Across the 4th District — a highly conservative swath of Iowa nearly 200 miles wide, mile upon mile of fertile farmland dotted with towns the length of a two-block Main Street — King has widespread support.
“Steve’s Steve. He’s a local guy. He graduated from high school here. He comes in for breakfast on Sundays,” says Crawford County Supervisor Eric Skoog, who with his wife, Terri, owns what they believe to be the oldest continuously operating restaurant in Iowa.
At the counter of Cronk’s, which has been open since 1929, Skoog says he disagrees with King on immigration and hasn’t been afraid to share his conflicting views. Skoog has worked hard to help local schools adjust to the influx of immigrant children in Denison, one place in the heavily white district where a major meatpacking plant has drawn a sizable Hispanic community.
Still, Skoog said, “I don’t see him as racist. I don’t know. He’s just Steve.” Come November, he said, he’ll probably vote for him.
Some in the district welcome King’s blunt talk.
“We’re getting pretty happy in this country about kicking the white guy. Only one group of people haven’t achieved minority status, and it’s white men,” says Steve Sorensen, a former truck driver, watching the World Series in a Hampton bar. “You can fire a white man every time you want. He’s got no recourse. Try that with anybody else.”
Mindy Rainer also believes that others get government benefits more easily than she does, as a white woman. “There are people out there that are desperate as hell, and I’m one of them,” she says, sliding up to the bar at the restaurant in the town of Cherokee where she works.
Rainer’s husband was injured on a job site 25 years ago, she said, and denied disability benefits because of bureaucratic hurdles. She has supported them both, but now her kidneys are failing and she fears that she won’t be able to work for the eight years until her husband can collect Social Security.
Rainer recalled lining up to try to get help with her utility bills when she lived in South Carolina and becoming suspicious of the others in line, almost all of them African American.
“What upset me more than anything was all them black babies were dressed up in the best clothes,” she said. “When their kids are wearing $150 tennis shoes, what do you think?”
She sides with King when he talks about immigration. “Why should we feed others when we can’t feed ourselves?” she asked.
Steve King is just representing the views of rural Iowans who want a political party that puts white people first, particularly white men, because that's how it should be in America. The difference is thanks to Donald Trump, it's perfectly okay to say that you want to vote for the guy running on the platform of "white advocacy", and not a single one of them thinks it's racist because there's a generation of white folk in America who believe they have been discriminated against since birth.
This is America, the party of whites versus the party of those people and Steve King is happily running as a proud member of the former.