with Democrats and Republicans alike, started to feel to me like listening to disconnected halves of conversations that had never occurred. And still weren’t.

“We have found a whole community here,” said Pat Carlson, Wally Zick’s wife, “of very like-minded—it’s going to sound elite—but bookish, artsy, I’d say compassionate … organic foodies, the whole nine yards. It’s all transplants. It’s mostly liberals.” As for this election, and the locals, she continued, “I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them, and I guess, in some ways, we were. Because we couldn’t believe anybody would vote for Trump.”

Zick described a fault line here between the old and the new, the people who have lived in the county forever and the move-ins from over the Minnesota border, clustered primarily on the southwestern end of the county. “They don’t come here,” Zick said. “We don’t go there.”

“We don’t know them,” Carlson, 72, said.

“I could ask them, ‘Why did you vote for Trump?’” Zick said. “Then what would I do about it?”

“You don’t want to make them mad,” Carlson said.

***

The way it is, I heard over and over in my time in Pepin County, is not the way it was.

Small family farms, mostly dairy farms, which traditionally were not only the lifeblood but also a psychological backbone, are long gone—replaced by agribusiness. The overall number of farms has gone down, the average size gone up. “Get bigger, get better, or get out,” Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, once famously (or notoriously) said. Global competition in a more connected world changed agriculture as it did almost every other industry.

The 2 percent of the population in Pepin County that isn’t white are mainly Mexicans who milk the cows now, instead of the people who used to: the sons and daughters of the farmers. These migrant laborers have been fixtures on farms in Wisconsin for going on 20 years, and few locals are clamoring for their jobs. “The white boys won’t do that kind of work,” not anymore, Mesch told me. But none of that changes the fact that one page of the county’s weekly newspaper packed with pictures of dads with their kids and the deer they shot is followed by another page stocked with classified ads that say things like “NIGHT MILKER WANTED,” “Hablo Espanol.”

Meanwhile, many of the smartest, most enterprising youth from Pepin County—as in so many counties like it—have been leaving for college and never coming back. School enrollments are down, and districts have consolidated, leaving behind in smaller communities hurt feelings and ripped-away sources of pride. “The farm families have declined, and so have the school populations,” said Mesch, who keeps an office in the cold, old, wood-framed courthouse in Durand, the county seat. “They feel like they’re losing their identity.”

‘Trump set it on fire’ | The election results left some locals—like Wally Zick and Pat Carlson, top; Alex Johnson, bottom right; and Terry Mesch, bottom left, the head of the local historical society—wondering if they even knew their own neighbors. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

“It’s been a steady decline for years—probably since the mid-’80s,” Sue Wolf told me. When I met her, she was the fourth-generation family proprietor of Wolf’s, an independent clothing store on Durand’s Main Street, which is a familiar faded tableau of the decay of small-town America—a few bars, a shuttered theater, local commerce smothered by scattered chain-owned big-box options. “It wasn’t a sudden crash. It’s been a slow, steady burn.” In December, Wolf’s closed after 112 years in business.

The withering of old Pepin County has coincided with the influx of the move-ins. Minneapolis and St. Paul are an hour-and-a-half drive and a world away, and the people who have come from “the Cities,” as the people here call them, are typically retirees or close to it, and often well-off enough to restore old houses or build big new ones. The economy around them, geared more toward their wallets and tastes as well as those of tourists, relies on wineries, galleries, bed and breakfasts, seasonal art festivals—and a pie shop run by the husband-and-husband team of Steve Grams and Alan Nugent.

If there is a de facto capital of Pepin County’s politically progressive newcomers, it is the village of Stockholm, winter population 66. And its social hub, just down the hill from the renovated farmhouse where Zick and Carlson live, is the Stockholm Pie & General Store, which sells artisanal cheese, craft beer and pricey slices of a double lemon pie that Gourmet magazine called “one of the 53 best things we ate” in 2012.

This is where I met with Bruce Johnson. He moved here, from the Cities, too, six years ago, with his wife, who is a filmmaker. He serves on the Pepin town board, and he also is the leader of the Pepin County Democrats. Johnson is searching for answers.

