Why is Iowa not a red state?

[pbrower2a]

1. Iowa agriculture is farming with little ranching. Ranch country seems extremely R-leaning, as shown in the Texas Panhandle.

2. Iowa has little oil activity.

3. As the map shows, Iowa has comparatively few Southern Baptists (in contrast to Missouri).

4. Iowa, like Wisconsin and Minnesota (and really Michigan, Chicagoland, and northern Indiana and Ohio... and the West Coast from about Monterrey CA northward), was settled from the northeastern US. Settlers brought their institutions with them. The Puritan stock of New England set the institutions in place even if later immigrants (Irish Catholics in New England, Mexican-Americans in California) took them over. These are settler colonies, places in which institutions are strong, education is valued, courts settle disputes, and law is respected. The "Wild West" was almost invariably the Southwest settled by people of backwoods Scots-Irish and northern British stock -- people with little respect for institutions or learning and who often settled scores with duels and lynchings.

The people with a long heritage of respect for law, institutions, and learning became liberals; those who got such late are what we now call conservatives. (The blatant exception to the pattern is Mormons. Go figure.)  

5. Iowa has no metropolis but plenty of medium-sized cities. Racial animosity that results from huge concentrations of the underclass in giant cities (think of Missouri, which contains St. Louis and Kansas City) and resulting polarization that  results in dominance by white conservatives in Missouri does not happen in Iowa.

6. Iowa is close to the US average in its rural-urban mix. It is close to the D-R split nationwide, so if the majority goes slightly R, Republicans win the state's Presidential vote (2004); if the majority goes even slightly D (Democrats won the popular vote in every Presidential election nationwide since 1992 except 2004) Iowa goes D.