Sifting Through the Ashes of Iowa

Sifting Through the Ashes of Iowa

I know, I know. I'm the political number crunching guy, sitting here in the last state called, one of only three states that switched sides from 2000 to 2004. I should be making some attempt to analyze, right?

Well, sorry, dear readers. As an Election Office Professional it's taken me a whole week just to decompress enough and grieve enough to think.

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First off the good news. Five Iowa counties switched from Bush 2000 to Kerry: Fayette, Poweshiek, and Winneshiek all have small to mid-size colleges and young voters may have played a role (both increased turnout and Nader collapse). Jefferson is an anomaly. It's home to a large community of transencental meditation followers (really!) who had voted Natural Law Party in recent elections. Looks like they went Democratic after NLP died. Jasper (Newton - Maytag) is industrial by Iowa standards. A less noticable (i.e. didn't switch sides) trend was seen in nearby/similar Marshall County.

Four counties shifted from Gore to Bush: Cedar, Greene, Louisa, and Winnebago. Don't see a pattern here - Cedar is traditionally GOP but went for Gore by two votes after a few hours of fame in 2000 as The Only Tied County In The Nation. Louisa, which I got to know very well in my 1996 race, is pure rural and small town with a growing but largely non-voting Hispanic population. Winnebago is vacation country (Okoboji) up by the Minnesota border.

But these relatively small shifts aren't the story. Three counties seem to tell the biggest stories: Dallas, Pottawattamie, and Sioux.

Dallas County west of Des Moines is the fastest growing county in the state, and Bush picked up about 2/3 of the total increase in the vote to gain roughly 2500 votes on the Democrats. A similar but smaller pattern happened south of Des Moines in Warren County.

Pottawattamie County is on the western border in Steve King's 5th CD and gets most of its media for Big Red Nebraska. It's usually one of the lowest percentage turnout counties in the state. But this year turnout was up and Bush won nearly 80% of the increased turnout. This despite Democrats holding a tough state senate seat and picking up a state house seat last year in a special election.

The REAL story shows in Sioux County and its evil twin Lyon County, up where Iowa corners on South Dakota. These are the two most GOP counties in Iowa. Turnout was way up and Bush gained over 90% or the increase. Which makes sense in a place where he's already getting five out of six votes. Not to mention those two are in the Sioux Falls media market and had been infected for months by the Thune-Daschle Senate race. (I'll take this excuse to note Stephanie Herseth's re-election.)

The pattern repeats in 20-odd counties across the western half of the state: turnout jumps in heavily GOP areas.

These gains were offset by isolated Democratic pickups. Two of the three big campus counties - Story (Ames/Iowa State) and most of all my own beloved People's Republic of Johnson County (Iowa City) - trended to Kerry (in part due to the total meltdown of 90% of the Nader/Green vote). The third campus county, Black Hawk, saw little change from 2000, bit UNI is smaller and Black Hawk is less clearly a College County.

There was a slight Democratic trend in Dubuque and the northeast (Clayton, Allamakee, the aforementioned Winneshiek which all get media from swing state Wisconsin - Kerry ended the campaign VERY nearby in La Crosse, where I was born).

But none of this was enough to overcome GOP trends in the Des Moines suburbs and those big turnout spikes in the west.