I am doing the start of a deep dive into 5 states: Iowa, WI, MI, PA and FL.
I am starting with Iowa. There is a decent debate raging about the collapse of Democratic Support in the Midwest. Some are arguing the cause is economic. Others think it is based on social and racial issues (The owner of the Bleeding Heartland blog thinks it is the latter).
But how do you measure economic stagnation to begin with? One way is in population change. It is an old story – one told for a century in Vermont. The young move away because there are no jobs. This problem existing in Vermont in rural areas for century – but began to reverse in the 60’s.
Here is a scatter plot of change in population and change in Democratic Support. That is all this plot captures: I didn’t think it would begin to explain the change.
And yet it did. About half the change in Democratic Support from 2008 to 2016 is explained by the population change.
Places that grew in population (Sioux County, Butler, Black Hawk, Polk and Dallas) had smaller declines that places with big population declines (Lucas, Adams, Fremont, Van Buren).
In fact, the only county that saw an increase in Democratic Support was Dallas County – the west Des Moines Suburb/Exurb – which grew by 29% between 2008 and 2016. Ironically this is where I worked for Bernie and Edwards in the Caucuses.
The first time I was in Dallas County I thought it reminded of me of New Tampa – a growing suburb of Tampa.
Something clearly happened at the low end of the income scale all through the Midwest, though the more you look at exit polls the less confident in them you become.
