Conversations With Iowa Trump Voters was a collaboration in 2021 between the Fallon Forum and Bold Iowa. Each week from January through April, Ed hosted an hour-long conversation with an Iowan who voted for Donald Trump. Those conversations were published in Ed’s weekly blog and the interviews were featured on the Fallon Forum podcast and radio program.

Ed’s goals with these conversations were to:

1. Dispel the myth that all Trump voters are bad people;
2. Identify common ground;
3. Dialogue about solutions to the existential threat of climate change;
4. Understand why so few rural and blue-collar Iowans vote Democrat.

Ed writes, “I reject the rhetoric that most Trump voters are racists, misogynists, and ‘deplorable’ — as Hillary Clinton so memorably referred to half of Trump’s supporters in 2016. There are good people who, for various reasons, voted for Donald Trump. We need to understand why. We need to listen. We need to figure out our shared interests, especially regarding the climate emergency.”

Relevant to the fourth goal listed above, Ed likes to quote Andrew Yang:

“When I was running for president, I spoke with many of the people who hold some of our most common jobs in America — truck drivers, retail clerks, waitresses and more.

“When I told them I was running as a Democrat, a lot of them tended to flinch.

“We have to acknowledge that there’s something wrong when working class Americans have that response to a major party that is supposed to be fighting for them.

“So, you have to ask yourself in that situation, what is the Democratic Party standing for in their minds?”