Why Iowa turned so red when nearby states turned blue
With the Iowa caucuses six days away, politicians will be crisscrossing the state, blowing through small-town Pizza Ranches, filling high school gyms and flipping pancakes at church breakfasts.
What Iowans won’t see are the Democrats. President Biden spoke in Pennsylvania on Friday, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris were both in South Carolina this weekend and Monday. But Iowa, a state that once teemed with bipartisan politics, launched Barack Obama as president in 2008 and oscillated between Republican and Democratic governors, has largely ceded to the Republican Party as part of a notable group of voters in the Upper Midwest.
There is no reason why the Upper Midwest has seen Iowa turn into a beacon of Donald J. Trump’s populism over the past fifteen years; North and South Dakota have renounced storied histories of prairie populism for a conservatism that mirrored the national Republican Party, and Illinois and Minnesota are moving dramatically to the left. (Sandwiched between them, Wisconsin found an uneasy parity between its conservative rural counties and its more industrial and academic centers in Milwaukee and Madison.)
No state in the country swung so heavily Republican between the two 2012 and 2020 as Iowait went from a six-point victory for Barack Obama to an eight-point victory for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election.
The deindustrialization of rural and Mississippi River regions had its impact, as did the erosion of institutions, from community organizations to small-town newspapers, that had given the Upper Midwest a character separate from national politics.
Susan Laehn, an Iowa State University political scientist who lives in the small town of Jefferson, Iowa, recounted how an issue that would once have been handled through discussions at church or the Rotary Club instead became tainted with national politics, along with her husband, the Greene County libertarian lawyer, stuck in the middle: New multi-colored lighting installed last summer to illuminate the city’s clock tower sparked an angry debate over LGBTQ rights, leaving much of the city became soured by identity politics that they largely gave to the national left.
Another problem: brain drain. The movement of young graduates from Iowa and the Dakotas to the metro areas of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul left his mark on the politics of all five states.
Michael Dabe, a 19-year-old business and marketing student at the University of Dubuque, near the west bank of the Mississippi River, has found a comfortable home in Iowa, where life is slower and simpler than in his native Illinois and politics . he said, are more in line with his conservative leanings.
But he had no doubts about what he will do with his business degree once he graduates, and most of his classmates will likely follow suit, he said.
“There are so many more opportunities in Chicago,” he said. “Politics is important to me, but job security, being able to raise a family more safely, is certainly more important.”
A analysis in 2022 by economists from the University of North Carolina, the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago of data collected from LinkedIn showed how states operate with dynamic economic centers attract graduates from more rural states. Iowa is losing 34.2 percent of its college graduates, worse than 40 of the 50 states, just below North Dakota, which is losing 31.6 percent. Illinois, on the other hand, gets 20 percent more graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more than it produces.
Even when young families want to move back to the rural areas where they grew up, they are often thwarted by an acute housing shortage, says Benjamin Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Cloud, Minnesota; 75 percent of rural homeowners are baby boomers or older, and those older residents see boarded-up businesses and believe their community’s best days are behind them, he said.
As older voters become more frustrated and conservative, the trend is accelerating. Iowa, whose 2020 congressional delegation included two Republicans, two House Democrats, and two Republican senators, now has an almost entirely Republican-controlled government that has pursued boldly conservative policies that ban nearly all abortions and transition care for minors, vouchers for public money for private schools and obtain books from school libraries that describe sexual acts. (The library and abortion laws are now on hold in the courts.) The congressional delegation is now entirely Republican after a 2022 Republican election and the re-election of Senator Charles E. Grassley.
Meanwhile, on the East Bank of the Mississippi, in Illinois, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles are banned, the right to abortion is enshrined in law, and recreational marijuana is legal. Upstream in Minnesota, pot is legal, unauthorized immigrants are getting driver’s licenses, and voting rights for felons and teens are expanding.
Such policy dichotomies influence the decisions of younger Iowans, said David Loebsack, a former Democratic House member from Eastern Iowa.
“These people continue, and I fear they will continue, given the policies that have been passed,” he said.
