I’ve made a lot of blog posts and writeups about Iowa population and politics-adjacent issues, but the 2016 election brought forth a forehead-smacking-obvious postulate that eluded me until June*:
If level of education becomes a political factor, Iowa’s “brain drain” has been so widespread and persistent that it has consequences for the composition of the electorate.
Since college-educated adults have been abandoning Iowa for decades while the overall number of Americans with degrees is going up, it follows that the state will be an outlier in this area. Iowa has the best high school graduation rate in the nation, but that’s less helpful if it’s not enough “to meet the country’s future workforce needs”.
- Iowa is the 37th-most-educated (or 14th-least-educated) state as measured by percentage of residents over age 25 with a bachelor’s degree. Iowa was the only state to have a statistically significant decline in that number in 2015. (24/7 Wall Street, based on Census Bureau data)
- “Iowa… is losing a net of some 3,200 highly educated people annually.” (Omaha World-Herald, Dec. 12, 2016)
Being behind the curve on this isn’t a new development. According to Census Bureau numbers and reports, 16.9% of Iowans age 25 and up had a bachelor’s or more in 1990, when the national rate was 20.3% (p.3); a quarter-century later, 28% had a degree but the national rate had risen to 33.4%.
Barack Obama swept four education groups — no college/some college/degree/postgrad — in Iowa in 2008 and 2012 (NYT), when a degree or lack thereof wasn’t an indicator of partisan leaning. In 2016, that changed. The headlines are all you need, but the links have more:
- “White Voters Without College Degrees Are Fleeing The Democratic Party,” NPR, Sept. 13, 2016
- “Educational divide in vote preferences on track to be wider than in recent elections,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 15, 2016
- “The ‘Diploma Divide’ Explains Why Iowa Looks Better for Trump Than New Hampshire,” National Review, Oct. 24, 2016
- “The Iowa Outlier, Where Obama Voters Go Trump,” NBC, Oct. 30, 2016. In a comparison of six swing states (Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), “Iowa in particular stands out for having a large population of whites without a college degree.”
- “Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump,” FiveThirtyEight, Nov. 22, 2016
So if (IF) not having a college degree becomes any sort of reliable proxy for party alignment in the future — and IF the Driftless Area is in a permanent shift — Iowa may prove a tougher challenge for Democrats unless and until the brain drain is neutralized … or the Republicans end up four-flushing the hand they’ve been dealt.
(Holy run-on conclusion, Batman.)
*And then I sat on this for so long the New York Times beat me to the punch.