Eighth in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2018 state and federal elections.

Last week, Bleeding Heartland examined votes for governor in counties containing Iowa’s mid-sized cities, which collectively accounted for roughly 15 percent of Iowans who participated in this year’s election.

Today’s focus is ten counties where more than half of this year’s Iowa voters live. Whereas Fred Hubbell underperformed in all seventeen “micropolitan” areas, the results in larger counties were a mixed bag for the Democratic nominee.

LARGEST COUNTIES CONTRIBUTE A GROWING SHARE OF STATEWIDE VOTE

Here are Iowa’s largest counties by population, with each county’s main city in parentheses.

Polk (Des Moines metro area)
Linn (Cedar Rapids metro area)
Scott (Iowa side of the Quad Cities)
Johnson (Iowa City metro area)
Black Hawk (Waterloo/Cedar Falls)
Woodbury (Sioux City)
Story (Ames)
Dubuque (Dubuque)
Pottawattamie (Council Bluffs)
Dallas (farthest-west suburbs of Des Moines)

The first table shows the total votes cast in each county for any candidate for governor, including write-ins. All numbers for this year’s election came from the Iowa Secretary of State’s results website on November 18. Eight counties had updated totals following the canvass; Linn and Scott still showed unofficial figures.

The counties appear in descending order from most to least votes cast in 2018. Turnout was higher in Dallas and lower in Woodbury relative to those counties’ population.

The electorate has grown in every county containing a large metro area, but the sharpest increases are in Dallas, Polk, Johnson, Linn, and Story counties, reflecting urban sprawl over the past couple of decades. In fact, Dallas was outside the top ten vote-producing counties in 1998, below four micropolitan counties (Cerro Gordo, Clinton, Marshall, and Jasper) and Warren County.

Every county tallied more votes this year, no surprise given the highest statewide turnout for an Iowa midterm election since 1994.

Note the growing share of votes from population centers, relative to the state as a whole. Most Iowa counties have steadily lost residents for decades as economic growth has concentrated in a small number of metro areas and college towns. We can expect that trend to continue, so that each election cycle, the largest counties will provide an ever-higher share of total votes cast.

As more Iowans settle in urban or suburban neighborhoods, a Democratic candidate has more paths to win a statewide race without carrying dozens of counties, like Tom Vilsack and Chet Culver did in 1998, 2002, and 2006.

However, not every county with a large population consistently favors Democratic candidates.

ONLY SOME LARGE COUNTIES ARE TRENDING TOWARD DEMOCRATS

Hubbell outpolled Governor Kim Reynolds by a historically wide margin in Iowa’s most urban counties.

This table compares Hubbell’s advantage or deficit in the largest counties with margins for Iowa’s only successful Democratic candidates for governor in the past 50 years.

Residents of Polk, Johnson, and Story delivered record victories for a Democratic nominee for governor or president. Even Barack Obama never came out of those counties with such a large advantage.

The Dallas County number is less bad than the trendline suggests. Given the massive growth of wealthy suburbs west of Des Moines, Hubbell did well to keep Reynolds’ margin so low. Republican candidates have carried this county by thousands of votes in the recent past.

Compared to Culver and Vilsack, though, Hubbell underperformed in other urban strongholds, particularly Dubuque, Scott, Woodbury, and Pottawattamie. Unofficial results show Reynolds received about 36,000 more votes statewide than her challenger. Hubbell could have made up a third of that margin by matching previous Democratic nominees’ results in Dubuque and not getting blown out in Woodbury and Pottawattamie.

This table shows the current political make-up of the largest counties, using statistics on active registered voters from the Secretary of State’s office, as of November 1. These figures do not take into account anyone who registered to vote on election day.

In many ways, the results line up as we’d expect. For instance:

On the other hand, some oddities stand out.

Since voter registration numbers don’t fully explain the disparate election outcomes, I pulled together some other statistics that struck me as potentially relevant. Most of the information in the next table comes from U.S. Census Bureau data as of July 2017. The unemployment column draws on Iowa Workforce Development numbers from September 2018.

We see evidence of the widening partisan split among white voters, depending on education level. The best counties for Hubbell (Johnson and Story) have the highest share of Iowans with a college degree. The high percentage of college-educated Dallas County residents is likely the primary reason Reynolds fared worse there than one would guess base on the GOP voter registration advantage.

Conversely, the best large-population counties for Reynolds were Pottawattamie and Woodbury, which have relatively low numbers of college-educated adults.

Hubbell’s best counties had a younger population on the whole, with a smaller percentage of senior citizens.

In other respects, this table raises more questions than answers for me.

Any relevant questions or insights are welcome in this thread.

Top image: On left, the main Polk County administrative office building in Des Moines. On right, Davenport City Hall in Scott County.

City sidewalks, small-town sidewalks
Dressed in ‘lection day style
In the air there’s a feeling
of Caucus …

Yes, the crispness in the air … the shortening of days … the Black Friday sales … they can mean only one thing: Iowa caucus season is right around the corner.

A pro-Republican mailing to thousands of Warren County households last month was not only sleazy, but also unlawful.

The Iowa Ethics and Campaign Disclosure Board will investigate who paid to send a letter attacking Democratic State Representative Scott Ourth “to every mailbox in Iowa House district 26” and “what campaign finance laws were violated in the process.”

Three-term State Representative Todd Prichard became the new Iowa House minority leader today. Despite suffering a net loss of seats in the upper chamber, Senate Democrats opted last weekend not to change their leadership team.

“No U.S. metro area has larger social and economic disparities along racial lines than Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa,” wrote Samuel Stebbins and Evan Comen in 24/7 Wall St’s latest report on the country’s “worst cities for black Americans.” As in past years, most cities on the list are located in the Midwest.

In a landmark ruling five months ago, the Iowa Supreme Court held that a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions violates the rights to due process and equal protection under the Iowa Constitution.

This summer Governor Kim Reynolds replaced Bruce Zager, one of the justices who joined that 5-2 majority opinion. She will soon replace a second justice who concurred. Daryl Hecht announced today that he will resign from the Iowa Supreme Court in December in order “to commit all of his energy” to battling melanoma.