The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics by Salena Zito & Brad Todd

Author:Salena Zito & Brad Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

Joe Steil

Keokuk, Lee County, Iowa

Donald Trump struggled mightily in the 2016 election to win over the two-college-degree, two-car- garage, two-income families that fill up America’s subdivisions—a group that has been the core of the modern Republican coalition.

But you wouldn’t know that from talking to people like Joe Steil in Keokuk, Iowa, a Mississippi River town whose faded Gilded Age glory is still visible in its residential neighborhoods and on the wide streets of its downtown district.

Steil is the chief executive officer of the Lee County Economic Development Group, and it’s his job to help solve the unemployment problem in the locality, which has the second-highest jobless rate in Iowa.2 The county today has 34,615 people, fewer than were recorded in its post-Civil War census of 1870, taken soon after the city’s most famous onetime resident, Mark Twain, called Lee County his home.3

A holder of bachelor’s and graduate degrees in banking, a civic leader, and a political centrist, Steil fits the profile of the exact kind of right-of-center voter most likely to have defected from Trump. But he didn’t. Unlike his demographic peers in the suburbs of Houston, Dallas, Denver, and countless other metro areas, Steil and the people like him who populate the civic service clubs in the small and midsize communities of the Great Lakes region—the Rotary Reliables—voted with their neighbors and not their economic or educational class.

Much has been written about Trump’s large gains among working-class whites, but barely noticed has been the resilience of his support among the upper-class whites who live among the Red-Blooded and Blue-Collared.

“If you’re in larger cities and things like this, you flock with people much more like yourself,” Steil says. “Where in rural America there’s a huge cross section and you’re a part of that cross section.”

Sitting in the conference room of a spec building in an industrial park now home to the economic development agency, Steil projects the thoughtful calm you’d want from your accountant, relaxed in a dark-checked button-down shirt, large glasses sliding slightly down the bridge of his nose.

“I think that we’re more diverse, is a good way of putting it,” Steil says of the social circles in places like Keokuk, where blue and white collars worship together, fish and hunt together, and, in 2016, vote together.

Steil is literally a Rotary Reliable—a member of the local Rotary Club, a business leaders’ group founded in Chicago in 1905—but he just as easily could be a member of the Lions Club, Sertoma Club, Optimist Club, National Exchange Club, or Kiwanis—all groups that have international footprints today but strong histories in the Midwest. Members meet weekly or biweekly, usually for a Dutch-treat lunch, to hear program speeches about other professions and to plan local charitable service projects.4 Even as the institutions of formal connectedness decline in America as a whole with the rise of the casual links of social media, these groups still form a backbone of the leadership class in many small and midsized communities, particularly in the Midwest. The

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