As neighbors go left, Iowa turns right
No other state in nation swung as heavily for GOP between 2012 and 2020 as did Hawkeyes
DES MOINES, Iowa — 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 will not be seeing are Democrats. President Joe Biden spoke Friday in Pennsylvania, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris both were in South Carolina over the weekend and Monday. But Iowa, a state that once sizzled with bipartisan politics, launched Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and seesawed between Republican and Democratic governors, has largely been ceded to the GOP as part of a remarkable sorting of voters in the Upper Midwest.
There is no single reason over the past 15 years the Upper Midwest saw Iowa turn into a beacon of former President Donald Trump’s populism. North and South Dakota shed storied histories of prairie populism for a conservatism that reflected the national GOP, and Illinois and Minnesota move dramatically leftward. (Sandwiched in between, Wisconsin found an uncomfortable parity between its conservative rural counties and its more industrial and academic centers in Milwaukee and Madison.)
No state in the nation swung as heavily Republican between 2012 and 2020 as Iowa, which went from a 6-percentage-point victory for Barack Obama to an 8-point win for Trump in the last presidential election.
Deindustrialization of rural reaches and the Mississippi River regions had its impact, as did the hollowing out of institutions, from civic 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, recounted how an issue that once would have been handled through discussions at church or the Rotary Club instead became infected with national politics, with her husband, the libertarian Greene County attorney, stuck in the middle: New multicolored lighting installed last summer to illuminate the town’s carillon bell tower prompted an angry debate over LGBTQ+ rights, leaving much of the town soured on identity politics that it largely blamed on the national left.
Another issue: Brain drain. The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.
Michael Dabe, a 19-year-old business and marketing major at the University of Dubuque, near the western 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 aligned with his conservative inclinations.
But he expressed little doubt what he will be doing with his business degree once he graduates, and most of his classmates are likely to follow suit, he said.
“There are just so many more opportunities in Chicago,” he said. “Politics are important to me, but job security, being able to raise a family more securely, is more important, for sure.”
An analysis in 2022 by economists at the University of North Carolina, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago of data gleaned from LinkedIn showed how states with dynamic economic centers are luring college graduates from more rural states. Iowa loses 34.2% of its college graduates, worse than 40 of the 50 states, just below North Dakota, which loses 31.6%. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20% more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8% more than it produces.
Even when young families look to move back to the rural areas they grew up in, they are often thwarted by an acute housing shortage, said Benjamin Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Cloud, Minn.; 75% of rural homeowners are baby boomers or older, and those older residents see boarded-up businesses and believe their communities’ best days are behind them, he said.
As such older voters grow frustrated and more conservative, the trend is accelerating. Iowa, which had a congressional delegation split between two House Republicans, two House Democrats and two Republican senators in 2020, now has a government almost wholly under Republican control, which has enacted boldly conservative policies that ban almost all abortions and transition care for minors, publicly fund vouchers for private schools and pull books describing sexual acts from school libraries. (The library and abortion laws are now on hold in the courts.) The congressional delegation is now entirely Republican after a 2022 GOP sweep in House races and the reelection of Sen. Chuck Grassley.