I think an underrated factor is the role Iowa's first in the nation primary plays. It definitely encourages a civic mindedness that's correlated with Democratic strength. Other high turnout states like Minnesota and Wisconsin have been more Democratic than what would be expected as well.
Indeed. While Iowa largely evaded the various Granger and other agrarian movements of long ago, the farm crisis birthed a loose-yet-distinct class consciousness in the Driftless Area. I’ve read on different fora over the years that this is due to the Driftless Area’s topography fostering mom-and-pop farms vis a vis the Great Plains’s agricultural giants, but cannot speak to this myself. Furthermore, Iowa’s quintessential Main Street America milieu, sizable college-town communities surrounding Iowa/Iowa State, and its spot on the presidential primary totem pole not only birthed netroots-influenced candidates such as Tom Vilsack, but provided a crucible for the Obama campaign’s national success:
I don’t want to get cynical that fast. I won Iowa twice. I won Iowa when unemployment was still 8.5 percent, in 2012. And the demographics of Iowa have not changed. I won Iowa comfortably. This notion that somehow everything in this country has flipped—I think it’s more complicated than that.
Iowa was the last time I was able to interact directly with voters who might not immediately be predisposed to vote for me. The first time I did that was when I was running for the Senate. Downstate Illinois is like Kentucky or southern Ohio or Indiana or much of Iowa. And what I discovered in that Senate race—and this was repeated twice in Iowa—is that I could go into culturally conservative, rural or small-town, disproportionately white working-class communities and I could make a connection, and I could win those votes. The reason I could is that I didn’t have a filter between me and them.
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Even as late as 2008, typically when I went into a small town, there’s a small-town newspaper, and the owner or editor is a conservative guy with a crew cut, maybe, and a bow tie, and he’s been a Republican for years. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for tax-and-spend liberals, but he’ll take a meeting with me, and he’ll write an editorial that says, “He’s a liberal Chicago lawyer, but he seems like a decent enough guy, had some good ideas”; and the local TV station will cover me straight. But you go into those communities today and the newspapers are gone. If Fox News isn’t on every television in every barbershop and VFW hall, then it might be a Sinclair-owned station, and the presuppositions that exist there, about who I am and what I believe, are so fundamentally different, have changed so much, that it’s difficult to break through.
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Now you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring. This stuff takes root. I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories. The fact is that there is still a large portion of the country that was taken in by a carnival barker.
