Dick and Jason rolled up with Kristin, Ryan’s fiancée, along for the ride.
“That’s gotta be the smallest buck I’ve ever seen,” Jason said. “What is it, a two-pointer?”
“It’s six,” I said defensively.
“More like five,” Dick said. “Look, it’s missing a tine on that one antler. It’s that same sonofabitchin’ young buck I saw earlier.”
“The one that was too small to shoot?” Ryan asked.
“I guess he didn’t heed that old-timer’s advice after all.”
The first thing they did was a traditional trophy shot, with me kneeling behind the corpse holding the head up by the antlers. In the pictures it looks comically small.
Then they handed me some rubber gloves and a large knife.
“So what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Put on those gloves and we’ll show you.”
Gutting a deer is not for the faint of heart. I am fully confident I would have puked if it hadn’t been for all the summers I had spent as a child at my dad’s veterinary practice, watching spays and neuters and seeing all manner of animal viscera sprayed across an operating room.
“So you grab ’em by the balls,” Dick said. “And you start your cut between the balls and the asshole there, and then you just kind of just tug the balls all the way up to the ribs, cutting as needed along the way.”
So that’s what I did. The Brumwells hooted and hollered and expressed some dismay that I neither barfed nor was forced to turn away. After the cut was done I plunged my hands into the open cavity and began pulling the steaming entrails out. They were warm and squishy against the gloves, an almost soothing sensation in that chilly evening hour. Once it was properly hollowed out we strapped the deer to the back of the Prowler, conveyed it back to the car and trailer at Russ’s farm, and drove it back into town.
A light layer of snow started falling to mark our return to Red Lake Falls. My first hunt was over, and winter was coming.
Chapter 8
As summer turned to fall in 2016 the nation became increasingly consumed with the presidential election, which was at that point lumbering toward its conclusion. The most striking thing about politics in northwest Minnesota that autumn was that there simply wasn’t a whole lot of it.
In October 2016 in Red Lake Falls, for instance, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single yard sign for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. There were a smattering of signs for various local offices—school board members and county commissioners and the like. Several yards, in fact, proudly displayed signs for multiple candidates competing for the same office—Minnesota Nice on the campaign trail. But the national election was nearly invisible from the roadside.
That’s not to say that the locals are above partisanship. Dan Benoit, Melissa’s husband, was a die-hard Trump supporter. In the run-up to the election he’d amble over to discuss the “fake polls” and rib me for my faith in the numbers. “I can’t believe that garbage those pollsters are putting out,” he’d say. I’d try to lecture him on survey methodology and likely voter models. I told him there was no chance in hell Trump could win the general election. He wasn’t having it.
“We’ll see,” he said.
Melissa, on the other hand, was a Clinton voter. “I can’t stand that he likes Trump,” she would tell us. “But a couple years ago we had a big fight over politics and we decided to stop talking about it, and it’s been great ever since.” No point in ruining a marriage over stuff happening 1,400 miles away in D.C.
Broadly speaking, northwest Minnesota is today a deeply conservative area, but it wasn’t always this way. The 2000 election marked the first time Red Lake County voters supported a Republican presidential candidate going back to at least 1960. They voted for Bush again in 2004, but flipped for Barack Obama by 6 percentage points in 2008. In 2012 Mitt Romney barely eked out a victory. Overall, Democratic candidates had never polled lower than 40 percent going back to, again, at least 1960.
Moreover, state-level Democratic candidates tended to perform strongly in Red Lake County. In 2012, for instance, Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar trounced her Republican challenger by 40 percentage points in the county. Representative Collin Peterson did her one better, beating his opponent by more than 50 percentage points in the county that year. Peterson’s Seventh Congressional District spans most of the western half of the state. It’s deeply conservative, but Peterson, one of the last of the Blue Dog Democrats, has held on here since the 1990s. In 2018 a Georgetown University study rated him the most bipartisan legislator in the House, due to his propensity to get along with Republicans. He’s also one of the few Democratic lawmakers still receiving money from the National Rifle Association.
