Two Iowa counties an hour apart show Americas growing political divide -

LEON, Iowa — Kim DeVore was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama when he ran for president in 2008, drawn to his message about bringing the country together. A loyal Democrat, she caucused for him and even traveled to Des Moines to attend a rally he held there.

But DeVore, who lives in a tiny Iowa town near the Missouri border, eventually came to feel that Obama had only divided the country further. She changed her party registration to Republican in 2016 and voted for Donald Trump, drawn to his pledge to build a wall on the border with Mexico and to put Americans first. “When we have veterans and other people here that are not being helped — now that’s infuriating,” she said.

Seventy miles north in the Des Moines suburbs, Kenan Judge, a retired executive at the Iowa grocery chain Hy-Vee, made the opposite political journey. He had been a Republican for decades but left the party in 2016 after Trump secured the nomination. In 2018, he ran for a Republican-held state House of Representatives seat in Dallas County as a moderate Democrat and won.

“I don’t put up with that stuff,” Judge said, referring to Trump’s rhetoric. “I mean, that’s not who I am. I’m not going to associate with that.”

Trump’s ascent has helped transform Iowa — where he is polling far ahead of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of Monday’s caucuses — from a swing state into a GOP stronghold. He carried the state by more than eight percentage points in 2020 — a 14-point swing since Obama won Iowa in 2012. No other state has shifted as hard toward Republicans in the same period.

While Iowa’s largely White small towns and rural areas have turned redder and redder, Des Moines’s prosperous, educated suburbs have moved toward Democrats. The divergence between Decatur County, where DeVore lives, and Dallas County, where Judge lives, has been propelled by the same forces reshaping the rest of the country’s political terrain, with voters increasingly divided along socioeconomic and geographic lines.

The shift toward Democrats in well-off Des Moines suburbs such as Waukee, Clive, Ankeny and Johnston mirrors Democrats’ newfound strength in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Phoenix, which helped Joe Biden win in 2020 and allowed the party to retain control of the Senate in 2022. Republicans’ growing dominance of rural Iowa, meanwhile, resembles changes across the Midwest and the rest of the country that helped Trump win in 2016 and cost Democrats Senate seats in Missouri and North Dakota and House seats in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

For a long time, Dallas and Decatur counties voted alike. They have backed the same presidential candidate in each election since 1988. As recently as 2012, rural Decatur County tilted slightly more Democratic than suburban Dallas County: Republican Mitt Romney carried it by only four points in 2012.

But the two counties veered in opposite directions in 2016 and split even further in 2020. Now-President Biden came within two points of winning Dallas County. Decatur County backed Trump by 39 points — a 35-point shift since Romney was the nominee.

They are only an hour’s drive apart and sit in the same swing congressional district, but they could hardly be more different. Decatur County has one of the lowest median household incomes in Iowa. Dallas County has the highest. Just a quarter of residents 25 and older have bachelor’s degrees in Decatur County. More than half of them do in Dallas County.

New subdivisions are eating up open land in Dallas County, with an Apple data center under construction in the cornfields outside Waukee. Decatur County is slowly shrinking.

“You really have within the 3rd District the tale of two Iowas,” said Matt Paul, a Democratic operative who worked as state director on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, referring to the two counties’ congressional district, which Republicans retook in 2022. “You have one Iowa that is growing, that has new schools, a growing tax base, a strong housing market. And you have an Iowa that has school districts that are struggling to stay open, that have lost their employment base, that are struggling with the challenges and realities of small-town America today.”

Outsider appeal

Disappointed with Obama, DeVore might have voted for Romney in 2012, she said. But she didn’t find a Republican she could wholeheartedly support until Trump.

Trump’s pledge to build a wall appealed to her. And she was turned off by Democrats’ increasing discussion of the country’s racial divisions.

“Don’t get me wrong: I am not racist at all,” said DeVore, 55, who owns a small day-care center in the tiny town of Decatur. “But the more we talked about it, the more divided we got. And it seems like it got brought up over and over and over.”

