In the past 12 years, Iowa flipped from bluish-purple to ruby red. The Quad-City Times talks to the people who live in the counties that showed the biggest change.
The northern Iowa county that voted for Obama twice and Trump three times swung 52 percentage points to the right between the 2012 and 2024 elections.
“We’re made up of rural and factory workers and hard, hard-working people that want to pay their own way. And they liked what they saw in Trump,” the local GOP chair said.
In 2012, Chickasaw County voted for Obama by 11 percentage points. By 2024, Trump won by nearly 37 percentage points.
Over the last decade, Dallas County has seen the largest population growth compared to all of Iowa’s 99 counties. It’s also adding Democrats faster than Republicans.
Education and population density are among the factors that fueled Iowa’s conservative shift toward Donald Trump in the last three presidential elections. See the breakdowns from 2012 to 2024.
This summer, reporters talked with Iowans from across the state in a six-part series called Iowa’s Political Shift. Here’s five takeaways to know from the series:
We traveled to Iowa counties that saw the biggest swings toward Republicans and a county that swung toward Democrats to try to get a sense of the state’s changes.