Even with the Iran war weighing Trump’s party down, Democrats face a challenge turning the upper chamber blue
The county of Louisa in eastern Iowa is so rural that there is not a single stoplight on its roads, and its largest town, Wapello, boasts an appropriately wry nickname: “Capital of the World”.
The moniker is not entirely off-base, for decisions made here have, in their own way, reverberated across the globe. Louisa is among a band of counties along the Mississippi River that backed Barack Obama both times he was on the presidential ballot, before, like Iowa as a whole, flipping to Donald Trump in 2016 and growing increasingly Republican each time he was on the ballot.
In the town of Columbus Junction, where jobs at a slaughterhouse attract immigrants from all over the world, Araceli Vazquez-Ramirez, a community advocate with the local council of the League of United Latin American Citizens, remembers hearing from neighbors who planned to vote for the Trump two years ago because they believed the promises of improved healthcare and other economic benefits he campaigned on.
What they got instead, she said, was fear. Federal agents are not known to have conducted any raids in the town, but the population has grown frightened by Trump’s efforts to end temporary deportation protections for certain nationalities, and by aggressive deportation campaigns in major cities that appear to indiscriminately target anyone who appears foreign.