Overall in 2012, Democrats on the ballot in Red Lake County won every partisan contest, with the notable exception of the presidential race. But then 2016 happened.
On election day Briana went to the local consignment shop to purchase a white pantsuit. We brought the twins to Red Lake Falls’ sole voting location, the basement of the town hall, to introduce them to the concept of civic duty. The scene was right out of a Getty Images slideshow on voting in the heartland—wood-paneled walls, tables draped with bunting, red-white-and-blue drapes over rickety old booths where we filled out paper ballots.
The precinct volunteers were cheery and polite. There was a different sign-in table for each of the city’s three wards. We had no idea which ward we belonged to but it didn’t matter, as the volunteers recognized us by sight and shuffled us efficiently to the proper table. When everyone knows everyone else by sight and name there’s not a whole lot of concern over voter ID. Once we had voted we went back home to watch the returns roll in. By the end of the evening we were just as shocked as everyone else.
I wish I could say that I had known what was coming, that my immersive experience in “real America” had revealed insights that the Beltway elite were blind to. But that’s a load of bollocks, as any honest observer of the election in any corner of the country would tell you. The truth is nobody had any idea. I lived in the heart of Trump country for six months prior to the election and had no idea that the election would unfold the way it did. There were rigid partisans in either camp, of course, who would have shouted their certainty of victory regardless of what any of the polls had said. The partisans on the Trump side have been gleefully I-told-you-so’ing for the past three years, but had just eighty thousand people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania voted differently, Hillary Clinton would have won and her fiercest defenders would be doing the same today.
Judged solely by the yardstick of prior presidential elections, Trump’s victory in Red Lake County was a stunner. Hillary Clinton won the support of fewer than 30 percent of voters, an unprecedented margin of Democratic defeat in more than a half century of presidential contests. This was a sharp contrast from say, Washington, D.C., where Clinton won over 90 percent of the vote. The down-ballot results offer some insight into what voters here were thinking: they weren’t supporting Trump as much as they were opposing Clinton. Democratic representative Peterson, for instance, bested his Republican challenger by close to 25 points. In the race for retiring state senator LeRoy Stumpf’s seat, Republican Mark Johnson edged out Democrat Kip Fontaine by fewer than 2 percentage points. Clinton’s poor performance relative to down-ballot candidates was unprecedented for a Democratic candidate.
There were signs that Red Lake County wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about either of the major-party presidential candidates. You can see this in the fact that in 2016 about two hundred fewer people cast a vote for either the Republican or Democratic candidate relative to 2012. In 2012 about 3 percent of the county’s total presidential votes had gone to a third party or write-in candidate. In 2016 that share was 11 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson more than quadrupled his vote total in Red Lake County, from 24 votes in 2012 to an even 100 in 2016. Ten Red Lake County voters—one-half of 1 percent of the electorate—opted to vote for the no-name can
didates on the “Legal Marijuana Now” ticket instead of Trump or Clinton.
Still, as the sun rose on November 9 it was clear that we were officially living in Trump country. Like every media outlet in the country, the Washington Post was scrambling to figure out what the hell had happened. Dispatches from Trump country were suddenly in high demand. I volunteered to go talk to some of the geezers at Eagle Square one morning to get their take on the news—if there’s any place to find a Trump voter, I reasoned, it would be a Red Lake Falls gas station at nine in the morning.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I found that the grizzled crew of retired teachers, farmers, and laborers at Eagle Square that morning were mostly loyal Democrats who had voted for Clinton. They had had no idea that a Trump surge was in the works, either. And like so many other people in the country, they were wondering how their friends and neighbors with deep ties to Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party—the state arm of the national Democratic Party—ended up pulling the lever for Trump.
