OTTUMWA, Iowa — The candidates would arrive soon enough, armed with scripts and backed by millions of dollars targeting voters just like the women gathered here at the American Legion for mahjong. Tonight was about the game.
“Rack ’em and sort your tiles,” said Heidi Ash, 52, who convened the group in Ottumwa, a hollowed-out industrial town an hour and a half southeast of Des Moines.
Jami Brechon, 61, pushed three tiles across the table.
“I’m just kind of guessing,” she said. “I’m going by faith to make the right decision.”
Brechon, who owns a local plant and crystal shop, was talking about the game, but that logic carried well beyond the table. These women live in an area hamstrung by tariffs, struggling to keep hospitals open, bogged down by spiking prices from the war in Iran and grieving the loss of four soldiers in the Middle East since December, the most of any state.
They are the type of voters who will help determine who controls Congress this fall, and, before long, who competes for the presidency — a contest that is already quietly beginning. With competitive races for three congressional seats, one Senate seat and the governorship, Iowa has emerged as a testing ground for the popularity of Trump’s policies and how they will translate to the midterm elections.
Some of these women used to like the Democratic Party, and so did their neighbors. But discerning who would best serve the town’s needs has became more complex. The Democrats that Ottumwa reliably elected decades ago, when the meatpacking industry was booming and a job building farm equipment could support a family, did not reverse its worsening fortunes, and it became one of the many working-class towns that twice delivered Donald Trump to the White House.
The multibillion-dollar question consuming Washington is whether the Republicans can keep them when Trump is not on the ballot — or leading the party — and whether the Democrats can win them back.
Around the mahjong table on Tuesday, beneath framed newspaper clippings that marked the start and end of past wars, sat two teachers, a restaurateur and a small-business owner who worried that their children would never be able to afford to buy homes of their own. As they played, they discussed the nuisances of menopause, swapped stories about their adult children complaining about their parenting and compared purchases inspired by Instagram ads.
“This is why we all gather to play mahjong,” Ash said, drawing a two-dot tile.
“So we can just release all the venting,” said Amanda Cain, 46, who teaches first grade.
Brechon, the plant and crystal shop owner, is an example of one key dynamic in the current political climate: the steady backing Trump continues to receive from his core supporters even as his standing has declined with others. She said she was feeling the higher price at the gas pump. But she supported Trump’s military action and hoped it would soon come to an end.
“All my life, I’ve heard the wall, immigration, you know, Iran, nuclear, da da da, and nobody’s ever done anything about it,” she said. “At least we’re doing something to make some sort of change.”
Brechon is still registered as a Democrat, but it has been a decade since she voted for one. She knew Trump from “The Apprentice,” and while she hates some of what he says — like that he would erase an entire civilization if Iran did not agree to a deal — she believes he has a good heart.
Plus, she said, gas prices are still cheaper than she remembered them under former president Joe Biden. And she feels like the Democrats betrayed her during covid, when, she believes, they acted against scientific evidence to force widespread isolation.
She reshuffled her tiles, then discarded one with a bird on it, about halfway through their first game of the night. The table picked up their drinks for a toast.
“Table rules,” explained Ash, who wore a shirt that said “IT’S MAHJONG TIME.”
She had started running $70, five-hour mahjong boot camps in the area in October — an effort to bring back the feeling of community that had disappeared during the pandemic.
None of the women at the table had started following the gubernatorial, senatorial or congressional races in their district — each among the most hotly contested elections in the country. But they all said they planned to vote come November.
Democrat Sarah Trone Garriott wanted their attention. Earlier that day Garriott, a former Lutheran minister and hospital chaplain who is challenging Republican Rep. Zach Nunn for his seat in Iowa’s 3rd District, argued that the party in power had failed Iowans, pointing to Trump’s Medicaid cuts that she said had forced a local clinic to shutter.
“If we can spend a billion dollars a day on a war in Iran,” she said, at a restaurant in Des Moines, “we can keep the clinic open.”
Nunn, an Air Force officer with multiple combat deployments, was preparing to launch a bid for governor before Trump called him and asked him to run again for Congress, according to four people familiar with the conversation — a sign of the White House’s focus on defending the seat.
