DUBUQUE, Iowa _ One of the essential storylines of the 2016 presidential election was the hidden Donald Trump voter: the person who wasn't surveyed by pollsters or comfortable telling friends or family about who they thought was best to lead the country.
Three years ago, thousands of these Americans _ many working class, residing in the middle of the country _ helped deliver the most astounding electoral surprise in modern history. Now, as they review the Trump presidency a year before his reelection, some are showing signs of turning on conventional wisdom again.
Heather, a local administrative assistant here who is married with a stroller-bound toddler, is still so embarrassed by her 2016 vote that she wasn't comfortable revealing her last name.
"I'm ashamed to admit ... but I'm of a more conservative bent and family. I just couldn't vote for Hillary. But I also thought there's no way Trump was going to win. This way, I could at least say, 'Well I didn't vote for her,'" she said. "I didn't think I was doing any harm."
While Heather isn't sharing her conversion far and wide, she's already decided "there's no chance" she'd vote for Trump again. "Heavens no," she said. "Trump basically turned me into a Democrat."
The 2020 presidential campaign has been engrossed in a debate over which demographic groups Democrats should devote most of their attention to in order to reclaim the White House. African-Americans in urban areas? Rural voters who flipped from Barack Obama to Trump? Newly emerging but unreliable young people?
But the one pivotal group showing the most evident signs of splitting from the president are white working-class women, according to a review of polling data, focus groups and interviews with more than a dozen party strategists and voters like Heather.
It's these voters _ packed in eastern Iowa, central Minnesota, southwestern Wisconsin, northern Ohio and throughout Michigan _ who will wield outsize influence over Trump's 2020 fate. Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini calls these women the essential voter as it relates to the Electoral College.
"If I could talk to one voter in the country, it would be a non-college-educated white woman," he said. "It's definitely the kind of voter Trump can't lose."
