Third in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

Donald Trump’s mastery of Iowa in the 2024 election is no more apparent than his performance in a batch of counties that border the Mississippi River.

For the last eight years, this region has been clearly in Trump’s corner. But it shifted even more decisively in his favor Tuesday.

Trump won these ten counties by more than 34,000 votes, according to unofficial results.

There were still a small number of ballots to be counted, but Trump’s victory in this region approached Barack Obama’s historic wins in 2012, at least in numeric terms. And, compared to four years ago, Trump won this stretch of Iowa by more than double the number of votes than he did against Joe Biden.

That’s no small shift.

Political pros have told me over the years that if Iowa is ever to go to the Democrats again, it must win these counties—and by sizable margins. But right now, those sizable margins are all in the Republicans’ favor.

Trump even won Scott County, the biggest urban area along the river, by 3,499 votes (45,947 to 42,448, or 51.0 percent to 47.1 percent), according to the local auditor’s office. Scott County hasn’t voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984. And it was the only county on the river that had been holding out against the shift to Trump.

I have described Scott County as a bastion of purple in a sea of red. Obviously, I’m going to have to think about whether that characterization is still accurate. It’s true in the first district Congressional race, Democrat Christina Bohannan was able to win the county over Mariannette Miller-Meeks but by a smaller margin than Rita Hart did four years ago.

Biden also won the county four years ago, but Trump was the victor Tuesday.

It’s an old story that these counties along the Mississippi River, like other Obama-Trump counties throughout the Midwest—characterized by a greater share of white working class, non-college educated, voters—have swung to the right. But it is Trump’s margin of victory Tuesday over Kamala Harris that is the most notable.

Joe Biden continued to lose ground along the river (although not in Scott County) while losing to Trump statewide by about eight percentage points in the 2020 election. But this year, Trump’s winning margins, again in terms of raw votes, exploded on the way to a 13-percentage point victory statewide.

That’s an extraordinary win by any measure, and it is a bitter disappointment to those who were given a glimmer of hope by that last-minute Iowa Poll that said Harris was actually winning.

As I write this, I’m listening to cable news analysts dissecting what Trump did right and what Harris and the Democrats did wrong.

I’ve always cautioned against believing the instant judgments from people who got very little sleep the night before. I do the same now. In the immediate aftermath of an election, rarely is clarity in ample supply.

Still, the decisiveness of Trump’s victory cannot be disputed. When he loses by only five points in New Jersey, that’s an extraordinary turnabout. Biden defeated him there by nearly 16 percentage points in 2020.

Democrats will now have to pick themselves up and figure out what to do next. Just like the Republican Party did after Obama’s re-election in 2012.

I have made no secret that I believe Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. I have not changed my mind. I doubt many on the left have, either.

Obviously, not enough Americans agreed.

Donald Trump will be inaugurated in two months, and only then will we begin to find out whether the very real fears—chaos, retribution, mass deportations, across-the-board tariffs, etc.—that drove Democrats and (not enough) Republicans to oppose him will come to fruition.

The day after an election is when the losing side is bound to feel its most despondent. There is plenty of that today on the left. But it’s important to remember after elections end, governing soon begins.

That is why we hold elections: To choose the people who will lead our government.

On Tuesday, America chose. But our choice of individuals to hold these positions of power doesn’t have to determine our country’s destiny. And if there is one thing people on the left, both inside and outside of the government, should learn from the Republican Party, it’s that losing an election doesn’t mean surrendering when it comes to governing. It means continuing to work to enact the policies that will make America a more prosperous, just nation.