How education, population changes fueled Iowa's shift toward Trump

Editor’s Note: This story is the fifth and final in a series that looks at how and why Iowa voters moved away from Democrats and lined up behind President Donald Trump and other Republicans.

It’s no surprise that Iowa has experienced a significant political shift in the last 12 years.

Since 2012, Iowa has seen a nearly 19-percentage-point swing toward Republicans, according to voting data from the last four presidential elections.

In 2012, former President Barack Obama won the state by nearly 6 points. Half of Iowa’s Congressional delegation was made up of Democrats and control of the Iowa Legislature was split between the two parties. Iowa went to Democrats in four out of the five presidential elections before 2008.

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In November, now-President Donald Trump won Iowa by more than 13 percentage points, Republicans won supermajorities of both legislative chambers and Iowa’s all-GOP congressional delegation won re-election.

“Iowa has shifted pretty dramatically since about 2008, 2010, from a moderate state that is fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, to the state we have now, which is the state that Republicans clearly control,” said Dave Peterson, a political science professor at Iowa State University.

Like many other states across the country, population density and education were the two dominant factors that contributed to Iowa growing redder each presidential election.

Here’s a breakdown of how education and population contributed to Trump’s success in Iowa.

Democrats lose voters without college degrees

One of the most significant determining factors of whether Trump won a county, congressional district or state in the last three presidential elections was education.

Between the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, the gap between voters with a bachelor’s degree or higher and those without any college degrees expanded drastically.

In 2016, 55 percent of white voters in the United States with a four-year college degree or more education said they voted for then Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, compared to the 38 percent who said they voted for Trump, according to the Pew Research Center. On the flip side, Trump won white voters without college degrees more than two-to-one, winning 64 percent of the demographic while Clinton won 28 percent of the group.

The same trend played out in Iowa that year.

The number of Iowans who have earned their bachelor's degrees has steadily increased in the last 12 years, going from 26.3 percent of the population attaining them in 2012 to 32.1 percent of residents holding them in 2024.

In 2012, Obama won multiple Iowa counties that ranked in the lower half of four-year degree attainment out of the state’s 99 counties, winning 17 out of the 49 counties with the lowest higher education completion.

In 2024, former Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, won only five of Iowa’s 99 counties. All of those counties ranked in the state’s top 10 for the percentage of residents with bachelor’s degrees.

Trump causes a 'diploma divide'

Before 2016, there wasn’t a very strong relationship between education and voter choice, Peterson said. In 2012, there was no large split in degree attainment among those who voted for Obama and then-Republican candidate and former Sen. Mitt Romney. But Trump’s presence on the ballot created what Peterson calls a “diploma divide” between educated and non-educated voters.

“The Republican Party has increasingly become the party of whites without a college degree, and the Democratic Party has increasingly become the party of whites with a college degree and minority voters,” Peterson said. “That's pretty consistent across the country, but it really has a pretty dramatic impact in states like Iowa, where we have one of the highest percentages of our population as whites without a college degree, and a lot of that is just because we're not a very racially diverse state.”

Andrew Green, a political science professor at Central College in Pella who has researched and authored a book about Iowa’s swing toward Trump, said Iowa had 30 pivot counties in 2016, or counties that swung from voting for Obama in 2012 to going to Trump in 2016. It was the most of any state.

Green said the likelihood of a county pivoting was heavily tied to education.

“The significant predictors of a county being a pivot county in 2016 were the share … of voters within the county who had a college degree,” Green said. “On average, counties that had a higher share of college graduates who lived within the county, those counties were actually less likely to be a pivot county in 2016.”

Trump's celebrity reached those not tuned into politics

Trump changed the game for Iowans without four-year degrees who weren’t previously politically engaged.

Typically, citizens who are college educated are more likely to vote, but in 2016, Trump was able to mobilize a part of the population that hadn’t attended college, according to Peterson. Trump’s name recognition as a celebrity ahead of 2016 made him a more familiar candidate for those who weren’t tuned into politics, Peterson said.

“He (Trump) was able to reach a lot of people who, say, Mitt Romney hadn't been able to reach because these are folks who, for lots of reasons, didn't really pay attention to politics. But Trump was able to reach them, and in reaching them, was able to mobilize them,” Peterson said. “If any other candidates had made the exact same appeal and had the same issue, position, said the same things, but wasn't Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016, it probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful, because his celebrity is what got him the attention,” Peterson said.

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Divide between rural, metro grew in 2016

Similar to education, a county’s population was somewhat a factor in determining how it voted in 2012, but Trump’s presence made it more pronounced.

Over the last 12 years, Iowa's population has steadily climbed by 5.4 percent while the nation’s population increased by roughly 8.3 percent. Iowa went from having 3,074,186 residents in 2012 to 3,241,488 residents in 2024.

Ahead of the 2012 election, the urban-rural divide, where more densely populated areas tended to vote for Democrats and more sparsely populated areas backed Republicans, was a slowly growing trend among the electorate.

But between 2012 and 2016, the divide grew, especially in Iowa.

In 2012, Obama won 38 of Iowa’s 99 counties, three of which had fewer than 10,000 residents and 27 of which had between 10,000 and 50,000 residents.

In 2016, Clinton won six Iowa counties, which all had populations of 50,000 or more, while Trump won the other 93 counties.

Peterson said this shift is due in part to people more closely aligning their geographical identity with their political affiliation and Trump communicated with rural voters in a way that no other candidate had been able to.

“The ways in which rural identity of people thinking about themselves as a rural person, as a rural citizen, has also become increasingly prominent politically. People who live in rural areas see their way of life as a way of life, and see this as an identity, and they connect that to the parties,” Peterson said. “They think that the Republican Party is the party that represents them, the party that looks like them, the party that hears them, and the Democratic Party doesn't.”

Peterson added that as Iowa ages and younger residents and recent college graduates continue to leave rural counties and the state in general, the urban and rural divide will continue to grow.

A 2024 Iowa Workforce Development survey reported that 38 percent of Iowa college students plan to leave the state after graduation.

“We're an aging state and so that's contributing to the growth of the Republican Party in the state,” Peterson said. “Gen X is the most supportive of the Trump generation, generally, as opposed to baby boomers, but younger voters, the millennials and Gen Z, are the most liberal.”