DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa.
In
2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, an
overwhelmingly white state validating the candidacy of the first black
president. A year later, its Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage,
adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public
sentiment. In 2012, Iowa backed Obama again.
All
that change proved too much, too fast, and it came as the Great
Recession punished agricultural areas, shook the foundations of rural
life and stoked a roiling sense of grievance.
By
2016, Donald Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Republicans
were in control of the governor’s mansion and state legislature and
held all but one U.S. House seat. For the first time since 1980, both
U.S. Senate seats were in GOP hands.
What
happened? Voters were slow to embrace Obama’s signature health care
law. The recession depleted college-educated voters as a share of the
rural population, and Republicans successfully painted Democrats’ as the
party of coastal elites.
Those forces combined for a swift Republican resurgence and helped create a wide lane for Trump.
The
self-proclaimed billionaire populist ended up carrying Iowa by a larger
percentage of the vote than in Texas, winning 93 of Iowa’s 99 counties,
including places like working-class Dubuque and Wapello counties, where
no Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower had won.
But
now, as Democrats turn their focus to Iowa’s kickoff caucuses that
begin the process of selecting Trump’s challenger, could the state be
showing furtive signs of swinging back? Caucus turnout will provide some
early measures of Democratic enthusiasm, and of what kind of candidate
Iowa’s Democratic voters — who have a good record of picking the
Democratic nominee — believe has the best chance against Trump.
If
Iowa’s rightward swing has stalled, it could be a foreboding sign for
Trump in other upper Midwestern states he carried by much smaller
margins and would need to win again.
“They’ve
gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back,” Tom
Vilsack, the only two-term Democratic governor in the past 50 years,
said of Republicans. “This is an actual correction.”
Iowans
unseated two Republican U.S. House members — and nearly a third — in
2018 during midterm elections where more Iowa voters in the aggregate
chose a Democrat for federal office for the first time in a decade.
In
doing so, Iowans sent the state’s first Democratic women to Congress:
Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby
Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.
Democrats
won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in
2008, though Trump’s return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.
“We
won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent
Republicans,” veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link
said. “I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next
year.”
There’s more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.
Iowa’s
metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the
past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where
Democrats saw gains in 2018.
The
once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west
of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University
of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past
decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.
“I
don’t believe it was temporary,” Iowa State University economist David
Swenson said of Democrats’ 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar
Rapids. “I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and
educational shifts that have been going on.”
The Democratic caucuses will provide a test of how broad the change may be.
“I
think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state,” said
John Stineman, a veteran Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data
analyst who is unaffiliated with the Trump campaign but has advised
presidential and congressional campaigns over the past 25 years. “I
believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.”
For now, that is not a widely held view, as Iowa has shown signs of losing its swing state status.
In
the 1980s, it gave rise to a populist movement in rural areas from the
left, the ascent of the religious right as a political force and the
start of an enduring rural-urban balance embodied by Republican Sen.
Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.
Now, after a decade-long Republican trend, there are signs of shifting alliances in people like Jenny O’Toole.
The
48-year-old insurance industry employee from suburban Cedar Rapids
stood on the edge of the scrum surrounding former Vice President Joe
Biden last spring, trying to get a glimpse as he shook hands and posed
for pictures.
“I
was a Republican. Not any more,” O’Toole said. “I’m socially liberal,
but economically conservative. That’s what I’m looking for.”
O’Toole
is among those current and new former Republicans who dot Democratic
presidential events, from Iowa farm hubs to working-class river towns to
booming suburbs.
Janet
Cosgrove, a 75-year-old Episcopal minister from Atlantic, in western
Iowa, and Judy Hoakison, a 65-year-old farmer from rural southwest Iowa,
are Republicans who caught Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s recent trip.
If
such voters are a quiet warning to Trump in Iowa, similar symptoms in
Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats also made 2018 gains, could be
even more problematic.
Vilsack
has seen the stage change dramatically. After 30 years of Republican
dominance in Iowa’s governor’s mansion, he was elected in 1998 as a
former small-city mayor and pragmatic state senator.
An
era of partisan balance in Iowa took hold, punctuated by Democratic
presidential nominee Al Gore’s 4,144-vote victory in Iowa in 2000, and
George W. Bush’s 10,059-vote re-election in 2004.
After
the 2006 national wave swept Democrats into total Statehouse control
for the first time in 50 years, the stage was set for Obama’s
combination of generational change, his appeal to anti-Iraq War
sentiment and the historic opportunity to elect the first African
American president.
