Iowa

Donald J. Trump 798,923 Votes 51.8%

Hillary Clinton 650,790 Votes 42.2%

To understand how all these heavily white Iowa counties went for Obama, we must look back to 2008. After eight years of Republican rule, with the economy in a tailspin, white people were suffering through the sort of disastrous unemployment rates that usually only black Americans face. It has been called the worst recession since the Great Depression. Obama’s message of hope, that Americans of all stripes were in this thing together, along with his promises to go after the banks and Wall Street types that had caused the disaster, struck a chord across political parties. And his savvy ground operation took this message to rural and suburban communities that Democrats had often written off as unwinnable.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first black man to run for president (and second black American, behind Shirley Chisholm), made similar inroads with rural white farmers during his 1984 and 1988 campaigns. This was simply because he reached out to them promising to push policies that would specifically help them, like ending foreclosures on family farms and forgiving their debt. He did not get a majority of this vote, but he got a surprisingly significant portion.

Decades later, large numbers of rural and suburban white voters were willing to cast their lot with Obama and his multiracial coalition — not necessarily out of some sense of racial enlightenment or egalitarianism but because at the time, they saw it as being in their own best interest. Class and economic anxieties did not erase racial ones; they just in that moment transcended them.

Much has changed in the country since the desperate days of 2008, and while Obama carried more than half of Iowa’s 99 counties that year, last week Clinton only carried six. I talked to several white Iowans, many of them lifelong Democrats, who had voted for Obama at least once. They said they believed in unions and social programs to help the needy. They believed in the concept of racial equality, in the sense that all people should have the same opportunities. But in recent years, they had come to feel at odds with their party; it no longer reflected their own cultural norms. Where once they were the backbone of the party, now they were outsiders.

Gretchen Douglas is a corrections officer from Marshalltown. The 53-year-old had been a Democrat her entire adult life and describes herself as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. She’s a supporter of unions and gay rights and abortion rights and said she doesn’t want to breathe dirty air. She proudly talked of her daughter’s success as a chemist, mentioning that not long ago the only options for women were teaching and nursing. She holds a degree in accounting and can tell you exactly the share of the national debt she and her husband carry.

Even as the recession caused Iowa to shed hundreds of state jobs, Douglas managed to hold onto hers. But in 2012, for the first time in her life, she registered as a Republican, and last week she voted for Trump. Douglas told me she had switched parties because she felt Obama had been irresponsible with spending, causing the national debt to soar. She said Democrats were spending too much on social programs for people who did not need them.

“I don’t want to throw Granny out in the snow, and I think the least of our brothers should be taken care of,” she said. “But I think that those who can work should.” Douglas said there was a time in her life where she was struggling, and so she applied for welfare for herself and her young children but was denied. She didn’t think that was fair, but she worked hard and turned her life around. But these days, she said, “I kind of think for some social programs there is no stigma.”

Douglas never mentioned race, but polls including a recent one of Trump supporters have shown that white Americans’ support for entitlement programs declines if they think black people are benefiting. And the longer Douglas talked, the more she revealed other reasons she had voted for Trump.

When Obama was elected, she hoped he would “bridge race relations, to help people in the middle of Iowa” see that black people “are decent hardworking people who want the same things that we want.” She said people in rural Iowa often don’t know many black people and unfairly stereotype them. But Obama really turned her off when after a vigilante killed a black teenager named Trayvon Martin, he said the boy could have been his son. She felt as if Obama was choosing a side in the racial divide, stirring up tensions. And then came the death of Michael Brown, shot by a policeman in Ferguson, Mo.

“I’m not saying that the struggles of black Americans aren’t real,” Douglas told me, “but I feel like the Michael Brown incident was violence against the police officer.”

The Black Lives Matter movement bothered her. Even as an Ivy League-educated, glamorous black couple lived in the White House, masses of black people were blocking highways and staging die-ins in malls, claiming that black people had it so hard. When she voiced her discomfort with that movement, she said, or pointed out that she disagreed with Obama’s policies, some of her more liberal friends on Facebook would call her racist. So, she shut her mouth — and simmered.

Trump clearly sensed the fragility of the coalition that Obama put together — that the president's support in heavily white areas was built not on racial egalitarianism but on a feeling of self-interest. Many white Americans were no longer feeling that belonging to this coalition benefited them. A recent study by sociologists from Harvard and Tufts found that white Americans believed that they experienced more discrimination than black Americans. Trump spoke openly to those Americans, articulating what many Iowans felt but could never say. It was liberating.

“Trump was crass, and he was abrupt,” Douglas said. “But I felt like he was going to take care of the things that mattered for me, and honestly I was very worried about our country.”

There has never been a moment in America in which black people’s gains have not been perceived by some white Americans as their loss. And history is littered with examples of how economic and racial anxieties can create a wedge with which to destroy interracial political and economic alliances. White supremacists overthrew the biracial fusion party in North Carolina in the late 1800s and, with the support of the white population in the state that had once supported the sharing of power, worked to disenfranchise black North Carolinians and usher in seven decades of Jim Crow. In more modern times, George Wallace was roundly trounced when he ran for governor of Alabama against a racist opponent. Wallace, who had promised “to treat a man fair, regardless of his color,” vowed to never be “out-niggered” again. The next election he rode a segregationist platform right into the governor’s mansion. Similarly, Richard Nixon ran for president the first time as a moderate and lost, but he later found his opening courting white opposition to civil rights with his Southern strategy. It is not incidental that John McCain and Mitt Romney mostly declined to stir up racial tensions in their campaigns against Obama and lost.

When Trump inveighed against Mexican rapists and talked of barring Muslims from the country, the baldness of his rhetoric spoke to something deeply seated in the Iowans I talked to. Erin Wright, who worked for the state before quitting to finish a nursing degree, voted for Obama in 2008, and doesn’t remember if she voted at all in 2012; she cast her ballot for Trump last week. Like Douglas, she wasn’t struggling financially but was attracted to Trump’s promise to seal our southern borders and to bar Muslims from entering the country.

“There’s a lot of illegal people here, who do take work,” she said. “If they want to become a citizen, that is super, they should become a citizen. But all the influx of people who come in, they get benefits, they get jobs, and they take them from people who can’t find anything else who have lived here their whole lives.”

What’s missing from the American conversation on race is the fact that people don’t have to hate black people or Muslims or Latinos to be uncomfortable with them, to be suspicious of them, to fear their ascension as an upheaval of the natural order of things. A smart demagogue plays to those fears under the guise of economic anxieties. Things not as good as you hoped? These folks are the reason. Kelley, the historian, said white Americans have ignored race when it serves them and defaulted to it when it suits them. “We think of interest as an objective thing that floats above, but it is subjective,” he said. “Race always plays a role. It never disappears.”

The miracle Obama worked in 2008 and 2012 was to stitch together, at least in part, the racial lines that have always fractured this country. What we saw last week was those lines being torn apart again.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is a staff writer for the magazine. She won a 2016 Peabody Award for her series on school segregation for “This American Life.”