I’ve never really understood Iowa politics. Any insights even beyond the specific focus of the OP are welcome. Iowa has always seemed pretty conservative to me. The people who I’ve known from Iowa tend to be pretty progressive but, then again, they’ve made a point of moving away from Iowa- when they talk about their friends and family back home, they always lament how conservative everyone is.
And yet, with the exception of 2004, Iowa’s electoral votes have consistently gone to Democrats since 1988.
538 had shown Hillary sitting pretty comfortably in Iowa. Trump only briefly pulled ahead with his post-convention bump. Even at that, his post-convention bump only barely put him over a 50% chance of winning. A week after the Democratic convention, Hillary was back up to a 70% chance of winning- peaking shortly thereafter at 77%.
The past 3 weeks however have been a steady decline for Hillary with Trump now ahead.
Not sure I have a definitive answer there. I lived in Iowa during grad school - Iowa City - but I don’t think that’s representative of the whole.
Note on those numbers that Johnson is polling particularly highly. Since August began his lowest number has been 6% and his highest 16%. It’s arguable that third parties are polling higher than expected. Also, there still appears to be a high number of undecideds. From the numbers it appears that 10-15% of Iowa respondents haven’t made up their minds.
It seems to me after observing the primaries for years- Iowa Democrats are really liberal, and Iowa Republicans are really conservative. As to who wins the state, it’s who turns out. The polls all seem to make assumptions on what percent of the vote will be uneducated whites, whites who went to college, women, various religious groups, etc. and then weight the results of each group to get the projected total. CNN recently did a nationwide poll that grossly overestimated the uneducated white vote in order to give Trump a lead and make the race seem more exciting. So whether or not the race is won or lost isn’t known yet.
Yep, nailed it. I used to live in Illinois and now live in Iowa and it feels very different, politically. Much more divided, and people are unwilling to even consider the other side. There are a lot of small-town, country folk that like huntin’ and big trucks and hate gays and immigrants. Then there are pockets of extremely liberal, extremely eco-friendly people – mainly in university towns, but many in the decent sized cities too. I remember I laughed when Iowa City had garbage police – students that would stand by the garbage cans during their street festivals and tell you what to throw away, what to recycle, and what to compost.
In addition to the above two diametrically opposed populations, you have a lot of union factory workers. In the past, they were reliable blue votes but now that’s up in the air.
In the last few midterms, Iowa has gone strongly red. It was only Obama’s popularity that caused strong turnout and helped us go blue in 2008 and 2012. I don’t think the union workers or minorities have strong turnout in the midterms. The 2016 presidential race will be very close here. There are a lot of angry-white types and a lot of sovereign citizen types too.
Agreed that Iowa is sharply divided between very left of center Democrats and very right of center Republicans–there’s more “air” between the two groups than in many other states, and the division is into much more equal slices than in many others as well.
There’s also a geographic division. Eastern (especially northeastern) Iowa is part of a traditionally progressive region of the US, one of the few largely rural sectors of counties that went for Obama in both 08 and 12. (You can access a map at 2012 Election County-By-County – Outside the Beltway) Along with smaller bits of northwestern Illinois and southeastern Minnesota, and a big chunk of southwestern Wisconsin, this part of Iowa has had a strong liberal Democratic streak for a while.
The west of the state, in contrast, is represented by Steve King and has much more in common, politically, with Nebraska and South Dakota.
So whatever the polls may say today (the most recent I saw has Clinton back ahead by a small margin), Iowa remains pretty sharply divided politically, and the election there will likely be close. Looking back over the last few elections, the candidate who carries Iowa rarely wins by more than five percentage points, usually not even that. So the polls are in line with that.
I have felt for some time that Trump could take Iowa. The state has two republican senators and a republican governor. It’s still winnable for Hillary but in terms of favorability she’s worse than John Kerry, who lost in Iowa. It’ll be close either way, though.
Actually, Iowa has a really good track record of picking the winner in every election going back a ways. 1988 is the only year I see they went the other way.
