01/12/2024

Two Iowa Counties an Hour Apart Show America’s Growing Political Divide

Seventy miles separate deep red from dark blue

Kim DeVore was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama when he ran for president in 2008, drawn to his message about bringing the country together. A loyal Democrat, she caucused for him and even traveled to Des Moines to attend a rally he held there.

But DeVore, who lives in a tiny Iowa town near the Missouri border, eventually came to feel that Obama had only divided the country further. She changed her party registration to Republican in 2016 and voted for Donald Trump, drawn to his pledge to build a wall on the border with Mexico and to put Americans first. "When we have veterans and other people here that are not being helped, now that's infuriating," she said.

Seventy miles north in the Des Moines suburbs, Kenan Judge, a retired executive at the Iowa grocery chain Hy-Vee, made the opposite political journey. He had been a Republican for decades but left the party in 2016 after Trump secured the nomination. In 2018, he ran for a Republican-held state House of Representatives seat in Dallas County as a moderate Democrat and won.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Washington Post.