Anyway, one person who didn't know what Donald Trump is.
The former president was in Iowa last week as part of his extended push for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. He stopped at a Dairy Queen in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and went all out there promising to buy things for others customers. (He hadn't been in the habit of actually buying them recently.) But one order piqued his interest.
“Everybody wants a Blizzard,” he said he said. “What the hell is Blizzard? Who ordered Blizzard? … We're going to do Blizzard, okay?”
For the uninitiated, this is a bit like walking into a McDonald's and saying you don't know what a “Big Mac” is. Once upon a time, the signature treat at a DQ was the “Dilly Bar,” vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate. But then in the mid-1980s DQ discovered the Blizzard — candy or cookies mixed into soft serve — and established a new dominant offering.
It's not really surprising that a billionaire from New York would be ignorant of this particular slice of Americana. It's a little more surprising that it would be Trump, given his unusual embrace of fast food as a politician and as president. But Dairy Queen doesn't belong in New York. The closest stores to his (former) home in Trump Tower are across the river in New Jersey. (There is one close enough to Mar-a-Lago(but, apparently, it doesn't stop much there.) Ask Trump where to get a slider, though, and I bet he says “White Castle” without missing a beat.
Dairy Queen is, instead, very much a Midwestern thing. Using data on more than 4,000 Dairy Queen stores in the United States, we created this location heat map. You can see that the strip from Chicago to Northeast Ohio shines brighter. This is the heart of DQ.
But if you look at this map, you notice something else: Besides Illinois, the states with the most DQ locations are also the ones that tend to be purple or red. Trump is doing exactly what members of his own party claim to dislike most: displaying ignorance of the coastal “overfly country.”
Having gone to high school in Northeast Ohio (and thus familiar with Dilly Bars and Blizzards) (I ate a lot of Heath Blizzards when I was little), I was curious how much Dairy Queen's presence overlaps with support for Trump. Besides, the stores tend (in my experience) to be in more rural areas, which suggests that Trump doesn't know what a red country restaurant is.
It is difficult to fully understand the policy of Dairy Queen locations. First, determining the area of each Dairy Queen location is not trivial, as it involves mapping thousands of addresses to electoral maps. Also, it wasn't exactly critical to calculate it accurately. So I took the zip codes of each Dairy Queen store, determined the counties in which those zip codes were located (which itself is imprecise), and then looked at the presidential results at the county level. Consider this a back-of-the-napkin calculation.
Interestingly, Joe Biden received more votes in Dairy Queen counties than Trump. In prefectures without Dairy Queen, Trump received more votes. But that's partly because chain restaurants need to be close some People. Large, empty counties are not a great choice for a fast food restaurant. Instead, you have stores like this one in Windsor Heights, Iowa, that are in an enclosure which supported Biden by 30 points. It is also in a dense commercial area, across from a Walmart Supercenter.
But that's it Any DQ store. If, on the other hand, we look at the density of shops in relation to the population, the picture changes. I took the number of stores in a county and compared it to the population. I then divided the results into five groups (quintiles, as the fancy people say), ranging from the fewest stores per capita to the most. Results? Counties with the highest density of stores per capita also voted much more heavily for Trump.
This is true in absolute terms (adding up all the votes cast in those counties and comparing them) and is true when simply averaging the vote margin across those counties. As below.
Dairy Queen is a red country restaurant. Hence the brand colors, I guess.
But that's also a good distillation of Trump's unique position in the Republican field. If, say, Mike Bloomberg came back to the GOP and showed up at an Iowa Dairy Queen to buy ice cream for people and then said, “What's a Blizzard?” The conservative media wouldn't have stopped talking about it for a week. Trump would have four posts on Truth Social before dawn the next day. But when Trump — also a Democrat-turned-Republican — does the same thing, he gets away with it.
If Trump then posted on social media that the Council Bluffs Dairy Queen is a good place for you know what, it would also generate massive media attention.