It was a “change election,” he said. Bernie Sanders won the Democratic primary here in April, handily, and some of his supporters either ultimately didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton or didn’t show any enthusiasm for doing it. Clinton didn’t campaign anywhere close to Pepin County, or anywhere in Wisconsin, period, in the months leading up to the general election. People felt ignored. Also, Johnson surmised, a limited media landscape contributes to “a lot of low-information people.” I had grown accustomed to hearing postmortems that emphasized economic stress, and Johnson granted that. The unemployment rate might be low, but so are wages, he said, pointing out that many here have to make long commutes to get paid more than $11 or $13 an hour. Toward the end of his accounting, though, he zeroed in on the idea of “cultural insecurity.”

He talked about an incident two years ago in which a 64-year-old Laotian Hmong man from an adjacent county was out hunting squirrels and wandered into the woods on the land of a 43-year-old local, who saw him, attacked him and nearly beat him to death. The incident inflamed tensions about race and outsiders. And he talked about a recent squabble over the creation of an area ATV club. Some newcomers argued the machines would make too much noise and lower their property values. There was “opposition from a lot of the liberals who live in fancy houses on the bluffs,” he said. Some of them, he added, “rarely talk to the locals”—even while trying to impose their ideas and sensibilities. The locals, Johnson said, understandably “feel hurt by the people who look at them as rural rubes.”

Myklebust had popped into the pie shop, and she joined the conversation.

“This is a place in transition—I mean, look at this,” she said, glancing around Stockholm Pie. “It’s a hipster pie place, run by a gay couple.”

The politics of pie | Parts of Pepin have seen the arrival of progressive newcomers like Alan Nugent, left, and Steve Grams, a married couple who own a pie shop. But in towns like Durand, it’s a different story; Wolf’s clothing store, at right, recently closed after 112 years in business. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

Katherine J. Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, recently wrote a book about this. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker came out just last March. It’s based on research she did from 2007 to 2012, when she essentially kept inviting herself to informal but regular gatherings of people in more than two dozen rural communities around the state—and listened. For decades, Wisconsin has been politically malleable, but the window for Cramer’s work ended up being particularly fascinating and telling. When she started, the state had a Democratic governor and two Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and its voters had picked a Democrat for president in four straight elections; by the time she finished, Democrat Russ Feingold had lost his 18-year spot in the U.S. Senate, and Wisconsin’s governor was Scott Walker, a union-busting, public-employee-attacking Republican. In her book, she wrote about “rural consciousness” and “multifaceted resentment against cities.”

But even Cramer was surprised by the extent of the resentment stemming from a growing rural-urban divide, and now its consequences. “I did go into the evening saying that Hillary Clinton was going to win,” she admitted to me. The reason Clinton lost: “It’s people looking around,” Cramer said, “and then making the assessment that their way of life is under threat.”

“It feels like somebody is coming from the outside and changing their world,” said the area’s state senator, Kathleen Vinehout, a Democrat. It feels that way because it is that way.

“People are wondering just what their place will be in this 21st-century global economy,” said the congressman who represents western Wisconsin, Democrat Ron Kind. “This is very unsettling for a lot of folks.”

“It’s more than the loss of a job or a wage,” Cramer added. “It’s the death of an expectation of a certain kind of life. … Across society, what’s seen as up and coming, successful, whatever you want to call it—it’s not you anymore.”

And what I heard in Pepin County, again and again, is that they’ve had it. In conversation after conversation with people who have lived here forever and who voted for Trump, some people were more measured and diplomatic than others—but the same blunt, base feelings kept coming up.

“Where’s the richest place to live?” said Gerald Bauer, 74, born and raised on a local dairy farm, who now is the vice chairperson of the county board of supervisors. “The area around Washington, D.C.—that’s wrong.”

And here these city people have come, with their money and their politics, right to Pepin County, which now has its very own liberal left coast. “The ones that move in try to change everything,” said Gary Samuelson, 72, “and the people who’ve been here a long time don’t care too much for change.”

“They don’t share our views on anything,” Vic Komisar, 41, the president of the ATV club, said of the people from Minnesota. “They got this picture that we’re all country bumpkins, the locals are, that we’re not educated. The people who move in talk down to the natives. I don’t know how you want to word that, but that’s the persona given off.”

Komisar said he frowned upon some of Trump’s rhetoric, calling him an “oddball.” But one thing he liked a lot: “I think he’s going to stand his ground on—how the hell do I want to word this?—I don’t think he’s gonna get ran over by the social agenda.” He cited gay marriage, the legalization of marijuana and Black Lives Matter. “It shouldn’t be center stage with troops overseas and the economy. We got other things to worry about than Black Lives Matter having a protest. Come on—we got bigger issues. To me, that’s what it’s been for eight years. I’m not a racist. I’m not a homophobe. I’m not any of those things. But OK, you guys have your rights—can we move on?”

