The role of rurality in Iowa's lurch to the right

The Iowa Caucuses will take place on Monday, and media outlets are chock full of coverage.  Particularly noteworthy in terms of attention to the rural-urban divide is this New York Times story by Jonathan Weisman headlined, "Why Iowa Turned So Red When Nearby Stats Went Blue."  While you wouldn't know it from the headline, it's very much a story about the role of rurality in presidential politics.  In fact,  Weisman uses the word "rural" 19 times.  I can't excerpt them all here (at risk of exceeding fair use), but I'll excerpt a few that I think are key.  A key theme: the impact of the the rural brain drain on Iowa's politics:    

Deindustrialization of rural reaches and the Mississippi River regions had its impact, as did the hollowing out of institutions, from civic organizations to small-town newspapers, that had given the Upper Midwest a character separate from national politics.

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An analysis in 2022 by economists at the University of North Carolina, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago of data gleaned from LinkedIn showed how states with dynamic economic centers are luring college graduates from more rural states. Iowa loses 34.2 percent of its college graduates, worse than 40 of the 50 states, just below North Dakota, which loses 31.6 percent. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more than it produces.

Even when young families look to move back to the rural areas they grew up in, they are often thwarted by an acute housing shortage, said Benjamin Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota extension in St. Cloud, Minn.; 75 percent of rural homeowners are baby boomers or older, and those older residents see boarded-up businesses and believe their communities’ best days are behind them, he said.

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The politics of rural voters in the Upper Midwest may simply be catching up to other rural regions that turned conservative earlier, said Sam Rosenfeld, a political scientist at Colgate University and author of “The Polarizers,” a book on the architects of national polarization. Southern rural white voters turned sharply to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as Black southerners gained power with the civil rights movement and attendant legislation, he noted.

But rural voters in the Upper Midwest, where few Black people lived, held on to a more diverse politics for decades longer. North Dakota, with its state bank, state grain mill and state grain elevator, has retained vestiges of a socialist past, when progressive politicians railed against rapacious businessmen from the Twin Cities. Even still, its politics have changed dramatically.

The entire story is worth a read.   

This excellent Washington Post piece by Theodoric Meyer, published today, compares a rural county (Decatur, on the Missouri state line) with a metropolitan one (Dallas, suburban Des Moines in central Iowa).  Here are two key paragraphs focusing on the rural-urban divide: 

While Iowa’s largely White small towns and rural areas have turned redder and redder, Des Moines’ prosperous, educated suburbs have moved toward Democrats. The divergence between Decatur County, where DeVore lives, and Dallas County, where Judge lives, has been propelled by the same forces reshaping the rest of the country’s political terrain, with voters increasingly divided along socioeconomic and geographic lines.

The shift toward Democrats in well-off Des Moines suburbs such as Waukee, Clive, Ankeny and Johnston mirrors Democrats’ newfound strength in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Phoenix, which helped Biden win in 2020 and allowed the party to retain control of the Senate in 2022. Republicans’ growing dominance of rural Iowa, meanwhile, resembles changes across the Midwest and the rest of the country that helped Trump win in 2016 and cost Democrats Senate seats in Missouri and North Dakota and House seats in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Both counties lie in the state's third congressional district, which has been a swing district.  Meyer quotes Matt Paul, who worked as state director on Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign: 

You really have within the 3rd District the tale of two Iowas. You have one Iowa that is growing, that has new schools, a growing tax base, a strong housing market. And you have an Iowa that has school districts that are struggling to stay open, that have lost their employment base, that are struggling with the challenges and realities of small-town America today.

Also, don't miss this Los Angeles Times story about a Southern California family who moved to Iowa in 2022 because the politics there suited them better.  And this one last month by Jose del Real in the Washington Post, "A Harvest of Memories," out of Chickasaw County, Iowa  It's chock full of community and lack of anonymity.