Nobody felt the urban-rural divide in last week’s presidential election more deeply than the Chicagoans who’ve moved here to the big, blue city from the surrounding red states of the Midwest.
For many of them, supporting Hillary Clinton sparked strong disputes with their Donald Trump-loving folks back home in the farms and small towns of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Iowa.
“I don’t know what to say about my relatives in Wisconsin,” said Jennifer Towne, 48, a Badger State native who migrated south 19 years ago. “I thought they would vote the right way, but they didn’t.”
Although they aren’t technically immigrants, of course, the people who moved here from nearby states do form a big bloc of newcomers in Chicago.
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Fresh out of Big Ten universities, they tend to cluster in upscale North Side neighborhoods, where it sometimes seems cars registered out-of-state are as common as Land of Lincoln plates.
Like immigrants, these newcomers often are drawn by better economic opportunities than what’s available in their hometowns. And they have their own bars to watch the teams they grew up cheering.
It’s a sure sign of gentrification when the flags of the Ohio State Buckeyes or the Iowa Hawkeyes are planted on front stoops once dominated by the colors of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Poland.
But these newcomers appear to embrace the diversity of Chicago, having come here from relatively monochromatic hometowns.
Towne said she’s certain her pro-Democrat viewpoint represents the vast majority of cheeseheads-turned-FIBs. (In case you didn’t overhear them during that summer trip to the Dells, some of them call us F—— Illinois B——-).
Despite Chicago’s deep segregation, those who moved here from other Midwestern states are exposed to greater diversity, and they say they have a greater variety of friends than they had as kids.
“You wouldn’t move here if you voted the way they voted” in the presidential race in her native Wisconsin last week, Towne said on the sidewalk in front of Will’s Northwoods Inn in Lakeview.
For Towne and other natives of America’s Dairyland who packed the bar Sunday to watch the Green Bay Packers, their favorite football team’s loss was the second — and less painful — of two defeats they watched last week.
Towne, a corporate market researcher who lives in Lincoln Park, says she cried when talking about the election with a Latina in-law in Wisconsin. According to Towne, Wisconsin’s support for Trump perplexed her cousin’s wife because, she said, “Your family has never been anything but nice to me.”
Like the Packers, the Democrats came in for plenty of blame for their loss.
“They discounted the fact that these people are really hurting,” Towne said. “They want a direction, and the Democratic Party didn’t give them that.”
Del Feltz, a 37-year-old TV ad producer, has lived in Chicago for 16 years after growing up in a rural area of Indiana’s Elkhart County, where Trump got 64 percent of the vote.
Although it takes barely two hours to drive from home on the North Side to his parents, Feltz said, “The mindset from where I came from to where I am now is so different.”
He said there are cultural misunderstandings on both sides of the rural-urban split but the election seemed to aggravate matters more than ever.
“Any conversation I had with anybody back home was emotional,” said Feltz, the only one of seven siblings who lives in Chicago. “It was hard to have a logical debate. Everybody had their own facts.”
Taking the L downtown to work the day after the election, Feltz said he could see the worried faces of people who could be adversely affected by Trump’s presidency.
“None of the people I grew up with in Elkhart have to ride that train to and from work,” he said.
Feltz already is bracing himself for more heated discussions with Trump train riders when he returns for the holidays, to a part of the heartland he says was “hit pretty bad by the recession.”
“This ought to be an interesting Thanksgiving,” Feltz said. “That’s for sure.”
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