Donald Trump’s near-sweep of Iowa in the 2016 election is even more shocking when you take it into longer-term context. The only time in the past half-century that the Democratic candidate failed to win at least 10 counties in Iowa was 1980. (1964 and 1968 were polar opposites: LBJ won all but seven counties, and then Nixon won all but a different seven.)
Here are two maps to illustrate the point. I got the information from US Election Atlas (at least, until I got so far back it stopped generating maps) and Wikipedia. ProPublica also has this awesome project that looks at the counties won by the losers in each presidential election.
Each map shows the most recent year each party’s presidential candidate carried each county in Iowa. Because so many counties voted Republican in 2012, I left them blank with a note. I could’ve done the same for the Democrats but wanted to differentiate between 2008 and 2012 (Woodbury is the only R-to-D flip there).
About half of Iowa’s counties made a long-term flip after one of three elections: 1980, 1984, or 1996. Only three counties east of US 71 have pre-Bill Clinton Democratic droughts — Grundy, Mahaska, and Marion — but it’s Cass and Page that have voted Republican the longest, backing FDR in 1932 and no Democrat since.
Much of northeast and eastern Iowa dumped the Republican Party after the Reagan Revolution — all those orange counties went for Dukakis in 1988, during the farm crisis. That’s where the geography and economy of the region come into play again — the west end of the Rust Belt lies somewhere between the Driftless Area and Des Moines. (Silos and Smokestacks, anyone?*) US 218 is a good candidate for the border, with Waterloo (John Deere Tractor Works, along with the old Rath Packing plant) holding the anchor point. Trump won all except the most major urban counties.
The election result makes a good argument for Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status in the candidate selection process, because white blue-collar workers made the difference in this election, and while the Midwest electorate is diminishing, it is far from irrelevant.
There’s one more streak-leader transition in these maps. In 1960, Dubuque County was one of six to vote for JFK (notably, Carroll, which also has many Catholics, was another). The county had voted for the Democratic candidate ever since. But Trump won Dubuque County — and also Des Moines County and Wapello County, two of the other long holdouts — leaving one undisputed and probably eternal Democratic champion: The People’s Republic of Johnson County.
* For those needing Thanksgiving reading, here’s a think-tank white paper on “Transforming the Rural Economy in the Midwest” (PDF).