“I was shocked by the election,” said Jim Benoit, a retiree and veteran who has lived in Red Lake Falls nearly his whole life. His voice carries a raspy lilt that comes from a decades-long cigarette habit cultivated on the northern Minnesota prairie. I knew Jim from all the times he had stopped by our house to say hi to the boys or drop off pickles and walleye recipes. But until that day, I had no idea what his politics were. “I say hold on to your shorts,” he said, “because we’re in for a ride. And not a good ride—I’m really scared to death.”
Ed Dahle, who retired some years ago after decades of teaching music at the Red Lake Falls High School, said he wasn’t impressed by Trump’s obviously farcical promise to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. He had taken to telling anyone who asked that he planned to build a wall around his house to keep Trump supporters out.
“It’s hard for me to vote Republican when I was raised by a grandfather that was solid Democrat,” he said. “And he told me every time he had a chance, ‘Don’t ever vote Republican because the Democrats help the farmers.’” It’s in the name of the party, after all.
Allen Bertilrud stopped by to shoot the shit. Bertilrud had just been elected mayor in a race that exemplified northwest Minnesotans’ distaste for the political process in general. His predecessor, Kevin Harmoning, had decided earlier in the term that he was done being mayor and was ready to step down. Harmoning in the time I had known him had always seemed slightly embarrassed to be the mayor, as if politics were a disreputable pursuit that good people should try to avoid getting wrapped up in.
The thing was, nobody else wanted to be mayor, either. The good people of Red Lake Falls evidently resembled the founding fathers, in that they viewed electioneering and politicking as a base pursuit. The very act of seeking a political office disqualified a person from being elected to it. The candidate filing deadline came and went with nobody submitting their name for the ballot. In a town of 1,400 people, not a single one wanted to be mayor. As the election approached in the fall, Dick Brumwell ultimately took it upon himself to play the role of kingmaker and organize a write-in campaign via phone. Allen was his choice for mayor, on the basis that they’d spoken a few times and Dick considered him “a pretty levelheaded guy,” which is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard him say about anyone, including his own children.
That day Dick was, in fact, helping Jason fix a garage door at his house. Dick, incidentally, is also a lifelong Democrat. He voted for Obama twice. But he said a vote for Clinton was off the table—just never liked her. He vacillated on whether he could pull the lever for Trump. He was going to vote for “Johnson or that McMullin guy” instead of Trump but in the end a phone call with his Trump-supporting sister convinced him to vote for the reality TV star. He decided to go for it on the basis that Trump would shake things up a bit and that’s what the country needed, and after all what’s the worst that could happen? “I think America is so gosh-darn tired of the status quo politicians, lifetime politicians, it’s time to get somebody who isn’t associated with the government, who has new ideas,” he said.
Less than a month later, Dick was regretting his decision. “Shouldn’t have let my damn sister talk me into it,” he said. It was clear, even at that early date, that the man wasn’t going to grow into the office the way presidents typically do. Trump was still going to be Trump. Several years later his brand of politics—the bullying, the boasting, the schoolyard insults—rubs a lot of people the wrong way in a state that defines itself by its niceness.
Still, there’s evidence that Dick’s a local outlier in his Trump regret. In the 2018 elections, for instance, the partisan breakdown of the state and U.S. house elections in the county was exactly the same—there was no sign, in other words, that unhappiness with Trump was translating into discontent with down-ballot Republicans.
The aftermath of the election prompted a new wave of analysis of the working-class voters who pushed Trump over the finish line. There’s a temptation to treat these white rural voters as a monolith. The sense often seems to be that they’re fundamentally different than their urban counterparts—on culture, on politics, and across so many other social vectors—and similar to each other.
Statistically, of course, there is some truth to this. There is a commonality out here. Nearly everyone is white. Most folks own guns. Many have a tie to the agricultural economy.
But it’s easy to overstate these commonalities. What was starting to become apparent by the 2016 election was that folks in this community—and probably many others like it across the United States—defy easy stereotypes. Yes, Red Lake County turned out overwhelmingly for Trump. But there are plenty of Clinton voters here, too. For me, nothing hammered this point home quite like selecting a group of guys for an interview based on my preconceived notions of what a Trump voter looked like, only to find out that most of them voted Democrat.