Trump has campaigned to return to the White House on a message of grievance, castigating undocumented immigrants, seeking revenge against critics and articulating an emerging agenda that could be more extreme than his first term. He has continued to make false claims about the 2020 election and downplay the insurrection he inspired at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

DeVore doesn’t hold Trump responsible for Jan. 6 — “He said you can peacefully go protest,” she said — and she has no hesitation about voting for him against Biden.

Decatur County is one of the state’s poorest — it has the lowest average household income in the state and the fifth-lowest median household income — in part because of its hilly terrain and relatively poor farmland. The county’s average land value is $6,286 per acre, according to Iowa State University — less than half the value of land in some of Iowa’s most productive farming counties.

“I think it is a question of despair: ‘Look, we don’t have any hope to speak of here. Maybe this guy can provide it,’” said David Loebsack, a former Democratic congressman who represented Decatur County from 2013 to 2021, describing why voters there are drawn to Trump.

The square that surrounds the 1908 county courthouse in Leon, a town of about 1,800, is still lined with businesses — a pharmacy, a bank, a tattoo shop, a thrift store, a lumber yard, the Main Street Brick House restaurant — but many of the jobs that once sustained the town are gone. The Crestline window factory closed its plant in Leon in the 1990s and moved operations to Wisconsin.

Tasha Pace, 40, who manages the Brick House, didn’t vote for Romney in 2012 — but she supported Trump in 2016 and 2020, and she said she will vote for him again this year if he’s the nominee.

“Trump’s more relatable to people,” Pace said. “He’s more of a people person. He says what’s on his mind. He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.”

Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor and the only remaining Democrat in statewide elected office, grew up in Winneshiek County, which voted twice for Obama and twice for Trump. He doesn’t see voters who flipped from one to the other as irrational.

“When Trump ran in 2016, there are very important ways in which his messaging was similar to Obama’s,” Sand said. Obama and Trump each ran “as an outsider, someone who was going to change the system, someone who wasn’t a part of the system.”

Democrats, meanwhile, “nominated in ’16 and ’20 two people who were the most consummate insiders you could possibly nominate for the presidency,” Sand added.

Biden appears to have done better with White voters without bachelor’s degrees — the foundation of Trump’s support — in Iowa than elsewhere. But such voters make up such a large share of the vote in Iowa, with so many counties similar to Decatur, that Biden still lost the state.

Trump’s campaign is betting working-class voters will support him in even greater numbers this year, said Alex Latcham, who is based in Iowa as the Trump campaign’s early-states director.

“He’s fundamentally transformed the appeal of the Republican Party, and in many ways has made it much more competitive and the party of the working man and woman,” Latcham said.

There are Iowa counties that saw even bigger swings toward Republicans between 2012 and 2020 than Decatur County. Howard County, a rural county that borders the one where Sand grew up, voted for Obama by 21 points in 2012 and backed Trump by 27 points in 2020 — an astonishing 48-point swing.

Ninety-four of Iowa’s 99 counties moved toward Republicans between 2012 and 2020. Seventy shifted by at least 20 points; 32 shifted by at least 30 points.

But Decatur County stands out because Democrats’ margins have continued to fall. The county swung 10 points toward Trump between 2016 and 2020 — more than any other in Iowa. Biden won fewer votes there than Clinton did.

Stephanie Whitten voted for Obama in 2008 — when he carried the state by nearly 10 points — and again in 2012.

“I thought that he was a pretty good leader and liked his views,” said Whitten, 40, who lives in Leon and works as a dispatcher for the Decatur County Sheriff’s Office. “I thought that a minority being in office would also be good.”

But Whitten sat out the 2016 election. She couldn’t bring herself to vote for Biden or Trump in 2020 — which she said earned her some ribbing from her Trump-supporting colleagues. And she won’t vote for Trump or Biden this year if they are the nominees.

Whitten, like many Americans, is concerned Biden’s mind is declining. (Biden’s doctor has declared him healthy and “fit to successfully execute duties of the presidency.”)

“When I see him, just the look on his face, I’m like, ‘Dementia, 100 percent,’” Whitten said.

Booming, and trending Democratic

If Decatur County is Trump country, Dallas County is closer to Romney country — but it’s trending toward Democrats.

It’s one of only three counties in Iowa where a majority of adults 25 and older have bachelor’s degrees. Many of those voters have recoiled from Trump even if they once voted Republican, giving Democrats an opening.

