Iowa is a swing state-- and in 2016 it swung hard against the Democrats, primarily because the party fielded a status quo candidate who offered hard-pressed workers just about nothing and because Trump made them all kinds of (since-unfulfilled) promises. Trump’s victory was was a ten-pointer-- 800,983 (51.15%) to 653,669 (41.74), winning 93 of the state’s 99 counties-- but it was much more a rejection of Hillary than an embrace of Trump or Trumpism. Earlier Trump had been beaten by Cruz in the caucuses-- 27.64% to 24.3%. Hillary and Bernie had essentially tied-- 49.84% to 49.59%.Two years later, Iowa swung left-- replacing two Republican incumbents with two very mediocre Hillary-like Democrats and nearly ousting far right fanatic Steve King in an R+11 district that Trump had won 60.9% to 33.5%. This year is likely to be King’s last in Congress. He will have a tough enough time winning the primary and if he does, progressive Democrat J.D. Scholten is ready to finish him off. Meanwhile, in the Senate race, freshman Joni Ernst is going to have a tough time-- unless Schumer’s handpicked mediocrity, Theresa Greenfield, winds up winning the Democratic nomination. If Michael Franken wins the primary, Ernst’s Senate career is done for.In 2018, the Democrats narrowed the GOP margin in the legislature, which went from 59-41 to 53-47 in the House. Another good wave year and they will win back that chamber. The state Senate is a lot tougher and probably out of reach-- with 32 Republicans and 18 Democrats. Only half the seats are up in 2020.Since Inauguration Day, Trump’s approval in Iowa has plummeted by 22 points (as of Nov. 17). According to Morning Consult’s Trump Tracker Trump’s favorability in Iowa is 42% and his unfavorability rating is 55%-- a pretty steep 13 point deficit. Maybe this has begun sinking in:Reporting for the Associated Press yesterday, Thomas Beaumont, looked at Trump’s chances to win Iowa’s 6 electoral votes again. “Now,” he wrote, “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.”…“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.…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.
The Federal Reserve study that came out on last week confirms what most people have been feeling in their pocketbooks-- despite all the gaslighting from Trump ands allies. Trump’s tariff wars have been a disaster and have led to job losses and higher prices. Fed economists Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce: “We find that the 2018 tariffs are associated with relative reductions in manufacturing employment and relative increases in producer prices… [T]he tariffs, thus far, have not led to increased activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector.” As you can see by taking a look at the graph above, it isn’t just Iowa farmers who have had trouble from Trump’s destructive and lunatic trade policies.