***

When these feelings collide with politics, it’s the Democratic Party that tends to take the hit. Once, the party was a coalition of farmers and workers and union members, along with urbanites and minorities. A lot of farmers in Pepin County come from longstanding Democratic families. But over time, the party has come to represent a way of seeing America with which people here have trouble identifying.

John Andrews, 68, was the sheriff in Pepin County for 28 years. He is a Republican. He used to be a Democrat, though—and not just any Democrat, but the boss of the Pepin County Democrats, the position currently held by Bruce Johnson. Andrews told me he switched parties in the mid-2000s after the newcomers started coming to the meetings. “They actually took over the party,” he said.

He agrees with Komisar’s opinion concerning the overemphasis on “the social agenda.”

“When the people came in—and the things that they were trying to push on the rest of us—that’s why I left,” Andrews added. “I didn’t want to deal with these people. I didn’t want to be a part of what they were a part of. You’re talking about people from the Cities who are very progressive. I call them tree-huggers, a bunch of tree-huggers. They referred to us, meaning the people who’ve lived here and worked here all our lives, as a bunch of hicks. They just think they’re a little bit better than everybody else, and that we’re not as smart.”

“These [Confederate flags] were popping up everywhere,” said Matt Anderson, 34, an artist who grew up in Pepin County. He had seen the occasional bumper sticker, but flags were new. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

In Pepin County, I met predominantly two kinds of Clinton voters: the Twin Cities progressives, and aging farmers or their descendants. Alex Johnson is the Democrat who said Trump had lit Pepin County “on fire.” He’s an earnest farm kid who was salutatorian at Pepin High. And he’s a Democrat—because his father was a Democrat, and his father was a Democrat because his father was a Democrat. And that was because of the Depression, when a lot of people needed help, and farmers in Pepin County and elsewhere got some from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the federal government.

Phyllis Seyffer grew up in Pepin County, too. “My dad was a solid Democrat, a dairy farmer,” she told me. Why? “The Depression,” she said.

When I sat down with John Caturia, a retired dairy farmer, he said the same thing: “A generation ahead of us went through the Depression, and the Democratic Party brought it out of the Depression and gave people some hope and gave them a chance to make a living.”

Alex Johnson is 24. But Phyllis Seyffer is 74. And John Caturia is 86. “There aren’t very many of them left anymore, people my age,” Caturia said.

This has left the Democratic coalition in Pepin County shaky and shrinking, a tenuous mash-up of voters who nominally support the same party but are increasingly bound only by an accident of geography.

The result is something Alex Johnson can see on his computer screen. A voracious reader of Wisconsin Blue Books, state-specific almanacs, he was a political science major at Edgewood College in Madison and is a politics junkie. Instead of counting sheep to go to sleep, he told me, he counts U.S. senators, starting in Hawaii, heading east—usually, he said, he’s out by Colorado. And over the year and a half leading up to the election in November, he put together an extensive, cross-tabbed database of all of the county’s votes stretching back to 1970.

“It’s been trending Republican since 2008,” he said, calling up his spreadsheet when we met in the lobby of his grandmother’s single-story apartment building. The high-water mark for Democrats here was John Kerry in 2004, and Barack Obama got significantly fewer votes in 2012 than he did in 2008, barely edging Mitt Romney.

And during the past decade-plus, in between the presidential years, Johnson stressed, the trend line couldn’t have been clearer. As Wisconsin veered Republican—Feingold losing, Walker winning—it was Obama’s vote totals that started to look like the outliers, not the other way around. By last April, in the Wisconsin primaries, any candidate judged to be same old, same old was a nonstarter. Sanders beat Clinton here by a margin almost identical to his victory statewide. Trump lost Wisconsin to Ted Cruz—but he didn’t lose Pepin County.

