Why did Obama do as well as he did in Iowa?

[ottermax]

Obama has mentioned that the 2009 Henry Louis Gates arrest controversy was one of the turning points in his polling with white voters. Iowa didn't have as dramatic of a swing to the right in 2012 as other states like Indiana, Missouri, or West Virginia, but there was a general shift to the right from 2008 to 2012 in more heavily white states overall compared to more diverse states.

The combination of 2014 Ferguson and the rise of smartphones and social media dominance of the information landscape probably hard coded the trends of polarization.

What remains a bit surprising to me is how well Obama held on to his support in 2012 in some of these states and among white working class voters - which really goes to show that Romney was a terrible candidate for these voters. Unfortunately we haven't really seen a non-Trump aligned election in a while, but the 2022 election showed that Iowa is pretty much gone for Democrats which is really terrible from a Senate perspective as it remains one of the better and easier opportunities for a Senate seat.

That all being said in the 2000s Iowa was quite Republican also (although not at the state and local level), so it will be interesting to see what happens when Republicans move past the Trump era to see if Iowa Republicanism is more of a Trump phenomenon or a bigger shift culturally.