CRESCO, Iowa — When the surge of conservative populism started sweeping the Republican Party in the fall of 2015, Howard County Republican Party Chairman Neil Shaffer remained firmly behind Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) when he went to caucus in January 2016.
Shaffer eventually warmed to Donald Trump and went on to vote for him in November of that year. It was a vote that made him part of a coalition that turned Howard County, which lies here in northern Iowa on the border with Minnesota and not that far from the Wisconsin state line, Republican for the first time since Ronald Reagan in a presidential election.
How big was the swing here from Democrat to Republican? Well, in 2008 Barack Obama won 62% of the vote over John McCain in this predominantly white farming county, a number that didn’t change much four years later when he faced Mitt Romney.
However, by 2016, Trump won a whopping 58% of the traditionally Democratic county’s vote — a 42-point swing from 2012 to 2016, earning Howard County its place in history as the third-most volatile county in the entire country, trailing only Clark County, Missouri, and Elliott County, Kentucky.
Shaffer was profiled in The Great Revolt, Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics, the book I co-wrote with Brad Todd, which looked at the unlikely coalition of seven wildly different archetypes of voters who joined together in 10 counties in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. These were counties that voted for Obama twice and were moved red just enough by these voters to change American politics in 2016.
Shaffer said he voted for Trump again in 2020, yet admits he isn’t quite sure he’ll do it again come Monday, a wavering away from the former president he admits surprises even himself.
“I went into 2020 hopeful he would win,” said Shaffer, a sixth-generation family farmer who also works as an environmental specialist in watershed projects for the state and is a trustee at the same Evangelical Lutheran Church where his forefathers worshiped.
“I could see the benefits of his presidency, especially in rural America — he had really come through on his promises from his picks on the Supreme Court to reworking the NAFTA agreement, which put the sanctions on China, and tariffs and was actually writing checks out to Iowa farmers,” he said, explaining why Trump remained popular in Iowa.
But he also saw the debates in the fall of that year, cringed at Trump’s approach, and said he began to expect the worst in the general election against Joe Biden.
“They were terrible,” Shaffer said. “I could only watch a few minutes of them. I’m not a big debate guy anyway and as they started in I didn’t think Trump had done himself justice.
“A lot of people that I heard from in the county said, ‘Oh, man, did you watch that? That wasn’t very good,’ but still, the diehards in the county weren’t going anywhere nor were they staying home,” Shaffer said.
When it was clear Trump lost to Biden, Shaffer said he was never of the belief that the election was stolen as Trump often says. “I think we were outworked and outsmarted. I don’t believe it was ‘stolen’ in my word,” he said, adding that lax voting laws in other states and Trump’s push for people not to trust the absentee balloting hurt him in the end.
“I told the Trump people to please stop talking about the absentee ballots and how they’re crooked and all this,” he said. “We need to get as many people to vote early. And if that’s the rules in that state, then by God get better at it than your opponent.”
It is three days before caucus day — it is snowing and cold, as it almost always is around here this time of year, and Shaffer, after making sure roads were clear, said he has been going to the different caucus sites he is in charge of as chairman of the party to make sure everything is ready for the big show Monday night.
“So caucus night, we have four sites in our county,” Shaffer said. “Some we bundle up precincts like here in Cresco’s we’ve got four precincts. They all meet together, but they’ll vote by precinct, but they’ll do their meeting agenda together. And I’ll probably be the temporary chair for that night, start it off at 7:00. Our doors open at 5:30, so people can come in early if registered. We’ll hand them their ballot. But we’ll wait until 7:00 to start.
“Once it starts, we let someone speak on behalf of each candidate, and then they can vote,” he explained. “And once they’ve voted, if they’d like to leave, they can leave. They can wait until we count. We’re going to count them right in front of everyone right there in the midst of the caucus.”
Since the presidential campaign has gone into full swing, two Republican presidential candidates, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have visited Howard County trying to earn its vote. Shaffer said it has been DeSantis who has had the most impact on both him and many other Republican caucus voters in this county.
“I have a unique experience because I’m a county chair, so you get contacted by campaigns,” he said, adding, “As far as campaign ground game, DeSantis has by far a well-oiled machine going on here. Their people contact me constantly. He’s got all kinds of levels of people, they’re in charge of this and that. When he came through, it was just flawless.”
Shaffer said he received a personal call from Casey DeSantis this week and it was remarkably not a call to pressure him for a vote. “She called me a couple days ago just to say, ‘Thanks for being chair, and I know there’s a lot of pressure on putting these caucuses on,’ which I thought was a very nice gesture,” he explained.
The Florida first lady told the Washington Examiner in between several events that she enjoys making those outside-the-limelight bonds with people.
“It is very humbling to travel across the state because these personal connections mean a lot to caucus-goers,” she said. “Iowans want to see candidates show up and earn their vote and that’s exactly what Ron has been doing.”
Shaffer said when DeSantis was here in town, the room at the Atomic Pizza Pub, whose cheesy breadsticks are to die for, was so packed that Shaffer could barely see the Florida governor through the crowd.
There are two candidates who have remarkably not reached out to Shaffer: Trump and Nikki Haley.
“Haley is the interesting one,” Shaffer said. “She wasn’t too high in the polls for a while, and I think she’s been planning all along to put her big game in New Hampshire. But now that she’s coming in the polls, she’d like to do well in Iowa. But I have yet to be contacted by anyone from her staff, anyone. I haven’t even heard of her coming to anywhere in northeast Iowa. And it’s almost daily I get messages from northeast Iowa where different candidates are going to appear. So I think if she doesn’t do well, it’s probably because she wasn’t planning on doing well.”
Shaffer said no one from the Trump campaign has reached out to him about caucus night or anything other than a blanket email that went out in August, “Which makes me wonder about their overall ground game, sort of reminds me of Howard Dean for the Democrats here in 2004, everyone expected Dean to win until they found out there was no ground game.”
Biden’s decision to skip Iowa and not hold a presidential caucus Monday night — Democrats will still meet and caucus over local matters, but their presidential ballot will be done by mail, and the votes will not be revealed until Super Tuesday — has brought about a curious interest from local Democrats, Shaffer said.
“I’ve had several conservative Democrat friends who will be caucusing with Republicans here because the Democrats have passed on it,” he said. “I don’t know how much of an impact that will have statewide; however they have been very interested in learning about each candidate and showing up.”
Shaffer said a lot of Trump’s strongest voters have never caucused before, and shockingly they are also not planning to start on Monday. “I’ve been surprised by the amount of them who told me when I asked them to come to caucus Monday night who told me, ‘Nah, he’s going to win anyway.’”
Shaffer just shakes his head, “That is where you need a ground game.”
The other thing that has surprised Shaffer, he said, was that despite the Trump 2024 signs that have been basically up here since 2020, there is a real willingness among Howard County Republicans to consider someone other than the former president.
“We sit in a round table and talk and it is not all Trump, Trump, Trump,” he said, and reminds everybody that Iowa loves to surprise both parties. “Cruz, Huckabee, and Santorum are three examples on the Republican side and Pete Buttigieg, Barack Obama, John Edwards and John Kerry for the Democrats, and these are all recent.”
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Shaffer said if you asked him a week ago if Trump was inevitable here, he would have agreed 100%. Now he says he’s not so sure.
As for him, he’s leaning heavily toward DeSantis, not just because of the way he has governed in Florida, he said, but also the way he has conducted himself and his campaign in the state. “I think that’s where my vote is going.”