Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

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).

New York Times visualization of the 2016 presidential vote by county. Note that the Driftless Area (NE IA, SW WI, SE MN) tilted Republican, and while not strongly so, it’s in deep, stark contrast to the 2008 map.

First, go read this. I’ll wait. It’s important to understanding the earthquake with an epicenter of rural America that just shook the world. There’s also a Wall Street Journal article about Sac County, if you can get to it.

Now, recall this blog post I made nearly two years ago about the geographic composition of the Iowa Legislature. I noted how the Democrats dominate urban Iowa, the Republicans rule in rural areas, and the most flippable districts in the Iowa Senate would be the handful that are rural and/or had a small city.

Of the six districts that flipped Republican on Election Day, five matched that pattern to some extent.

• Mary Jo Wilhelm, the most rural Democrat in the Senate, didn’t just lose her northern district, she got creamed. Brian Schoenjahn, in a district with parts of four counties whose largest city was Waverly, also lost. Wilhelm held the largest Democratic Senate district by area. That distinction now passes to Tod Bowman, whose seat was not in this cycle but, as I said in January 2015, has/had the second-smallest population center (Maquoketa).
• The district that paired Marshalltown with the rest of Marshall County and Tama County*, and the district that paired Burlington with the rest of Des Moines, Louisa, and rural Muscatine counties, both flipped. In the district next door to the latter, mostly consisting of Lee and Henry counties, the Democrat barely survived. All have a strong blue-collar component.
• Muscatine is paired with the area surrounding Davenport on the north and west, including Eldridge and Blue Grass. Here, it could be suburban(ish) voters who changed the balance.
• The outlier is the story that by itself should have shaken up Iowa politics: Majority Leader Mike Gronstal lost the only seat Senate Democrats had west of I-35.

In January, Senate Democrats will hold all or part of 20 counties plus the towns of Cumming and Wilton. That’s it. Eighty-four percent of Iowa’s land area — about 60% of the population — will be served by a Republican state senator (or David Johnson, whose disavowal of the party over Donald Trump will … you know, I’m not even going to try finishing this thought).

On the House side, only two seats changed hands, but their location is telling: Districts 56 and 57, Clayton/Allamakee counties and all of Dubuque County outside of Dubuque. Both are in the heart of the Driftless Area, roughly defined in Iowa northeast of a line from Chester to Anamosa to Clinton (the Maquoketa River watershed and those to the north but not the Wapsi). In 2012, the mostly rural area went for Obama and caught some attention as a political anomaly (the Daily Beast wrote about the Wisconsin side two weeks ago in less-flattering terms). In 2016, the flip of those northeast Iowa House and Senate districts, taken with what happened in southwestern Wisconsin, dealt a big blow to the “Driftless Area Democrats”, but its long-term significance or permanence is unknown for now.

* Until Tuesday, Tama County had not voted for the Republican presidential candidate since 1984. Only six counties in Iowa — the five most populous and Story — went Hillary Clinton’s way. That is absolutely astounding.