Meanwhile, as Clinton never came to the state for a rally or speech in the months prior to the general election, Trump arrived in close-by Eau Claire right before Election Day. His November 1 visit was dismissed by pollsters and pundits as a pointless exercise in a state he was slated to lose. “I will fix it, I will fix it, I will fix it,” he told the crowd packed into Zorn Arena. “We’re one week away, think of it, one week, from the change you’ve been waiting for your entire life.” The people chanted for him: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Image Mixed allegiances | Although some Pepin families have been Democratic since the Depression, resentment toward new residents from the cities helped flip voters to Trump. Clockwise from upper right: Vic Komisar, Lynn and Phyllis Seyffer, Gary Samuelson and Gerald Bauer. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

In the end, in Pepin County, Trump beat Clinton by 862 votes—a gaping 24 percentage points. Clinton got 532 fewer votes in 2016 than Obama got in 2012. The only municipalities in the county that she won were the villages of Pepin and Stockholm, relative bastions of liberalism. The Democratic share of the vote was down from 2012 everywhere, in every single municipality. But there were lots of new voters, too, middle-aged white men whom poll workers had never seen. I went to the clerk’s office and asked to read through the rolls. The total number of votes in Pepin County was 3,781—and there it was: 398 of them came from people who registered on Election Day.

“Very unusual,” clerk Marcia Bauer said.

But the only thing that surprised John Andrews, the disgusted Democrat-turned-Republican, was that other people were surprised.

“It’s so simple,” he told me. “The people here are good, honest, down-to-earth people, good citizens. The elitists, they don’t understand. … If they would get out and talk to the working class, they would understand.”

***

It’s possible that Pepin County’s Democrats could have—even should have—seen the tide coming in over them. “I was seeing eight Trump signs in yards,” said Tom Simpson, 35. “You saw no Hillary signs.”

Almost all the Democrats I talked to, though, found ways to justify this disparity, to convince themselves this wasn’t the kind of place they lived. “Somehow,” Jen Peterson said, “even though I’d seen all of them, I just assumed everybody who didn’t have signs was going to vote the other way.”

“I think I had a little bit of denial going on when I saw these Trump signs everywhere,” said Jean Accola, an artist who lives outside Durand and has been in Pepin County since 1980. “It was just hard to believe that decent people could vote for that man.”

Not all the Trump signs were actual signs that bore his name. Myklebust, for instance, showed me a picture on her phone that she had taken driving by a house in Durand. Out front, next to the cars with Trump bumper stickers, was a flagpole. At the top of the pole was an American flag. Right below the American flag was a Confederate flag. It’s not something Myklebust had seen before.

Helen Kees, 65, Pepin County born and raised, called the Confederate flag at that house and others she saw elsewhere around the county “a new thing.”

“I think it was always the undercurrent,” she said. In her opinion, though, Trump’s candidacy brought it to the surface. “I think prejudice and bigotry and racism have been unleashed.”

“These things were popping up everywhere,” said Matt Anderson, 34, an artist who grew up in Pepin County. He had seen the occasional bumper sticker, but flags were new.

It made Phyllis Seyffer think about her ecumenical quilting group. She usually tries to steer clear of talk about politics, but one day earlier last year, she told me, she brought up the president. “The only thing I said at quilting was, ‘I think we’re going to miss Obama,’” she said. “And it got real quiet.” She knew what they thought. “At quilting, I’d hear things about Obama,” she said. “It was never ‘Obama.’ It was, ‘That black man is at it again.’”

And it made Simpson think about things he overheard people saying here at bars at times over the past eight years—people, he told me, “who bitched about the ‘nigger’ running the country, and now want you to give Trump a fair chance.”

Small-town life | Two girls play video games at Six String Saloon in Maiden Rock, a town just across the Pepin County line. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

I, too, had seen the house in Durand with the Confederate flag, and one afternoon, as I was driving by, I saw people on the porch and stopped and parked. I introduced myself to them, and they introduced themselves to me—Randall and Carolyn Tyra, husband and wife, a retired machinist and a Wal-Mart cashier, in their late 50s.

In a light rain that was starting to turn into sharp, icy pellets, the stars and bars of secession were still flying high.

“It’s heritage, not hate,” Carolyn Tyra said.

Heritage? In Wisconsin?

Randall, who has a hook for a hand because of an oil rig accident, told me he’s from Texas and then explained what the flag means to him. “The red is the blood of Christ,” he said. “The white border is the protection of God, OK? The blue X is—what’s the saint?” He looked at his wife for help. “Saint Anthony?”

Carolyn couldn’t recall. “It’s not anything to do with the KKK or anything like that,” she said.

“Everything’s religious except for the stars,” he said. “It’s nothing hate. It’s religious. It’s God.”

