With the Iowa caucuses days away, politicians will be criss-crossing the state, blowing up small-town Pizza Ranches, filling high school gymnasiums and flipping pancakes at church breakfasts.
What Iowans won't see are the Democrats. President Biden spoke Friday in Pennsylvania and along with Vice President Kamala Harris were in South Carolina over the weekend and Monday. But Iowa, a state that once teemed with bipartisan politics, propelled Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and straddled Republican and Democratic governors, has largely ceded to the GOP as part of a remarkable reshuffling of voters in the Upper Midwest.
There is no reason why the Upper Midwest has seen Iowa become a beacon of Donald J. Populism over the past 15 years. Trump, North and South Dakota shed historic histories of populism for a conservatism that mirrored the national GOP, and Illinois and Minnesota moved dramatically to the left. (Sandwiched in between, Wisconsin found an uneasy balance between its conservative rural counties and its more industrial and academic centers of Milwaukee and Madison.)
No state in the nation swung as strongly among Republicans 2012 and 2020 as Iowawhich went from a six percent victory for Barack Obama to an eight-point victory for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election.
Rural and Mississippi River deindustrialization had its impact, as did the removal 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, Iowa, recounted how an issue that once would have been addressed through discussions at church or the Rotary Club became tainted by national politics, with her husband, a libertarian Greene County attorney, stuck in the middle: New colorful lighting installed last summer to illuminate the city's bell tower has sparked an angry debate over LGBTQ rights, leaving much of the city reeling from identity politics they've largely blamed the national left.
Another issue: Brain drain. The movement of new college graduates from Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolitan areas of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul left his mark on the politics of all five states.
Michael Dabe, a 19-year-old entrepreneur and marketing major 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 aligned with his conservative leanings.
But he expressed little doubt about what he'll do with his degree when he graduates, and most of his classmates are likely to 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 securely, is definitely more important.”
One analysis in 2022 by economists at the University of North Carolina, the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago data gathered by LinkedIn showed how states with dynamic economic centers they lure college graduates from more rural states. Iowa loses 34.2 percent of its college graduates, worse than 40 of the 50 states, just behind North Dakota, which loses 31.6 percent. Illinois, by contrast, earns 20 percent more graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more than it produces.
Even when young families want to return to the rural areas in which they grew up, they are often deterred by a severe housing shortage, said Benjamin Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota Extension in St. Louis. Cloud, Minn. 75 percent of rural homeowners are baby boomers or older, and these older residents see businesses with billboards and believe their communities' best days are behind them, he said.
As both older voters become disillusioned and more conservative, the trend is accelerating. Iowa, which had a congressional delegation split between two House Republicans, two Democrats and two Republican senators in 2020, now has an almost entirely Republican-controlled government that has enacted boldly conservative policies that ban almost all abortions and transitional care for minors, public funding vouchers for private schools and pull books describing sexual acts from school libraries. (The library and abortion laws are now pending in the courts.) The congressional delegation is now all-Republican after a 2022 GOP sweep of the House races and the re-election of Sen. Charles E. Grassley.
Meanwhile, on the east bank of the Mississippi in Illinois, high-capacity semi-automatic rifles are banned, abortion rights are enshrined in law, and recreational marijuana is legal. At the top of Minnesota, pot is legal, undocumented immigrants are getting driver's licenses, and the felon and teen vote is expanding.
Such political divisions influence the decisions of younger Iowans, said David Lobsack, a former Democratic House member from eastern Iowa.
“These people are going and I'm afraid they will continue, given the policies that have been put in place,” he said.
The politics of rural voters in the Upper Midwest may simply be catching up with other rural areas that turned conservative earlier, said Sam Rosenfeld, a political scientist at Colgate University and author of “The Polarizers,” a book about the architects of national polarization. White rural South voters swung sharply to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as black southerners gained power with the civil rights movement and accompanying legislation, he noted.
But rural voters in the Upper Midwest, where few blacks lived, held a more diverse policy for decades longer. North Dakota, with its state bank, state grain mill, and state grain elevator, has retained vestiges of its socialist past, when progressive politicians railed against predatory businessmen from the Twin Cities. Even today, its politics have changed dramatically.
“Until relatively recently, there was a white rural Midwestern voter that was different from a white rural Southern voter,” Mr. Rosenfeld said. “There was a real progressive tradition in the Midwest, unmatched by Jim Crow and race issues.”
Rural Iowa now looks politically like rural areas in any state from New York to Alabama to Oregon. And rural voters simply appreciated what Mr. Trump did for them, said Neil Shafer, who chairs the Iowa Howard County Republican Party. Located along the Minnesota border, it was the only county in the nation to give both Obama and Trump victories of 20 percentage points.
Iowans like underdogs, and Mr. Obama's charisma was paying off, Mr. Shafer 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 depressed commodity prices.
There was skepticism about Mr. Trump and his aggressive behavior in the big city, Mr. Shafer said, “but there is this individual spirit in the Midwest that likes the Don Quixote railing against big bad government, and people knew what they were getting . “
Kyle D. Kondik of the University of Virginia Center for Politics explains the polarization as a story of the upper half versus the lower half of the population scale. If more than half of a state's votes come from dominant metropolitan areas, as is the case in Illinois and Minnesota, the states tend to be Democratic. If smaller, rural counties dominate, states tend to move right.
Of the nine largest counties in Iowa, only one, Dubuque, swung 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 in 2012.
But Mr. Obama also carried 31 of the 90 smallest counties. Mr. Biden won none. As a group, Mr. Obama lost those rural counties by 2.5 percentage points to his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. Mr. Biden lost to Mr. Trump by nearly 30 percentage points.
Mr. Kodick attributed some of that to Mr. Trump, whose anti-immigrant, protectionist policies differed from traditional Republican positions. “It was a good fit for the Midwest,” he said.
Laura Hubka, who is co-chair of the Howard County Democrats, recalled high school students driving trucks around town in 2016 with large Trump flags. It felt scary, he said.
“It was scary for a lot of people and it scared a lot of Democrats inside,” Ms. Hubka said. “Trump spoke to a certain kind of people. People who felt they were left behind.”
Haunted by the changing politics, she said, at least one of her children is now planning to move his family across the border to Minnesota.
But sweeping Republican victories in Iowa in 2022, when Mr. Trump was not on the ballot and the Republican Party retreated across much of the country, point to other factors. Christopher Larimer, a political scientist at the University of Northern Iowa, again pointed to demographics. The huge wave of 18-year-old voters who first pushed Mr. Obama in 2008 were 22 and graduated college in 2012. By 2016, many of them had likely left the state, Mr. Larimer said.
“I don't know if Iowa is any different than anywhere else. it is caught up in the nationalization of politics,” he said. “Young people are moving into the urban core and that's making the suburbs redder.”
If this urban core is in a state, state-level results will not change. If they are elsewhere, they will.
Mr Winchester, the rural sociologist, said the perception of rural decline was not reality. regional centers such as Bemidji, Minn., or Pella and Davenport, Iowa, are thriving, and even if small businesses have closed, housing in these cities is full.
But, he said, “many cities don't know their place in the wider world. That sense of lawlessness, a sense of disconnection, is out there.”
Gary Hilmer, a retired USDA soil ecologist in Hardin County, Iowa, has moved away 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 talk to them about why,” he said. “It's disappointing, in that sense, because we should be able to talk to each other.”
Charles Homans and Cindy Hadish contributed reporting.