Brock Toll, a 39-year-old product manager for Wells Fargo who lives in Clive, an affluent suburb, voted for Romney in 2012 but reluctantly flipped to support Clinton and Biden. He described the reason for his switch in two words: “Donald Trump.”

“I would’ve much rather voted for a Mitt Romney Republican,” said Toll, who was wearing a Green Bay Packers cap and hoodie on a recent Saturday.

Toll said he is conservative on fiscal issues but doesn’t see Republicans as especially fiscally disciplined these days. And he has grown more liberal on LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, guns and the environment as he’s gotten older. He plans to vote for Biden again if Trump is the nominee.

Such voters are helping to push Dallas County toward Democrats, but there’s another reason for the shift: The county is booming, and many newcomers are Democrats. Its population grew by nearly 50 percent between 2012 and 2022, making it the seventh-fastest-growing county in the nation. Decatur County, in contrast, lost nearly 7 percent of its population over the same period.

The rapid growth is apparent on Hickman Road in Waukee, a wide thoroughfare lined with new restaurants, banks, churches and a Montessori school, with townhouses and luxury apartments under construction. A new “sauna studio” offers “full spectrum infrared sauna and red light therapy.”

There’s a newly built Chipotle in front of an Imax theater that opened in 2019 with solar panels and electric car charging stations in the parking lot and a gigantic neon palm tree on its facade. An enormous high school opened in 2021. There’s a Target under construction nearby.

Two miles down Hickman Road from Chipotle, the landscape abruptly switches to open fields, with new subdivisions slowly consuming them.

Warren County, another county in the Des Moines suburbs, has the second-highest median income in the state — but shifted nearly 15 points toward Republicans between 2012 and 2020. Two differences between Warren County and Dallas County: Just 32 percent of adults in Warren County have bachelor’s degrees (vs. more than 51 percent in Dallas County) and nearly 93 percent of the population is non-Hispanic White (versus about 83 percent in Dallas County).

Dallas County is 5.3 percent Asian American and 6.6 percent Hispanic. There’s a nearly finished mosque near the suburb of Granger that caters to the Bosnian community, its minaret rising out of the surrounding cornfields.

One of the new arrivals reshaping the county’s politics is Armel Traore dit Nignan, 41, who grew up in Burkina Faso and is now the head of analytics for a real estate company. He moved to Waukee in 2015 from Chicago, drawn in part by its excellent public schools, and won a seat on the school board in 2021.

Traore dit Nignan voted for Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020, despite having reservations about each of them. He dislikes Biden’s immigration policies and holds Biden’s vote for the 1994 crime bill against him.

“Being a Black man raising Black boys, I get a sense that a lot of what we’re dealing with today, he had a hand in it,” he said.

Still, he’ll vote for Biden over Trump if they’re the nominees.

“I will take some sense of normalcy over what Trump represents,” he said.

Judge, the retired Hy-Vee executive, decided to run for office after reading a story following the 2016 election about suburban voters elsewhere shifting toward Democrats. He started to wonder if his neighbors in Waukee might be undergoing a similar evolution.

So he ran for the state House seat in 2018 and won after knocking on more than 9,000 doors. Trump has changed Iowa, he said, but the state isn’t lost for Democrats.

“Too many people have written Iowa off,” he said. “It’s not [a red state]. I believe that in my heart.”

An undecided voter

If Trump wins the Republican nomination, he will be overwhelmingly favored to win Iowa in November — even if some of his onetime supporters abandon him.

Loring Miller, 77, a lifelong Republican who’s been deeply involved in Leon’s civic life for decades, voted for Obama in 2012 because he thought Obama was doing well enough to deserve a second term. He voted for Trump in 2016 because he couldn’t bring himself to support Clinton. He backed Trump again in 2020 but broke with him after the election.

“January 6th did it for me,” Miller said. “A true leader would’ve put an end to that.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do this time around,” he added. “I am totally discouraged by both sides of the aisle.”

Asked why so many of his neighbors switched their support from Obama to Trump, he said it might be less about Trump than it seems.

“I think the people behind him are not necessarily behind him,” Miller said. “They’re just behind major change.”

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