“One person, one vote” is the doctrine that governs elections in the United States. But for political campaigns, not all voters are created equal.
Presidential candidates in Iowa are counting on the multiplier effect of their most devoted supporters. And retired farmer Larry Ginter is working hard to get out the vote for Bernie Sanders.
Ginter is a barrel-chested man of modest stature with a gray mustache and a lot on his mind. Save for a stretch in the service, he’s lived in the same single-story home for all of his 76 years.
The stumps of last summer’s corn stalks poke through a thin layer of snow on Ginter’s 180-acre farm. Rhodes, Iowa, population 350, is farm country. And Ginter knows it intimately.
“This is the barn that I used to play in as a kid. Had the hogs in there,” Ginter says, gesturing toward the large white building. “This the machine shed here, Dad built that in ’53 I think it was, or ’54. There used to be an old dairy barn sitting right here.”
Ginter’s involvement in the 2016 presidential race began about a year and a half ago, when Sanders addressed a small group of political activists, labor leaders and other organizers at a private meeting in Iowa City.
Sanders told the group he was contemplating a run for the nation’s most powerful office. Ginter is a member of the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, an activist organization that has since endorsed Sanders’ candidacy. He was at the meeting.
“And he said he wasn’t going to engage it unless he knew. Unless he knew that we were going to stand up for that man,” Ginter says.
He becomes emotional recounting the meeting. Sitting at a small table in his tiny kitchen, Ginter stares at the floor and gathers himself.
"By God, this is a fight. It really is. Democracy is too damn important. This inequality that's going on here pisses me off.” - Larry Ginter
“Excuse me for being a little weepy here,” he says. “But by God this is a fight. It really is. Democracy is too damn important. This inequality that’s going on here pisses me off.”
Ginter wears his heart on his flannel sleeve. And these days, he’s pouring that passion into spreading the word to his farmer neighbors about a Democratic socialist from Vermont. He says he's knocked on lots of doors and made lots of calls.
“I’ve been praying for this guy for along long time,” Ginter says. “We need a political revolution. We need to get social democracy going in this country.”
He says one farmer he spoke with is worried about the $5,000 deductible in his health insurance policy.
“And I talked to him about Bernie Sanders health care plan, you know, move everybody into Medicare. But he’s struggling. He’s got two jobs, and he’s farming fulltime with his dad,” Ginter says. “Why the hell should he have to have two jobs?”
He says he makes the pitch for Sanders to neighbors, then makes a plea for them to attend the Feb. 1 caucus.
“I said, you may not have to do anything, but just be there as a body,” he says.
Ginter is wistful for the New Deal economics he says ushered in the heyday of his farming community in the 1940s and 50s.
“We had milk cows, we had chickens, we had the commercial cow herd. We had hogs. We had a big garden. We had apple trees. We had grapes. We had cherry trees. We had eggs. We had milk,” Ginter says.
And he says Sanders would put a clamp on the free-trade free-for-all he blames for the demise of the local economy here.
“There’s no discipline whatso-damn-ever, excuse my French. No discipline whatsoever here in agriculture,” he says. “It’s dog-eat-dog, fence-row-to-fence-row farming, two-way rotation, not three or four like we used to have.”
"I've tangled with a lot of politicians and talked with a lot of people. And Bernie Sanders is original."
Ginter says he uses the example of local school taxes to try to make his more conservative friends appreciate the value of Sanders’ populist message.
“But now, if I was a neoliberalist, dog-eat-dog capitalist, selfish SOB, I would say, ‘Well, why the hell should I take care of anybody else’s children? I don’t have any, so why don’t I take that money and stick it in my own pocket and have my own good time? That’s what the hell Bernie Sanders is fighting against,” Ginter says.
Ginter is a lifelong activist, and he says he’s convinced his fellow Iowans will come to appreciate Sanders’ appeal.
“I tell you what, I’ve tangled with a lot of politicians and talked with a lot of people. And Bernie Sanders is original,” Ginter says. “He’s authentic. And I really believe that.”
Caucus-goers in Iowa will decide the nation’s first presidential primary on Monday.
VPR’s coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign is made possible in part by the VPR Journalism Fund.