Our usual red state/blue state framework does a poor job of capturing the nuance in the country’s political landscape. If you’re just looking at a state-level map, it’s easy to come away with the impression that everybody in certain places votes one way, and everybody in other places votes another. But even in the deepest, reddest states in the country there are millions of people who vote Democrat, and conversely millions of Republicans in places like California. If this is true at the state level, it’s even more so at the level of counties, cities, and towns. If you drill down to precinct-level vote returns, for instance, you realize that even in the heart of Trump country there are thousands of pockets of places where voters chose Hillary Clinton. Those voters usually live in the small cities and towns that dot the nation by the thousands.
Take West Virginia, the reddest state in the nation in 2016. Even there, islands of liberalism dot the landscape. Charleston? Blue. Harpers Ferry? Blue. Huntington? Blue. Red Lake County was, of course, dark red. But even here, Clinton managed to pull off a win in one precinct just outside the town of Red Lake Falls. She bested Trump by more than 2-to-1 in that precinct, a mirror image of the county results as a whole. Granted, just twenty-three people voted in that precinct.
Shortly before the 2018 election I spoke with Brent Lindstrom, the Democratic-Farmer-Laborer candidate to unseat Republican Deb Kiel in Minnesota House District 1b. Lindstrom was a union guy from East Grand Forks, a veteran, and a first-time candidate for state office. He expressed dismay at the state of progressive politics in northwest Minnesota, the apparent lack of energy and coordination in Red Lake County in particular. The county didn’t even have its own DFL party meetings, Lindstrom pointed out—instead, progressives in Red Lake Falls and elsewhere were encouraged to organize via Polk County.
Lindstrom ultimately went on to lose to Kiel by close to 30 points, nearly the exact same margin his predecessor had managed two years ago. A simple truth about politics here and everywhere else is that a lot of it simply comes down to what letter comes after the candidate’s name on the ballot—is it a D or an R? Political scientists increasingly f
ind that when voters make decisions on candidates, partisanship comes first, and policy concerns come after. This is good for political parties, and it’s good for media organizations that treat politics as a spectator sport. But it’s not necessarily great for voters.
Progressive politics is very much alive even in the heart of Trump country, in its own quiet way. It’s deeply outnumbered, but it remains vibrant. I recently met with some Red Lake County progressives at the farm of one Virgil Benoit, the uncle, as it turns out, of my staunch Republican neighbor Dan. Virgil’s family farmed the rich Red Lake County soil for the better part of a century but have since mostly dispersed. Virgil remains behind on what’s left of the farmstead. He recently retired as a professor of French at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, and is the guy who puts together the annual French-Canadian festival in the long-forgotten Red Lake County hamlet of Huot.
Virgil and his wife, Sherry, were hosting a French dinner at the farmstead. Sherry teaches English at UND, including classes on literary theory. A guy named Dan Juhl and his wife, Mary, were there, too. Dan is a wind energy pioneer, one of the first people in the country to get into the business of wind in a major way back in the 1980s. He grew up in Red Lake Falls, went to high school here, and after living and working all around the country throughout his career he came back to the town and makes his home here. Another UND professor, Sharon Carson, was there, as was a reporter from the CNBC based in Winnipeg, Pierre Verriere, who had met Virgil initially through reporting on our move to the area, and subsequently on the history of French and Native American culture in the region. Pierre was originally from France and had come to North America owing in part to an obsession with American culture as a teen. He was there with his girlfriend, Daniella, a native of Honduras who had emigrated to Winnipeg.
I mention all these names and professions simply to underscore that these are the kinds of people who also make their homes on the northern plains, far from the coastal centers of culture and power. Their voices and experiences are no less authentic or important than those of the blue-collar diner attendees who play center stage in so much of American media’s characterization of the heartland. When’s the last time you read a national media profile of these voters?
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