Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 4, 2016: A 1959 trailer is on display at the Winnebago visitors center in Forest City. The center is where factory tours begin, but not where you’ll find the company’s top management anymore.

Last year, as I finished visiting every town in Iowa, I made it to Winnebago Industries headquarters in Forest City for a factory tour. It’s a very impressive place. The manufacturing process is emblematic of ingenuity and hard work. The company is a true Iowa icon.

Or is that wrong to say now?

The Des Moines Register asked the question this fall, after the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal stated it would begin treating Winnebago as a Minnesota company because its CEO, and an increasing number of top-level officials, work in Eden Prairie. Eden Prairie would be the seventh-largest city in Iowa, but up there it’s just another Twin Cities suburb. Just last week Winnebago hired a new vice president and general counsel. She will not live in Iowa.

A few weeks ago, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune interviewed Winnebago’s CEO. “We’ve had zero discussions with our board of directors about whether the headquarters of the company should change formally,” he said. “The soul of the company is in Iowa.”

Soul, yes, but. And it’s a substantial but. In a way, it’s connected to the continued drain of rural America. The Twin Cities footing “has helped the company recruit talent,” the Strib article says, and if you squint enough, the implied part is because those people can’t be found in Iowa. Or because those people aren’t willing to live in Iowa.

Nebraska lost ConAgra, in part, because its CEO didn’t want to live in Omaha. That isn’t the official explanation, of course, but. ConAgra’s HQ move to Chicago generated far more attention than what Winnebago is doing, but aside from taking the step of legal relocation the two seem substantially the same to me, just on different scales.

It is more than an academic exercise. Only three Fortune 500 companies have their headquarters in Iowa, and Rockwell Collins — which just scraped onto the list — is about to be slowly digested into a Connecticut-based firm. (The other two are Principal Financial and Casey’s.) Maytag was a Fortune 500 company, but it’s been gone a decade, demoted to a subdivision of Michigan-based Whirlpool. A city’s or state’s pride in being home to successful businesses and the attendant cachet — or at least the airport and hotel patronage — is not an invisible thing.

Is Winnebago an Iowa company? Or is it a suburban Twin Cities company with its major manufacturing facilities in Iowa? The financial statements may say one thing, but the wingtips and high heels on the ground say another.

Why, my second Gunderburger, of course. (The first was almost six years to the day earlier, supper before North Tama played Valley-CEW at the school between Elgin and Clermont.)

September 12, 2017: Yes, inject that Midwestern-ness directly into my arteries.

June 20, 2017: The centerpiece of the Merle Hay monument in Glidden has artwork from “Ding” Darling. Click here for larger version.

One hundred years ago today, Merle Hay of Glidden became the first Iowan and one of the first three Americans to die in combat in World War I. He was 20 years old. The state of Iowa funded a monument to Hay, which was dedicated on Memorial Day 1930. Merle Hay Road and Mall are named for him, but the story behind the name isn’t told much.

The Annals of Iowa had a feature about Hay and Glidden in 1967, on the 50th anniversary.

Monuments to all of Glidden’s Civil War (left) and World War (right) dead in the Glidden cemetery. Besides Hay, 10 other Glidden soldiers lost their lives in the war.

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.