The politics of rural voters in the Upper Midwest may simply be playing catch-up to other rural regions that have turned conservative earlier, says Sam Rosenfeld, a political scientist at Colgate University and author of “The Polarizers,” a book about the architects of national polarization. White voters in the rural South moved sharply to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as black Southerners rose to power thanks to the civil rights movement and associated legislation, he noted.
But rural voters in the Upper Midwest, where few black people lived, clung to more diverse politics for decades. North Dakota, with its state bank, state grain mill and state grain elevator, retains vestiges of a socialist past, when progressive politicians railed against predatory businessmen from the Twin Cities. Yet politics have changed dramatically.
“Until relatively recently, there was a rural white voter in the Midwest who was distinct from a white voter in the rural South,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “There was a real progressive tradition in the Midwest that wasn’t usurped by Jim Crow and racial issues.”
Rural parts of Iowa now politically resemble rural parts of any state, from New York to Alabama to Oregon. And rural voters simply appreciated what Trump did for them, said Neil Shaffer, chairman of the Republican Party of Howard County, Iowa. Located along the border with Minnesota, it was the only county in the country that gave both Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump victories of 20 percentage points.
Iowans love outsiders, and Obama’s charisma won out, Shaffer said. But Howard County’s self-employed farmers and small business owners have been burdened by the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration’s regulation of freshwater runoff and falling commodity prices.
There was skepticism about Mr. Trump and his abrasive behavior in big cities, Mr. Shaffer said, “but there is an individual spirit in the Midwest that loves the quixotic whining of big, bad government.” And the people knew what they were getting. ”
Kyle D. Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics explains polarization as a story of the top half versus the bottom half of the population scale. When more than half of a state’s votes come from dominant urban areas, as is the case in Illinois and Minnesota, states tend to be Democratic. When smaller, rural counties dominate, states tend to move to the right.
Of the nine largest counties in Iowa, only one, Dubuque, switched from Mr. Obama to Mr. Trump in 2016. President Biden’s margin in those counties in 2020 was just three percentage points lower than Mr. Obama’s winning margin in 2012.
But Obama also held 31 of the 90 smaller counties; Mr. Biden won none. As a group, Obama lost these rural counties to his Republican rival Mitt Romney by 2.5 percentage points. Mr. Biden lost them to Mr. Trump by almost 30 percentage points.
Mr. Kondik attributed some of that to Mr. Trump, whose anti-immigrant and protectionist policies diverged from traditional Republican positions. “He was a good fit for the Midwest,” he said.
Laura Hubka, co-chair of the Howard County Democrats, recalled high school students driving around town with large Trump flags in 2016. It felt intimidating, she said.
“It was scary for a lot of people and scared a lot of Democrats on the inside,” Ms. Hubka said. “Trump spoke to a certain kind of people. People who felt like they were being abandoned.”
Haunted by the changing politics, she says, at least one of her children now plans to move his family across the border to Minnesota.
But the overwhelming Republican victories in Iowa in 2022, when Trump was not on the ballot and the Republican Party was faltering in much of the country, point to other factors. Christopher Larimer, a political scientist at the University of Northern Iowa, again pointed to the demographics. The huge groundswell of new 18-year-old voters who turned out Obama in 2008 were 22 and graduated in 2012. By 2016, many of them had likely left the state, Mr. Larimer said.
“I don’t know if Iowa is different than anywhere else; it has become entangled in the nationalization of politics,” he said. “Young people are moving to the urban core, and that makes the suburbs even redder.”
If that urban core is capable, the statewide results will not change. If it’s somewhere else, they will.
Mr Winchester, the rural sociologist, said the perception of rural decline is not the reality; regional centers, like Bemidji, Minnesota, or Pella and Davenport, Iowa, are booming, and even as small-town businesses have closed, homes in those towns are filled.
But, he said, “many cities don’t know their place in the larger world. That concept of anomie, a sense of disconnection, exists.”
Gary Hillmer, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture soil conservationist in Hardin County, Iowa, has drifted from his Republican roots and said he struggled to understand the views of his Trump-supporting neighbors in the farm country around Iowa Falls.
“It’s hard to have a conversation with them to find out why,” he said. “It’s frustrating in that regard, because we should be able to talk to each other.”
Charles Homans and Cindy Hadish contributed reporting.