Nunn’s campaign declined to make him available for an interview.
One woman in the crowd was a lifelong Democrat from Ottumwa who lost both of her parents to cancer — a common occurrence in a state with one of the fastest-rising cancer rates in the nation. Exposure to pesticides, nitrate, PFAS and radon has been linked to the rise.
“I really believe that women are often the canaries in the coal mine,” said Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan), who joined Garriott at a town hall at the back of a restaurant in Des Moines, where she hinted at a presidential run. “Maybe their husbands are still very much in support of the president, but they are willing to say, look, you take my clinic away, I got to face the facts here.”
One woman at the mahjong table said she used to see a doctor at the clinic that closed in February. Another woman’s husband did, too. Both of them had heard Democrats say that Trump’s Medicaid and Medicare cuts were responsible. Neither knew whether to believe them.
A spokeswoman for MercyOne Iowa, which ran the Ottumwa clinic, said the changes to government funding had exacerbated long-standing pressure on health care providers — such as “increasing costs, staffing shortages and reimbursement that does not cover the full cost of care.”
“These pressures are combined with recent and expected government funding and policy changes across Medicaid and Medicare, reducing revenue to hospital systems,” said the spokeswoman, Eva Lederhouse, in a statement. “It is not possible to absorb these impacts without making thoughtful, forward-looking adjustments to remain sustainable.”
Since Trump took office last year, there haven’t been many tangible gains in this little city, one of the poorest in the state, nestled amid sprawling fields of corn and soybeans. The tariffs have reduced demand for U.S. crops, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has raised prices of key inputs for farmers. Gas prices improved for a bit, but on Tuesday, the blinking sign on the way into town said “$3.59.”
Trump, in a social media post Saturday, acknowledged the war’s impact on farmers.
“I am watching fertilizer prices CLOSELY during our FIGHT FOR FREEDOM in Iran,” he wrote. “The United States will not accept PRICE GOUGING from the fertilizer monopoly! American Farmers, we have your back!”
Republicans running for office in the state have said that the status quo isn’t working well enough, even though their party controls the White House, Congress and the state Capitol. They have pointed to Trump’s domestic policy bill that offers support for rural health programs like community clinics and telehealth services, as well as aid packages to help farmers.
At a breakfast the next morning in near Des Moines, GOP gubernatorial candidate Randy Feenstra touted the Trump administration’s elimination of tax on tips, Social Security and overtime pay. But he also acknowledged persistent problems such as long lines at hospitals and slow ambulance response times. He said he hoped gas prices would fall once the war ends.
“We can’t settle for average,” he said. “We got to continue the conservative movement putting more money in people’s pockets to make sure that we have world-class education and a great agriculture infrastructure.”
Feenstra ticked through some of the GOP’s cultural priorities — railing against gender transition care and abortion, and vowing to keep “DEI” out of schools. One woman listening, who runs a grassroots organization in support of Trump, said she was glad to hear Feenstra focus more on the issues she cared about, like nitrate pollution causing cancer in her state.
“I’m sick of talking about these social issues. I don’t really care about that,” said Kelley Koch, who runs MAGA Nation. “I’m baffled as to why these other issues haven’t come up sooner.”
The women at the mahjong table were tired of the most divisive issues, too. Most of them had lost friends or bitterly fought with their own children over the direction of the country. That was why they never asked how each other had voted.
Cain, the first-grade teacher, reshuffled the tiles in her hand. The game was almost over. She glanced at her friends around the table, who were also studying their hands.
She had not even told her own kids that she had, reluctantly, cast her ballot for former vice president Kamala Harris. She did not like that Trump had led the country with a level of crudeness that would have gotten her fired from her own job. The women at the table agreed that the president needed to “shut his piehole a lot more.”
“I just think there’s a distrust by every single American about every single person,” Cain said.
“Both sides,” said Brechon, who said she has voted three times for Trump.
The game ended in a draw.
The post At a mahjong table in Iowa, a struggle over which party to trust appeared first on Washington Post.
