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

The 2024 elections could hardly have gone worse for Iowa Democrats. Donald Trump carried the state by more than 13 points—a larger margin than Ronald Reagan managed here in either of his campaigns, and the largest winning margin for any presidential candidate in Iowa since Richard Nixon in 1972. The GOP swept the Congressional races for the second straight cycle and expanded their lopsided majorities in the legislature.

Support for Democrats has eroded in Iowa communities of all sizes—from large metro areas like Scott County (which voted for a Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1984) to rural counties that were always red, but now routinely deliver more than 70 percent of the vote to GOP candidates.

This post highlights the growing problem for Democrats in Iowa’s mid-sized cities. I focus on eleven counties where Democratic candidates performed well in the recent past, but now trail Republicans in state and federal races.

Changing political trends in mid-sized cities explain why Democrats will have smaller contingents in the Iowa House and Senate than at any time since 1970. Voters in six of these counties also saved U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks from a strong challenge by Democrat Christina Bohannan in the first Congressional district.

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

Matthew P. Thornburg is an associate professor at Misericordia University who studies elections. His mother’s side of the family hails from Greene and O’Brien counties, and he maintains close ties to Iowa and its politics.

In precincts lying in the path of the Summit Pipeline, Randy Feenstra underperformed the rest of his district slightly. However, most voters there and elsewhere in the fourth Congressional district remained straight ticket Republicans. Much of Feenstra’s mild underperformance arose from voters in O’Brien County, home county of his Republican primary opponent Kevin Virgil.

Carbon dioxide pipelines remain the issue Iowa Republicans wish would go away. While most political issues in the state are subsumed into the greater red vs. blue polarization of the country—where Republicans in Iowa enjoy the advantage–CO₂  pipelines create an intraparty split between the Iowa GOP establishment and some in the party’s conservative wing.

Ground zero for that tension is Iowa’s fourth Congressional district, where CO₂ pipelines were a prominent issue in both the Republican primary and general election.

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

As ticket-splitting has declined in recent election cycles, few Iowa candidates have managed to win where the other party has a big advantage at the top of the ticket. So it was in Iowa’s 2024 Congressional races: former President Donald Trump outpolled Vice President Kamala Harris in all four U.S. House districts, which helped GOP incumbents hold off their Democratic opponents.

But one challenger massively outperformed Harris, and Trump barely pulled one underachieving incumbent over the line.

Election analyst Drew Savicki was first to publish the 2024 presidential vote and swing in Iowa’s U.S. House districts. I later confirmed his calculations, using unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State.

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.

Second in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections. This post has been updated with unofficial results as of November 8.

The successful Republican effort to knock Libertarians off the ballot in three U.S. House districts may have influenced the outcome in at least one of them.

All three affected Libertarian candidates—Nicholas Gluba in the first Congressional district, Marco Battaglia in the third, and Charles Aldrich in the fourth—indicated that they would continue to run as write-in candidates. Unofficial results show write-in votes for Iowa’s four U.S. House races this year totaled 3,616—about 0.23 percent of the 1,602,409 ballots cast for a Congressional candidate.

When Libertarian candidates have been on the ballot for recent Iowa Congressional elections, they have typically received 2-3 percent of the vote.

AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE FIRST DISTRICT

In IA-01, unofficial results show Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan by 796 votes (49.98 percent to 49.79 percent). Bohannan has not conceded, and the race has not been called. But it’s unlikely that enough provisional ballots remain to be counted for her to overtake Miller-Meeks. Iowa no longer counts absentee ballots that arrive after election day.

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

Two years ago, Iowa appeared to be on a different trajectory than much of the country. As Democrats won many of the midterm election races, including in our Midwestern neighboring states, Iowa experienced yet another “red wave.” Six of the last eight general elections in Iowa have been GOP landslides.

On November 5, Donald Trump improved on his 2020 performance almost across the board: in blue states like New York and New Jersey, swing states like Pennsylvania and Georgia, and red states like Texas and Iowa. He gained in rural counties, suburban counties, and urban centers, in states where both presidential candidates campaigned intensely, and in states where there was no “ground game” or barrage of political advertising. He gained among almost every demographic group except for college-educated women. He may become the first Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004, and only the second GOP nominee to win the popular vote since 1988.

The Trump resurgence isn’t unique to Iowa, or even the U.S.—grievance politics has been winning elections all over the world lately.

But that’s no comfort to Democrats here, who probably won’t win back any Congressional districts and suffered more losses among their already small contingents in the Iowa House and Senate.