The starting gun for the next presidential election was fired last week. The midterms offered clues to Democrats about how they can win in the midwest

Road to the White House goes through the midwest. Who can capture hearts in 2020?

Road to the White House goes through the midwest. Who can capture hearts in 2020?

The 2020 Iowa presidential caucus cycle rang in last week when they called the governor’s race for the Republican, Kim Reynolds, by three points. The road to the White House in 2020 runs through the state. And the contenders were out in force over the last month.

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Bernie Sanders. Cory Booker. Eric Swalwell and Julian Castro. They were all over Iowa’s fourth congressional district of north-west Iowa, campaigning for upstart JD Scholten in his quixotic bid to unseat the notorious Steve King – the Republican who consorts with white nationalists and swears he won’t back down.

Scholten came closer than anybody has in eight tries, inching within three percentage points of the indomitable King. Call him the Beto of Iowa – no cigar, but Scholten sure turned some heads.

“You haven’t heard the last of JD Scholten,” he promised the deflated hotel ballroom crowd.

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Two Democratic women did turn Iowa heads and seats. Abby Finkenauer, 29, defeated the Trumpish Rod Blum 51-46%. Democrat Cindy Axne won a close race by winning Des Moines overwhelmingly – while carrying none of the rural counties in the central Iowa district.

What can a presidential interloper trying to understand Iowa first, and then Wisconsin, those two key Trump swing states, learn from what happened in the midterms?

All the insurgents led with healthcare. Scholten called for Medicare for all beside Bernie Sanders – and nobody argued with them. They cheered. Finkenauer ran a positive-themed campaign about the future; healthcare, a higher minimum wage and jobs. The union boys at the John Deere tractor plant in Waterloo who voted for Trump warmed right up to her. They’re plenty nervous about factory orders, as are Caterpillar and Case IH, in the midst of a trade war while Blum has stood by. These candidates listened.

How can Democrats compete for that rural white vote? Or can they?

The economy may be decent in New York but the anxiety out here is palpable

They can. Scholten did it in a district where Republicans outnumber Democrats 190,000 to 120,000, and independents at 172,000 lean conservative. His main argument was: we are losing our rural communities and driving farmers to the brink. He was the only candidate talking much, if any, about climate change. People liked him because he came across as friendly and honest, and increasingly they don’t think Steve King is by his dalliance with Trump.

The economy may be decent in New York but the anxiety out here is palpable. Two-thirds of Iowa’s counties are shrinking. Wisconsin dairy farmers are culling the herds amid hard times. Steel prices are rising yet the trade troubles persist, and those soybeans aren’t worth what they used to be – 30% less because of the China tariffs.

Democrats across the midwest confronted those anxieties in their campaigns by offering security – with pension protection, universal healthcare, collective bargaining rights for public employees and Medicaid expansion as Republican reforms saw nursing homes close, service denied and insurance companies get fat.

They weren’t talking so much about immigration or abortion, or even Trump.

It wasn’t a blue wave in the midwest but a purple split decision: in Kansas, Democrat Laura Kelly beat the radical Kris Kobach, the secretary of state who tried to make voter suppression into high art. It helped elect a Native American, Sharice Davids, who once was a kickboxer, over a longtime incumbent Republican in the western suburbs of Kansas City.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Democratic gubernatorial candidate Fred Hubbell concedes to incumbent Governor Kim Reynolds. He lost badly in rural Iowa. Photograph: Scott Morgan/Reuters

In Wisconsin, the Republican governor, Scott Walker, similarly wore out his welcome with relentless attacks on public employees, and cuts to social services and schools. He was run off by waves of voters in the Madison and Milwaukee suburbs who had voted for Trump. Tony Evers won, but it was so close – just a point.

That’s because Republicans maintained solid control of rural areas across the midwest. In Iowa, Democrats lost three seats in the state senate. In US Senate races, Claire McCaskill fell victim in Missouri alongside Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.

And there was Fred Hubbell, the Democrat who lost the key governor’s race in the lead-in caucus state and bellwether of Iowa. Hubbell got clobbered in rural Iowa so now the statehouse is draped in red. It may be a pyrrhic victory that fosters more overreach and hubris for which the Republicans could pay an even steeper price in 2020. The all-Republican statehouse the past two years has gutted public employee rights, starved schools and bid out the state universities to the ag chemical conglomerates.

The midwest that led the Tea Party surge of 2010 and that heaved Trump into the White House perhaps has run its course with that brand of politics.

In Iowa JD Scholten was talking about aspirations. So was Beto O’Rourke. And so did Barack Obama, whom Iowa embraced one cold January night. Nobody had heard of him before. His roots were in Kansas and his home in Illinois, and he understood the vernacular. The lessons are clear.

First, show up in those rural areas. Hillary Clinton didn’t have a good map. Neither did Fred Hubbell. Obama did. Finkenauer did, and may not have won those rural counties but outperformed Hubbell by two to five points. That’s what he needed to win.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Supporters react as early results come in showing Democratic congressional candidate Cindy Axne leading in Des Moines. Photograph: Scott Morgan/Reuters

Second, this is populist territory, flyover country where people think they’re getting dumped on. Trump and Obama won by campaigning as populists, against the system. So did Tom Harkin and Steve King, from opposite sides of the spectrum. Governor Tom Vilsack never sounded so passionate as when he talked about saving disenfranchised rural people. That talk resonates. Sherrod Brown knows it. Joe Biden has it down.

Third, healthcare remains the issue. It won’t get solved before 2020. It took Bernie Sanders a long way in Iowa, and he happens to be from a rural, white state. Call him a socialist, but he does draw a crowd and knows how far to tread on guns.

And fourth, almost all the winners were women, from the Republican governor of Iowa to Senator Tina Smith in Minnesota, who succeeded Al Franken. Kamala Harris worked the Iowa midterms. Amy Klobuchar is just next door and loves to pop down from Minnesota for a cup, don’t ya know. Elizabeth Warren is always top of mind.

Clearly, Iowa, Wisconsin and even Kansas are not hopelessly lost in a sea of Trump narcissism and denial. The midterm election wasn’t quite a wave, for sure not in Iowa, more like a split verdict that reflects midwestern pragmatism and fatigue with radical experiments that don’t add up to much in the paycheck. We have always expected honesty and humility, but have been getting less of it. When candidates offer it, as the Iowa congressional candidates did, white rural voters will give them a look – just enough, in Axne’s case, to get her over the hump and flip that seat.

King swore he’s not giving up. Trump plows ahead by lighting fires. The voters in the midwest told Walker and Kobach and Blum and Young, not so fast. The wave may be building if one of those candidates can figure out how to catch it. John Delaney just bought an ad in the Storm Lake Times, a good toe in the water.

Art Cullen is editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa. He won the 2017 Pulitzer prize for editorial writing and is the author of the new book, Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper, published by Viking (Penguin-Random House).