The county of Louisa in eastern Iowa is so rural that there is not a single stoplight on its roads, and its largest town, Wapello, boasts an appropriately wry nickname: “Capital of the World.”
The moniker is not entirely off-base, for decisions made here have, in their own way, reverberated across the globe. Louisa is among a band of counties along the Mississippi River that backed Barack Obama both times he was on the presidential ballot, before, like Iowa as a whole, flipping to Donald Trump in 2016 and growing increasingly Republican each time he was on the ballot.