“We
were like a conquering army, prepared to negotiate terms of surrender,”
said Cedar Rapids Democrat Dale Todd, an early Obama supporter and
adviser.
Todd
was one of a collection of Iowa Democratic activists who gathered at a
downtown Des Moines sports bar last year to commemorate the 10-year
anniversary of Obama’s historic caucus campaign.
Just
across the Des Moines River in the state Capitol, there was a reminder
of how much the ground had shifted since those heady days.
Republicans
control all of state government for the first time in 20 years. Part of
their wholesale conservative agenda has included stripping public
employee unions of nearly all bargaining rights, establishing new voter
restrictions and outlawing abortion six weeks into a pregnancy.
It
was in line with Republican takeovers in states such as Wisconsin that
were completed earlier, but traced their beginnings to the same
turbulent summer of 2009.
On
a Wednesday in August that year, throngs flocked to Grassley’s
typically quiet annual county visits to protest his work with Democrats
on health care legislation.
Thousands
representing the emerging Tea Party forced Grassley’s last event from a
community center in the small town of Adel to the town park, where some
booed the typically popular senator and held signs stating, “Grassley,
you’re fired.”
The events became a national symbol for uneasiness about the new president’s signature policy goal.
The
previous April, Iowa’s nine-member Supreme Court — Democratic and
Republican appointees — had unanimously declared same-sex marriage legal
in the state. A year later, Christian conservatives successfully
campaigned to oust the three Supreme Court justices facing retention,
waving the marriage decision as their cause.
Four
years later, Democrats had high expectations of holding the retiring
Harkin’s Senate seat. But Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley lacked
Harkin’s populist appeal, and was beaten by state Sen. Joni Ernst, an
Iraq War veteran from rural Iowa who painted Braley as an elitist
lawyer.
By
2016, Republicans had completed their long-sought statehouse takeover,
in part by beating longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal.
“We
tried in many cases to win suburbia, but we just couldn’t lay a glove
on it,” Gronstal said. “We just could not figure out how to crack it in
Iowa.”
The answer for Democrats in Iowa is much the same as the rest of the country: growing, vote-rich suburbs.
Dallas
County, west of Des Moines, has grown by 121% since 2000, converting
from a checkerboard of farms into miles of car dealerships, strip malls,
megachurches and waves of similarly styled housing developments.
It
had been a Republican county. However, last year, long-held Republican
Iowa House districts in Des Moines’ western suburbs fell to Democrats.
It was the culmination of two decades of shifting educational attainment with political implications.
Since
2000, the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and
suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural areas, according to U.S.
Census data and an Iowa State University study.
Last
year, a third of urban and suburban Iowans had a college diploma, up
from 25% at the dawn of the metropolitan boom in 2000. Rural Iowans had
inched up to just 20% from 16% during that period.
“The
more that occurs, the more you get voter participation leaning toward
Democratic outcomes than has historically been in the past,” Swenson
said, noting the higher likelihood of college-educated voters to lean
Democratic.
Since
2016 alone, registered Democrats in Dallas County have increased 15%,
to Republicans’ 2%. Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county,
but independent voters have leaped by 20% and for the first time
outnumber Republicans.
“There
is now a third front,” Gronstal said. “We can fight in those toss-up
rural areas, hold our urban base, but now compete in those
quintessentially suburban districts.”
Though
Trump’s return to the ballot in 2020 shakes up the calculus, his
approval in Iowa has remained around 45% or lower. A sub-50 rating is
typically problematic for an incumbent.
Another
warning for Trump, GOP operative Stineman noted, is The Des Moines
Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Poll’s November finding that only 76% of
self-identified Republicans said they would definitely vote to re-elect
him next year.
With no challenger and 10 months until the election, a lot can change.
“Still, that’s one in four of your family that’s not locked down,” Stineman said.
There are also signs Iowa Democrats have shaken some of the apathy that helped Trump and hobbled Clinton in Iowa in 2016.
Democratic
turnout in 2018 leaped from the previous midterm in 2014 from 57% to
68%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. Republican turnout, which
is typically higher, also rose, but by a smaller margin.
Overall
turnout in Iowa, as in more reliably Democratic-voting presidential
states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was down in 2016, due
mostly to a downturn in Democratic participation.
“The
trend was down, across the board,” said Ann Selzer, who has conducted
The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll for more than 25 years. “So it
doesn’t take much to create a Democratic victory in these upper
Midwestern states.”
“I think the success in the midterms kind of made people on the Democratic side believe that ‘we can do it,’” Selzer said.
Perhaps, but Trump has his believers, too.