Their talk about the Confederate flag, though, morphed quickly into sentiments that would have fit well in Cramer’s book about rural identity and the politics of resentment, the same feelings I had heard from Trump voters all over Pepin County.

“The media wasn’t saying what we were seeing. Everybody on this street but one house had Trump signs up,” Carolyn Tyra told me. The media, the people in the cities, the people from the Cities in their own county—“they all think we’re stupid,” she said, “and the common blue-collar worker doesn’t want to be treated like we’re stupid.”

And as much as the Tyras and those like the Tyras in Pepin County were voting for Trump, they were also voting against all of that. One evening, for example, during my time in Pepin County, less than 20 miles from Stockholm Pie, past cows in fields and cars in yards, past silos and still-standing Trump signs, I found myself in the tucked-away hamlet of Arkansaw, at a bar called the Rec Hall, where the regulars had on flannel and camo and a rifle was being raffled off. On the stool to my left was a man named Scott Sievwright.

Sievwright told me he had grown up nearby and had never left; he paid his bills cutting wood and working part-time for a dairy farmer. He told me he had voted for Obama in 2008, Romney in 2012 and Trump in 2016, but it was clear he held no politician in high regard. He said Bill Clinton “sold us out with that NAFTA crap.” He said George W. Bush had “f----d us good.” He said Obama’s eight years “sucked.” He called Hillary Clinton “a mean ol’ heifer.” And he expressed hardly any confidence that Trump would do well as president or make his own life better. “I don’t think he’ll get a second term,” Sievwright said. “It’ll be turmoil for four years. He’s like a firecracker in a keg of dynamite.”

Why, then, I wondered, did he vote for him?

He put down his brandy in a plastic cup and looked at me.

“Why not?” he said flatly. “Let it blow.”

The main point, Sievwright told me, was this: “The bastards out here in the country are sick of the bullshit.”

I mentioned I had spent part of the afternoon down in Stockholm, at the pie shop. Sievwright didn’t pause. “I know about the pie store,” he said. “You got lesbians and yuppies—that’s great—but stay where you are. I don’t quite agree with that whole shit. I don’t. This country makes laws to protect them. That’s retarded. Protect the gays and lesbians? You want to be gay or lesbian? Stay in the closet.”

He took a sip of his drink.

“That’s that end of the county, though,” he said.

***

A few winters back, Pat Carlson (“… I think they thought the liberal elite was looking down on them …”) ran into Gary Samuelson (“… the ones that move in try to change everything …”) at the Stockholm post office. They’re at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they’re generally genial, and their conversation about the snow and ice led to daydreaming about warmer locales to which they might flee until spring. Arizona came up. “Oh,” Carlson said, in Samuelson’s recollection, “I could never live in a red state.” Now, sitting at his dining room table, Samuelson smiled. “I’m so tempted to ask: What do you do if a red state moves to you?”

Small-town life | Two patrons eat lunch at Stockholm Pie & General Store in the village of Stockholm. | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

It’s a Pepin County, Wisconsin, version of a question Democrats and progressives are grappling with all over America. When I met with Carlson and Zick, I asked, half-joking, if they were considering moving. Their answers were serious. “We have thought about California,” she said. “Yesterday I investigated Hawaii.” Part of their thinking is due to the harsh winters. Now the election is a factor as well. “This adds some impetus to our planning,” he said.

Zick, a retired chemist, is the priest at a small Liberal Catholic Church he started not far from their house. If anybody came to him seeking sanctuary in Trump’s America, he would offer it, he said, although he worried out loud that he believed certain Trump voters might retaliate. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “if they burn the church down some day.” Arson was not something he was ever worried about before.

A short walk away, at Stockholm Pie, I talked more with Alan Nugent and Steve Grams. The gay couple have been here, move-ins from Minnesota, for 11 years. “When we moved here,” Grams said, “you were born here, you went to school here, you got married here, you had your children here, you died here.” They heard quiet pushback from around the county when they arrived, along with other newcomers, including a concentration of gay newcomers, in their village—“a lot of this, ‘Ooh, those outsiders, you know who they are,’” Grams said. They have been together for more than 20 years and got married in December 2013 in Red Wing, Minnesota—over there because it wasn’t legal to get married in Wisconsin until the following summer. But they told me they’ve never been the victims of any overt hostility in Pepin County. They were never afraid.

That began to shift the night of November 8.

