How Pete Buttigieg Found Support in Iowa's Formerly Anti-LGBT Communities

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4 hours ago
How Pete Buttigieg Found Support in Iowa’s Formerly Anti-LGBT Communities
The presidential candidate is trying to flip the Obama-Trump counties that once fought gay marriage the hardest.
Patrick Caldwell

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But the fact that Buttigieg’s allyship is quieter, that his marriage to Chasten Buttigieg would be a boringly bland political marriage were it not for their respective genders, might be what helps normalize his relationship for these rural communities. “The fact that he’s palatable to middle America,” Bruening says, “is why he’s popular in Iowa.”

“If you step into some of the smaller towns, the more rural towns, you can hear the slurs used as a casual form of language, but the young people today are much more open to letting people live their lives however they want,” Dan Callahan, the chair of the Independence County Democrats, who had introduced Buttigieg, told me after his event in Buchanan county last week, as George Michael’s “Freedom” played over the loud speakers to usher out the crowd. “There’s a lot of these older people here today, they’re the same way. ‘What you do doesn’t affect me, so I’ll let you do it, if you let me do what I want. That’s a lot of what Iowa is all about.”

As much as rigid gender norms loosened nationally in the 2010s, people across the LGBTQ spectrum still face plenty of discrimination—and things haven’t come nearly as far on trans rights as they have on marriage equality. Just last week, a group of nine Republicans in the state legislature, including the representative for Clayton County, introduced a bill that would have stripped trans-protections from the Iowa Civil Rights Act—but the Republican in charge of the relevant committee quickly killed the provision. “It’s one of those issues,” Price says, “that has moved so quickly and become such a non-issue for most people’s minds that when the Republicans do start talking about it, they get immediate pushback.” Should Iowa send Mayor Pete forward as its top choice to run against Trump, it doesn’t mean the state is absolved of any lingering homophobia, just as Barack Obama’s win here in the 2008 caucuses didn’t mean racism was solved in the Hawkeye state.

But the fact that Pete’s even a competitive candidate, and that the main reason he has a chance is thanks to the small towns that just a decade ago would have been highly judgmental to someone like him is a quiet success story, one of the few political bright spots of the Trump era.

“There’s a lot of people here who are probably still uncomfortable,” Callahan told me. “But it doesn’t mean they’re going to treat you different, or do anything differently. And they’re certainly not going to vote to support those kinds of actions.”