If you're still trying to make sense of the political earthquake of 2016 and happen to be reading this in Minnesota, just look east to a key Hillary Clinton firewall that crumbled on election night.
It's now clear that Clinton made a major strategic mistake by taking Wisconsin and its 10 electoral votes for granted, last deigning to visit the state in April. Despite its purple hue, the strategy seemed a safe bet: President Obama easily won Wisconsin twice, by nearly 14 points in 2008 and by just under 7 in 2012.
As Election Day approached, the respected Marquette University poll had Clinton ahead by a comfortable 6-point margin, seemingly ensuring that Wisconsin would continue a Democratic streak in presidential elections that dated back to 1988.
You need only look to beautiful Trempealeau County, just over the border from Winona, to piece together what went wrong for Clinton in Wisconsin and other battleground states. Trempealeau and its rolling hills are home to about 30,000 mostly white, mostly employed Wisconsinites, many of whom work in agriculture. Its largest city is Arcadia, with about 3,000 residents.
It's quite possible Clinton and her data-driven New York/Washington campaign strategists never heard of Arcadia, but they should have. The Wall Street Journal presciently featured the city in a pre-election analysis of small, Midwestern towns that have diversified faster than almost any other part of the country since 2000.
In Arcadia, an influx of Latino immigrants came to milk cows, process chickens and make furniture at Ashley Furniture Industries Inc. There were unfilled jobs, and the workers were needed, but the Journal story describes how the changing face of what was in the late 1990s a virtually all-white town of 2,400 left some longtime residents unsettled. From 2000 to 2014, the percentage of Hispanics in Arcadia grew from 3 percent to 35 percent.
In response, the local parish added a bilingual priest, Latino shops opened on Main Street and the share of students in the school district qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch climbed to 65 percent vs. 20 percent in the late 1990s. The district opened a new middle school to address the surge.
No one knows how many immigrants came to Arcadia illegally — Ashley and other employers told the Journal they have strong verification systems — but Trump's build-the-wall pledge appealed to some residents, as it did in other rural areas across the Midwest.