“Common courtesy and decency say you reject that,” Grams told me. “But people didn’t.”

“It’s a different world being an openly gay married couple in a rural place,” Nugent said. “If someone was able to justify voting for Trump, it makes me very fearful about what else they’re capable of doing.”

Other liberals I talked to in Pepin County weren’t so much fearful as they were feeling out of sorts and out of place. Many of them, after all, had moved to a state with an utterly different political makeup, when Walker wasn’t governor yet, when both U.S. senators from Wisconsin were Democrats. “Everything was Democratic-led,” said Dwight Jelle, 56, an energy consultant who built his house in Pepin County in 2002 and moved from Minneapolis full-time in 2010. “Now it’s the exact opposite. Which makes it challenging. Throwing Trump on top of that is a bit daunting.”

From the beginning, though, ever since Jelle and his wife made Pepin County their home, they have found the fissure between the move-ins and the locals frustrating. Jelle has tried to address this. He is currently the chairperson of the county’s board of supervisors, but his involvement in local government has helped only so much, and sometimes it means he hears the distrust even more than other newcomers: “‘Why are you in office? You’re not from here. How long have you lived here? I’ve lived here all my life’—that sentiment is definitely here,” he said. “One of the things that drives us crazy”—Jelle and his wife—“is that we can’t be part of the Pepin County original culture. It’s just: ‘We’re not from here, we’re from the Cities.’ So that’s where that cultural divide is.”

I asked Jelle if he, post-election, like Carlson and Zick, has considered leaving.

“Part of me,” he admitted, “wants to move the river, just move the river over a few miles”—meaning the Mississippi, so he would live in Minnesota again. But no. No plans to leave. “It would be easier,” he said, “but it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ll stick it out.” The solution, he explained, is not to try to talk less to different kinds of people but to try to talk to them more.

Steve Anderson told me something similar. He’s 66, another Minnesota move-in, but a stereotype-buster, too—a Vietnam veteran, a retired firefighter, a self-described “working class liberal.” When he moved here, 11 years ago, he joined the volunteer fire department serving Stockholm and the surrounding countryside. He became chief. He even started smoking again, he told me, just so he could share cigarettes with his fellow firefighters when they went outside after meetings. “That helped bridge the gap,” he said. He also, along with Jelle, is on the board of supervisors. And he’s not moving anywhere, either. “These are the same people I’ve always known,” Anderson said. “I still think they’re good, good-hearted people. I think they’ve been sold a bill of goods, and I think they’re going to regret their vote, but …”

Flocking together | In a place as small as Pepin, says Andrea Myklebust, who owns the farm at left, “You have to engage with people with whom you disagree.” | Danny Wilcox Frazier for Politico Magazine

After I left Pepin County, I called Myklebust, the sculptor and weaver who owns the sheep. She had told me at the pie shop that she felt “militant”—far more than she ever has. “‘Radicalized’ is a word I’ve used about how I’m feeling,” she told me on the phone.

What she sees as a grave threat to the republic, she said, is why she will not be moving back to Minnesota. “This is America, and I’m going to fight for it,” she explained. “And I’m going to fight in the ways that I do. It doesn’t involve violence. It doesn’t involve hate. It doesn’t involve guns. But I’m going to fight. Because this matters. I’m going to fight down to the last conversation.”

She’s going to fight, she said, by trying not to fight—by being a move-in who talks more to the locals, by interacting more with her neighbors around Pepin County who don’t think the way she thinks. Democrats and progressives in cities on the coasts were surprised by this election because they’re so removed from the Pepin Counties of the country. Here, though, it’s different. Proximity could be opportunity.

“When I was in the city, you could choose to ignore people,” Myklebust said. “Here, the person with whom you have strenuous political differences is also the person who drives the ambulance or the fire truck or teaches your kids at school. You have to engage with people with whom you disagree. We have to figure that out—if America is going to survive as a democracy. It sounds dramatic to say, but that’s really where we are.”

If nothing else, she said, her sheep need their hay. The man with whom she didn’t talk specifically about the election on November 9, the man for whom she tried to “rearrange” her facial expression, a man who didn’t return my calls—Myklebust needs to keep talking to him.

“I have to be able to continue to buy hay from him,” she said.

Why?

“It’s beautiful hay,” she said. “It’s dry, and it’s grassy, and it’s got just a little bit of clover in it. It’s beautiful, and it’s perfect.”