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On Election Night in 2016, Pastor John Lee and his wife, Mary Jo, waited to vote until 8:59 p.m. CT, hoping by then the winner would already be clear and they wouldn’t have to cast a ballot. Like others in Sioux County, they had been skeptical of Trump during the Republican primary race—Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Senator Marco Rubio each received roughly triple the votes that Trump did here during that year’s Iowa caucuses. Most of the 700 or so members of Lee’s congregation, Bethel Christian Reformed Church, eventually chose Trump in the general election, Lee told me, “but there were very few who voted for Trump who found that a comfortable choice, or an enthusiastic one.”

According to Lee and others I spoke with, this discomfort was in large part due to the immense gap between Trump’s style and rhetoric as a leader and the cultural heritage of this region. Northwest Iowa has long been dominated by Dutch Reformed Christians, whose theology emphasizes the totality of humanity’s sins, the irresistibility of God’s grace, and salvation dependent on God’s mercy alone. Culturally speaking, Lee said, people here are peak Midwest: unfailingly polite and ultra-neighborly, with a tendency to pinch “pennies so hard, they have Lincoln on their thumb.” Sioux County is roughly 86 percent white, according to census data, and has one of the highest rates of upward economic mobility of rural areas in the country, according to Brookings. While many residents of this area might identify as evangelicals, they don’t necessarily fit the one-dimensional stereotypes that have come to be associated with that group: When Trump came here in January 2016 and made his famous claim that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and still not lose any voters, the most common reaction was horror, according to some of the people who were there.

Over the past two and a half years, Lee says he has seen some growing appreciation for Trump in his community, if only based on the belief that the enemy of an enemy is a friend: People sense that those “who have attacked them are attacking Trump,” so they feel compelled to defend him, Lee said. Dordt University, a small Christian school in Sioux Center, was one of several religious nonprofits around the country that sued the Obama administration over the so-called contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. People here felt cultural headwinds during the Obama years, and they’ve been grateful for a reprieve under Trump, according to Lee. (While I was in Sioux Center, I gave a talk at Dordt’s quadrennial Presidential Politics Conference.)

[Read: Americans hate one another. Impeachment isn’t helping.]

Pat national narratives don’t fit Sioux County well. According to census data, the Latino population has grown significantly over the past two decades, rising from roughly 2 percent in 2000 to more than 10 percent in 2017. Pastor Eddy Olguin of Amistad Cristiana, a predominantly Latino Reformed Church, told me through a translator that “the community that lives in Sioux Center has been warm and respectful to the people here.” By and large, he said his congregants do not feel like they are under attack from their neighbors or at risk of random deportations. In fact, Latinos often provide labor for local farms and businesses, he pointed out. “In a county that voted for Donald Trump, a county that is heavily Republican, who say they don’t like immigrants,” Olguin said, “100 percent of businesses hire undocumented individuals.” (I could not independently confirm this statement. Olguin later followed up to clarify that he was speaking in general terms about hiring practices in the community.) No matter how nasty the rhetoric around illegal immigrants might be, “at the end of the day, everything is a fiction,” he said. “It’s not convenient for [Republicans] to kick Hispanics out, because they need them.”