Over the past 15 years, the Upper Midwest has seen a remarkable state-by-state sorting of voters along partisan lines.
With the Iowa caucuses six days away, politicians will be crisscrossing the state, blowing through small-town Pizza Ranches, filling high school gyms, and flipping pancakes at church breakfasts.
What Iowans will not be seeing are Democrats. President Biden spoke Friday in Pennsylvania, and he and Vice President Kamala Harris both were in South Carolina over the weekend and on Monday. But Iowa, a state that once sizzled with bipartisan politics, launched Barack Obama to the presidency in 2008 and seesawed between Republican and Democratic governors, has largely been ceded to the G.O.P. as part of a remarkable sorting of voters in the Upper Midwest.
There is no single reason that over the past 15 years the Upper Midwest saw Iowa turn into a beacon of Donald J. Trump’s populism, North and South Dakota shed storied histories of prairie populism for a conservatism that reflected the national G.O.P., and Illinois and Minnesota move dramatically leftward. (Sandwiched in between, Wisconsin found an uncomfortable parity between its conservative rural counties and its more industrial and academic centers in Milwaukee and Madison.)
No state in the nation swung as heavily Republican between
2012 and 2020 as Iowa, which went from a six-percentage-point victory for Barack Obama to an eight-point win for Mr. Trump in the last presidential election.
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.
Susan Laehn, an Iowa State University political scientist who lives in the small town of Jefferson, Iowa, recounted how an issue that once would have been handled through discussions at church or the Rotary Club instead became infected with national politics, with her husband, the libertarian Greene County attorney, stuck in the middle: New multicolored lighting installed last summer to illuminate the town’s carillon bell tower prompted an angry debate over L.G.B.T.Q. rights, leaving much of the town soured on identity politics that they largely blamed on the national left.
Another issue: Brain drain. The movement of young college graduates out of Iowa and the Dakotas to the metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis-St. Paul made a mark on the politics of all five states.
Michael Dabe, a 19-year-old business and marketing major at the University of Dubuque, near the western bank of the Mississippi River, has found a comfortable home in Iowa, where life is slower and simpler than in his native Illinois and politics, he said, are more aligned with his conservative inclinations.
But he expressed little doubt what he will be doing with his business degree once he graduates, and most of his classmates are likely to follow suit, he said.
“There are just so many more opportunities in Chicago,” he said. “Politics are important to me, but job security, being able to raise a family more securely, is more important, for sure.”
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.
As such older voters grow frustrated and more conservative, the trend is accelerating. Iowa, which had a congressional delegation split between two House Republicans, two House Democrats and two Republican senators in 2020, now has a government almost wholly under Republican control, which has enacted boldly conservative policies that ban almost all
abortions and
transition care for minors,
publicly fund vouchers for private schools and
pull books describing sexual acts from school libraries. (The library and abortion laws are now on hold in the courts.) The congressional delegation is now entirely Republican after a 2022 G.O.P. sweep in House races and the re-election of Senator Charles E. Grassley.
Meantime on the east bank of the Mississippi, in Illinois,
high-capacity semiautomatic rifles have been banned, the right to an
abortion has been enshrined in law and
recreational marijuana is legal. Upriver in Minnesota,
pot is legal, unauthorized immigrants are getting driver’s licenses, and voting access for felons and teens is expanding.
Such policy dichotomies are influencing the decisions of younger Iowans, said David Loebsack, a former Democratic House member from eastern Iowa.
“These people are going, and I fear they’re going to keep going, given the policies that have been adopted,” he said.
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.
