Iowa Portends an Upper Midwest Blowout for Trump - 92 Years of History Dissected

Topic: Elections

Yesterday, I posted about a new poll showing President Trump with a commanding 18-point lead in a three-man race between himself, Joe Biden, and Robert F. Kennedy.

This is the gold standard poll for Iowa, and it had Trump +8 in the 2020 race just before Election Day.

Trump +18.

Spells doom for Democrats in Wisconsin and will require video game level fraud in the Twin Cities to hold Minnesota.

You can find online commentary about Selzer and Co.’s 2020 poll here (correction, the poll only had Trump +7, not +8 as I mentioned in my social media post yesterday).  Trump wound up carrying the Hawkeye State by 8.2%, or 138,611 votes, in 2020’s certified results, though I think they are slightly shorted to sell the steal in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and even Minnesota.  You can read my full 2020 review/2024 assessment of Iowa here.  In that assessment, I have Iowa going to Trump by a minimum of 12% this year, and hypothetically by more than 15% in an election free of widespread cheating, which is generally carried out by use of corrupt electronic voting systems, mail-in balloting fraud, and ballot harvesting.

Last week’s polling from Selzer and Co., widely considered the gold standard for Iowa polling, tells me I may not be insane after all.  If you’ve read this journal for some time, you understand by now that presidential elections work like the switch of a light dimmer.  The harder you slide it one way, the more intense the lights all throughout the room become, and vice versa.  The harder right a presidential environment moves, with few exceptions, the more to the right the map will move, especially when we are talking about regional earthquakes like a Trump +18 poll from the most reliable pollster in a state, in a state that Barack Obama carried twice!  Yes, you read that right - Obama carried Iowa by 5.8% over a milquetoast moderate Republican nominee just 12 short years ago.  If you’re a Trump diehard, that should show you just how far he has come, that we are not scrutinizing the electoral map figuring out how to trip up Iowa by less than a point, which is all George W. Bush could handle in a 2004 reelection campaign.

Regions move together.  Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota make up a region I refer to as the Upper Midwest.  The voting populations differ from their counterparts in the Industrial Midwest, also referred to as the Rust Belt (not a flattering term), which stretches from Upstate New York through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and southern Illinois.  Voters in the Upper Midwest are strangely moderate and more swayed by agriculture policy (read up on Iowa’s strange shifting in the 1980s amid a sea of Republican landslides), though certain parts of the state resemble union-dominated counties in the latter region.  The Upper Midwest had much larger third-party vote shares in 2016, which redistributed itself in stranger ways in the 2020 race, widely perceived as a traditional two-man contest without a well-known third party upstart like Gary Johnson or dissident like Jill Stein.  Therefore, when analyzing the two regions, I tend to not stuff Wisconsin into the same box as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which are political cousins with nearly identical tendencies going back to 1948.

Selzer has Trump 11 points ahead of his polling from the November 2020 election, when she hit within 1.2% of the certified margin, well within her margin of error.  Let’s split the difference and round down, and say Trump is due for a 5% improvement in Iowa, meaning he would win the state by a certified margin north of 13 points, matching my prediction with razor precision.

What would modern electoral history suggest for Wisconsin and Minnesota if Trump shifts Iowa five points right?  Remember, it’s not just Selzer’s polling and a read on trending that informs my prediction, but also voter registration by party.  Wisconsin and Minnesota do not register voters by party, but Iowa does, and the correlation between the states is strong, as you will read in the balance of this article.  Iowa has zoomed from a R+1.0% advantage to R+9.8%, and climbing, an astonishing shift that is likely to make it nearly impossible to rip off Wisconsin and will require an Olympic performance in election fraud to hold down Minnesota, which hasn’t been carried by a GOP presidential nominee since Richard Nixon grabbed it by 5.5% in 1972.

Here is my scoreboard, with 22 elections having passed since the 1932 election (beginning of New Deal politics and subsequent regional impact):

In 16 of 22 elections (72.7%), Wisconsin and Minnesota have followed in the same direction as Iowa - right or left.

In 4 of 22 elections (18.2%), Wisconsin and Minnesota moved in the opposite direction of Iowa.

In 1 of 22 elections each (9.0% combined), one of Wisconsin or Minnesota moved with Iowa - right or left.

Moving into very recent times, since 1996:

In 6 of 7 elections (85.7%), Wisconsin and Minnesota have followed in the same direction as Iowa - right or left.  The only exception was in 2004, when Iowa narrowly moved right (by 1.0%), tipping to George W. Bush, while Wisconsin went left by 0.2% and Minnesota left by 1.1%.  There are many theories as to “why,” which Richard Baris expertly dissects down to the sentiments of various white ethnicities regarding the Iraq War.

History Lesson on Movement of Iowa