IOWA
State Profile
The following data and information about this state is taken from the 2006 Almanac of American Politics. The 2006 Almanac can be ordered online, or by phone at 1-800-356-4838.

State At A Glance  •  Key Elected Officials  •  Political History & Analysis

“Iowa is number one in pork, number one in corn, and number one in soybeans, but it is down near the bottom in population growth.”

At A Glance

• Size: 56,272 square miles
• Population in 2000: 2,926,324; 61.1% urban; 38.9% rural
• Population in 1990: 2,776,755
• Population Change: Up 5.4% 1990-2000; Down 4.7% 1980-1990
• Population Rank: 30th of 50; 1.0% of total U.S. population
• Most Populous Cities: Des Moines (196,093); Cedar Rapids (122,542); Davenport (97,512); Sioux (83,876); Waterloo (67,054)
• Registered Voters: 641,232 D (30.4%); 645,881 R (30.6%); 823,122 unaffiliated and minor parties (39.0%)
• State Senate: 25 R 25 D
• State House: 51 R 49 D
• State Legislative Term Limits: No

Key Elected Officials

• Gov. Tom Vilsack (D)
• Sen. Charles Grassley (R)
• Sen. Tom Harkin (D)
• Representatives: (4 R, 1 D):

Jim Nussle   (R-01) Jim Leach   (R-02)

Leonard Boswell   (D-03) Tom Latham   (R-04)

Steve King   (R-05)

About Iowa

As Americans were surging westward in the 1840s, Iowa was filling up with Yankee farmers and German immigrants, watching as wagon trains headed to the Oregon Trail and the Mormon thousands mustered by Brigham Young headed from the Mississippi across the rolling hills to Council Bluffs on the Missouri and then west. Iowa was a young state then, proud of its hundreds of schools and dozens of colleges, sending more than its share of young men back east to fight for the cause of the Union. After that war Iowans built a solid civilization based on farming, farm-machine manufacturing and meat processing that resisted the blandishments of William Jennings Bryan's populism and cheap money, and Iowa became one of the most solidly Republican states in the nation.

But starting around 1900, Iowa grew old. "If you build it, they will come" was the theme from the movie Field of Dreams, set in Iowa, and in the 19th century, Iowans built a model society. Yet for most of the 20th century very few people came. Iowa's commercial and financial center remained stuck in the railroad hub of Chicago, its economy failed to diversify and develop the dense manufacturing base of the Great Lakes states, and its young people started to move east or west to make their fortunes. Iowa's population, up from 674,000 in 1860 to 2.2 million in 1900, increased only slowly, and has not reached 3 million to this day: In 1900, Iowa had 11 congressional districts and California 7; now Iowa has 5 and California 53. Iowa's solid Capitol--a memorial to its Civil War dead--and its courthouses, its sturdy but mostly old housing stock, give testimony to Iowa's strengths but also bespeak its lack of dynamism. Even its great economic achievement--the development of high-tech, ever more productive, but also less labor-intensive agriculture--has made this a state that did not grow much. Iowa is number one in pork, number one in corn, and number one in soybeans, but it is down near the bottom in population growth.

Indeed, for much of the 20th century, Iowa has been a culturally and politically countercyclical state, headed in just the opposite direction of the rest of the nation--determinedly, with confidence in its own chipper rectitude, unembarrassedly out of step. In the industrial New Deal era, it stayed mostly agricultural and Republican, even as Des Moines radio announcer Ronald Reagan became an enthusiastic Roosevelt Democrat and headed to Hollywood. Iowa partook little of postwar economic growth. It was dovish during the Vietnam War and after. In the 1980s, as Reagan, by then a conservative Republican, became president, Iowans watched helplessly as farm prices and land values plummeted downward, farm implement factories closed and 5% of its citizens left; its population fell more than any other state except West Virginia. Self-pity became the dominant note of Iowa's politics, as voters sought protection from the vagaries of the market even as commercial real estate and stock prices boomed elsewhere. By 1988, once-Republican Iowa had become one of the most Democratic states, sending presidential caucus winner Dick Gephardt's politics solidly to the left and producing the second-highest percentage for Michael Dukakis in November.

In the 1990s, Iowa and the nation converged. If its economic rebellion against America's move toward free markets failed in the 1980s, its cultural qualms about America's move away from traditional values may have set an example for the rest of the country in the 1990s. For Iowa has managed to combine over the years steady habits and tolerance of diversity. The farm population continued to drop in the 1990s; from 1982 to 1997, the number of Iowans whose principal occupation was farming dropped from 86,000 to 56,000. Subsidies keep some farmers going, and farm prices boomed in 2004, but most of the money goes to a few large farms, and today many of Iowa's farmers are part-timers, with full-time jobs and just a little side income from the farm. In the 1990s, Iowa grew in other ways. Its high level of literacy and good work habits have produced white-collar and high-tech growth in and around its pleasant small cities, especially in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, even as many old factories have closed. The state's population fell 4.7% in the 1980s but grew by 5.4% in the 1990s, the biggest percentage increase since the 1910s. And if educated young Iowans still often leave the state, immigrants are coming in--Mexicans to work in the big new meatpacking factories, Serbian and Bosnian refugees who find jobs and stay. Iowa's main problem now is that it is getting older: Its over-65 population is expected to increase 47% over the next 20 years, while the number of children is projected to fall. No wonder that Governor Tom Vilsack held a party at New York's Tavern on the Green for ex-Iowans and urged them to come home. The recession of 2001 hit Iowa hard: The state lost 10,000 jobs, the Census Bureau estimated that it lost population and Vilsack and the state legislature struggled to pay for planned programs with lower-than-planned revenue.

Politically, Iowa has moved mostly in tandem with the nation since 1990. It voted twice for Bill Clinton and went for Al Gore by 4,144 votes in 2000 and for George W. Bush by 10,059 in 2004. It has reelected both its Republican and its Democratic senator; after 30 years of Republican governors, it elected a Democrat in 1998. After the 2004 election the two parties were tied 25-25 in the state Senate and Republicans had a 51-49 majority in the state House. Collectively these results indicate a sort of steady moderation, a desire to accept the verdict of the markets and to honor traditional values with some hedging on both counts. Iowa remains quirky in some respects. It is still probably one of the most dovish, isolationist-prone states, though very much aware of its role as an international exporter: It strongly supported NAFTA and normal trade relations with China (Mexicans eat lots of corn and Chinese lots of pork). It is thrift-minded, seeing a balanced budget more as a badge of moral rectitude than as a prudent economic policy. It pioneered legal riverboat gambling in 1989 and prepared to open more casinos in 2004, but also has a large anti-abortion movement. And it has its own traditional gatherings, which are often of political significance. One is the Iowa State Fair held every August on the east side of Des Moines, complete with the traditional 600-pound butter cow and, in 2004, a birthday cake and a barn carved in butter. And then there are the Iowa precinct caucuses held on a cold night in January in presidential years, the first occasion in which ordinary Americans decide who will be their president.