As most stories do, this series started with a question: why had Iowa swung so much to the right in the past 12 years of presidential elections?
In 2012, most Iowans supported Barack Obama, the state’s voters sent an evenly split-party congressional delegation to Washington, and Iowa’s political parties shared control of the Iowa Legislature. In 2024, now-President Donald Trump won Iowa by over 13 percentage points, Republicans gained supermajorities of both legislative chambers and Iowa’s all-GOP congressional delegation won reelection.
To dig into that question, Quad-City Times Des Moines Bureau Chief Maya Marchel Hoff started by sifting through the election data available at the Iowa Secretary of State’s website. She found all but two Iowa counties shifted toward Republicans between the 2012 and 2024 presidential elections, and some more dramatically than others.
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She identified three counties that made the most dramatic swings: Howard County, Chickasaw County and Jackson County. All had voted for Obama by double-digit percentages, then shifted to Trump and grew more supportive of the current president each time he was on the ballot.
Marchel Hoff and Quad-City Times reporter Sarah Watson set about researching the counties and planning a visit. Marchel Hoff reached out to local parties, elected local leaders, and county historians for interviews and tours.
Our goal was to get to know corners of Iowa a little better.
Party bigwigs – Jeff Kaufmann, Rita Hart, Bob VanderPlaats, Kim Reynolds, Rob Sand and the like are frequently quoted in the pages of newspapers or on the newsreels of TV stations.
In this series, we wanted to highlight people who are juggling busy lives, people who are active in local political parties, and those who are not.
We first stopped in Jackson County, a very scenic county bordered by the Mississippi River.
Local Democrats spoke with us at a favorite coffee and lunch spot. We toured the Clinton Engines Museum in Maquoketa and walked through the history of Jackson County with a few local history buffs.
Marchel Hoff achieved her dream (which she achieves at every opportunity) of meeting the Weinermobile and its drivers at the Dog Days of Summer event in downtown Maquoketa. Roughly a hundred people came out to hear the Iowa City band “Dogs on Skis” jam.
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We approached people there, introduced ourselves as reporters, explained the story we were working on, and asked if they’d like to talk about politics. Some were eager to tell us their opinions. Most people we approached turned us down — politely.
Most didn’t give a reason, but some people told us it’s hard to talk with neighbors, family and friends about politics if they don’t agree with you. Others said they just didn’t follow politics. Some turned us down because they feared offending business clients. Don’t talk religion and politics, one person joked.
We heard the same in Howard and Chickasaw counties, too.
We attended Sweet Corn Days in Lime Springs, a festive weekend-long event centered around sweet corn, complete with live music, free sweet corn and the locally infamous “.005 kilometer” run.
Two local kids, with smiles of delight on their faces, were crowned King of Corn and Lil Miss Sweet Corn. It is one of the largest events in the county that current and past residents attend every year in August.
We sat with them at picnic tables that lined the town’s main streets as the sun set, asking them how they’ve watched their communities change over the last year and whether they’ve either seen a political shift or shifted politically themselves.
The locals who spoke with us seemed almost practiced with their answers about the political shift — national outlets descended upon the county after voters swung by among the largest margins in the country from Obama to Trump in 2016.
In Chickasaw County, we witnessed a demonstration of a steam-powered 1922 tractor at the annual Northeast Iowa Antique Engine and Power Show and stopped to admire the Little Brown Church in the Vale, which has stood outside of Nashua, Iowa, since 1864.
With a backdrop of antique tractors in Fredericksburg, we spoke to a couple who had voted in just one prior presidential election and a former mayor who’d voted in a lot more.
To top off the series, Maya traveled 20 minutes west of her home in Des Moines to talk to people in Dallas County, offering a different slice of Iowa’s political landscape.
The county, like the others we ventured to for the series, has its rural areas. But in the last 20 years, suburban sprawl from nearby Polk County has transformed the county into a cross-section of the different communities represented across the state, from corn fields and small towns to bustling shopping centers and growing housing developments.
While we spent weeks talking to people and crunching the numbers on voting data, our visits to four of Iowa’s 99 counties barely scratched the surface of the people, places and stories that contributed to the state’s political transformation.
Approaching this story and topic felt daunting. Over the last decade our political environment both statewide and nationally has grown more polarized. We weren’t sure how people would respond to two reporters from a different area of the state coming into their communities and prompting them to divulge their political beliefs and values.
Politics wasn’t a topic that everyone wanted to talk about, but people they were still willing to offer a helpful suggestion of who in town might want to.
And almost everyone was game to share what they loved about their counties.
Maya Marchel Hoff is Des Moines Statehouse Bureau Chief and Sarah Watson is a government reporter for the Quad-City Times.
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