THE GREAT AMERICAN POLITICAL ROADTRIP: IOWA AND KANSAS

IOWA

The 2020 Presidential election in Iowa

Quite a few states have broken the hearts of Democrats since the Barack Obama era. However, no state has suffered the consequences for doing so more than Iowa. For decades, Iowa was where presidential elections started. The Iowa Caucus, usually held in mid-winter about nine or ten months before the November election, was the most crucial primary race for both significant parties until Democrats banished it to later in the calendar in 2024. Democrats and Republicans discussed ending the Iowa Caucus' first-in-the-nation status as early as 1989 when neither significant party's 1988 nominees won it. However, it wasn't until the early 2020s that Democrats finally pulled the trigger. 

It took so long because Iowa was a competitive state from the 1990s until the mid-2010s; it was a critical swing state in 1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and even in the 2016 elections. It was in Iowa that many Americans first realized Barack Obama could win. His 2008 victory in the Iowa Caucus is one of the 21st Century's most politically consequential moments.

Obama went on to win Iowa in his general election campaigns, which wasn't a terribly big surprise. Before him, Iowa had voted Democratic in four of the five previous elections before him, with only George W. Bush narrowly winning the state in 2004. 1988, despite being blown out nationwide, Democrat Michael Dukakis won the state by 10 points. It was his second-biggest margin in the country after Rhode Island. Before Dukakis, the state voted Republican in every election since 1952, except in 1964, and twice voted against Franklin D. Roosevelt. Looking at its political history and what the state looks like down-ballot, it's reasonable to assume the 25-year streak of Democratic presidential candidates winning Iowa, or coming close, was a fluke triggered by a farming crisis that got blamed on President Ronald Reagan and not on a political realignment of the primarily rural, mostly white state.