Some years ago I made the observation that the most Republican ethnic groups were Dutch- and Cuban-Americans. But, I added, it seemed unlikely that they would ever get together.
Wrong. In this year’s Republican primaries and caucuses, the Cuban-American Ted Cruz has run extremely well in counties with large Dutch-American populations. You could almost say there was some kind of affinity there. You can see it in the election returns, looking at communities with high percentages of Dutch ancestry and counties where 7.6 percent or more of residents identified themselves to the Census Bureau as having Dutch ancestry.
There are eight such counties in Iowa, four (Lyon, O’Brien, Osceola, Sioux) in the northwest corner of the state around Orange City (named after the Dutch royal family) and four (Mahaska, Marion, Monroe, Jasper) around Pella in south central Iowa. Together they cast 8 percent of the votes in the state’s Republican caucuses. The following table shows the percentages for Cruz, Trump, Rubio and Carson in the 8 heavily Dutch counties and the other 91 counties.
| Cruz | Trump | Rubio | Carson | |
| 8 Dutch counties | 34 | 18 | 24 | 12 |
| 91 other counties | 27 | 25 | 23 | 9 |
Cruz did distinctly better in Dutch Iowa, winning 38 percent of his popular vote plurality over Trump in counties that cast 8 percent of total votes. Trump finished a poor third. Rubio ran about the same in both groups: the five counties he carried included the two university counties (Johnson, Story) and the counties including Davenport and Des Moines and the latter’s fast-growing and affluent suburbs (Scott, Polk, Dallas). Of course if the whole state had voted the way the Dutch counties did, the race would look a lot different today.
Western Michigan contains the largest number of Dutch-Americans in the nation, centered on Grand Rapids. Thirteen counties there have 7.6 percent Dutch ancestry or more (Allegan, Barry, Kalamazoo, Kent, Mason, Missaukee, Montcalm, Muskegon, Newaygo, Oceana, Osceola, Ottawa, Van Buren) and they cast 21 percent of the votes in Michigan’s Republican primary. The following table shows the percentages for Cruz, Trump, Kasich and Rubio in those 13 counties and in Michigan’s other 70 counties.
| Cruz | Trump | Kasich | Rubio | |
| 13 Dutch Counties | 35 | 25 | 24 | 11 |
| 70 Other Counties | 22 | 40 | 24 | 9 |
The Dutch counties enabled Cruz to finish in second place, just ahead of Kasich, whom he trailed by 2 percent in the rest of the state. Even so, Kasich still nearly finished ahead of Trump in Michigan’s Dutch counties.
Why are Dutch-American voters disproportionately inclined to vote for Cruz and not vote for Trump? My working hypothesis is that Dutch-Americans, perhaps like Dutch in the Netherlands, have a high degree of social connectedness, particularly through their various Reform churches. This hypothesis would also tend to explain why Trump carried southern Illinois and southeastern Missouri counties, which had gone for Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee in 2012 and 2008, while Cruz carried southwestern Missouri counties, which had favored them.
Southwest Missouri, the headquarters of the Assemblies of God, has lots of social connectedness through churches; southern Illinois and southeastern Missouri, probably less so. Exception: one county in southeast Missouri went for Cruz, Cape Girardeau, the home town of Rush Limbaugh. In counties with high social connectedness, I suspect, rates or opioid abuse and long-term unemployment tend to be much lower than in counties with little social connectedness.
Another explanation that tends to explain all these results is the Dutch-American counties in Iowa and Michigan and southwest Missouri are ancestrally Republican; most counties in southern Illinois and southeast Missouri are ancestrally Democratic. Again, Cape Girardeau County is an exception, having voted Republican for president in all but five elections going back to the 1880s (the exceptions were 1964, 1948, 1936, 1932 and 1912).
But back to the Dutch. The good news for Cruz, and those who see him as the only candidate who can stop Trump from getting a majority of the delegates, is that he has found an ethnic group from which he gets disproportionate support; Dutch votes enabled him to carry one congressional district in Iowa and three in Michigan.
The bad news is that there aren’t many Dutch-Americans in states still to vote. Wisconsin has two counties with more than 7.6 percent Dutch ancestry (Outgamie, Sheboygan), which cast 6 percent of Republican primary votes in 2012. There are two in Upstate New York (Schoharie, Wayne), which cast 1 percent of Republican primary votes. Another (Jasper) in Indiana, which also cast 1 percent of primary votes. Plus seven in South Dakota (Aurora, Bon Homme, Campbell, Charles Mix, Douglas, Jones, Lincoln) which cast 11 percent of its primary votes and one in North Dakota (Emmons), which elects its delegates by caucus. So there won’t be much occasion for Ted Cruz to take off his Texas boots and campaign in wooden shoes from here on out.
