Iowa has become an increasingly Republican state since 2012. Here are some of the stories behind that conservative shift

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

Tami Haught has spent decades of her life on political advocacy.

Diagnosed with HIV/AIDS 33 years ago, she dedicated many weeks at the Iowa Capitol starting in 2005, urging lawmakers to reform HIV criminalization laws and allocate more funding toward a program that ensures access to medications for those with HIV/AIDS who are uninsured and underinsured.

Sitting in the Northeast Iowa Welcome Center entrance on Aug. 8 in Nashua, the town where Haught lives, she pointed to poster boards packed with photos of her at the Iowa Capitol alongside other advocates for her organization, the Community HIV and Hepatitis Advocates of Iowa Network.

She held up framed photos of her three grandchildren surrounded by signatures from Democratic and Republican presidential candidates she followed on the caucus trails, including President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden.

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Haught has advocated for other issues besides HIV/AIDS funding. She’s been active in her county Democratic Party in Chickasaw County and has backed Democratic causes in pushing for civil rights, housing, health care and livable wages for decades. She believes the Democratic Party is the only one fighting for her access to health care.

“Obviously, I'm a Democrat, because … my life literally depends on who's in power … and we've never been more under attack than we are right now of losing everything,” Haught said.

Alongside her for most of her political advocacy was her son, Adrian Haught, who is now 28.

Adrian remembers tagging along with his mom for these events. He lobbied frequently in Des Moines, traveled to Washington, D.C. twice to talk to lawmakers on Capitol Hill and saw Katy Perry perform in 2015 when she was campaigning for Hillary Clinton.

“There was one point in my life where I knew the Des Moines Capitol like the back of my hand,” Adrian said. “I've seen a lot of different things and met a lot of different people, and I have respect for everybody, no matter what their view is.”

Tami raised Adrian to be a Democrat. Adrian voted for Clinton in his first election alongside his mother and grandmother.

But in the past two presidential elections, the mother and son split on their top-of-the-ballot choice: Haught stuck with the Democrats while Adrian voted for Trump.

For Adrian, who entered the workforce, married and started a family on a single income after high school, Trump talked about affordability, returning domestic manufacturing to the United States and seemed to stand up for American blue-collar workers. At job sites, the people he worked with were Trump supporters more often than not. Gradually, Adrian strayed from the Democrats.

Adrian and Tami don’t talk about politics anymore. They try to stay away from the topic to avoid heated arguments. Tami and Adrian are still in each other’s lives, but the main focus is on Adrian’s three kids.

This rift isn’t exclusive to Tami and Adrian. Since 2016, thousands of Iowans have shifted away from the Democratic Party as the state morphed from a consistent shade of purple to a ruby red, Republican stronghold.

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.

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

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.

“Looking at how Trump, over the last three cycles, has not just maintained, but expanded his footprint is pretty jaw-dropping,” Green said. “2016 was really viewed as a change election, to a lot of people, that it was time to do something different, that traditional politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, had left a lot of people behind, particularly folks that lived in more rural counties in the state … those counties that had been key linchpin counties for Democrats to win if they were going to win statewide.”

The shift had political scientists and election forecasters scratching their heads. It’s led Democrats to conduct autopsies on where their footing in rural communities fell flat. And it’s caused changes in the political climate that Iowans can see and feel in their neighborhoods, churches and workplaces.

Affordability became prominent issue

Adrian’s shift to Trump was gradual. Once out from under the roof of his family, where he would sit and watch the news with his mom and grandmother every day at 5 p.m., he began to rely more on his personal experiences to shape his political beliefs.

“Everybody said the world was going to come to an end the day after he (Trump) was elected, and I walk outside the next day, I'm like, ‘Well, the world didn't blow up,' so I guess something didn't go wrong,” Adrian said.

Now, Adrian is in his third year of working as an operations shift lead for Shell Rock Soy Processing, a company in Butler County that crushes soybeans to extract oil for biodiesel.

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Once he and his wife got married and started having kids on a single income, Adrian said affordability of gas, groceries, and rent continued to grow more important to him. He bought a house in the winter of 2021, when interest rates hit record lows.

Overall, he believes he was better off financially when Trump was in office.

“I don't really remember the specific time when my mind just switched and I decided Trump was definitely better, but I know just watching the gas prices, that was nice,” Adrian said. “Having my kids, knowing I had an extra responsibility, so I had to think, you know what? How can I provide them with the best life possible?”

Many voters in Chickasaw County, where Adrian was raised, moved in the same direction politically. Obama won the county of about 12,000 people by 11 percentage points in 2012. Since then, the county has voted for Trump in greater margins each election: by 22 points in 2016, 31 points in 2020, and 36 points in 2024. In 12 years, the county swung 47.98 points toward Republicans in presidential elections.

Statewide, Iowa voted by close to 6 percentage points for Obama in 2012, then swung to Trump, who won by 9 points in 2016, 8 points in 2020, and 13 points in 2024.

Green says this drastic shift from Obama to Trump was partially spurred by Iowans’ feelings toward Obama’s two terms in office. He said many felt like the former president didn’t deliver on the promises he made in his prior campaigns.

“There were a lot of Iowa voters who had voted for him (Obama) once or twice, and they continued to see the decline of their rural communities. They'd continued to see jobs disappearing,” Green said. “So when this outsider came in, who was a different type of politician, I think a lot of those folks looked at that and said, ‘It's time to try something different’.”

Howard County had biggest political shift

Howard County, a rural county of about 9,300 sandwiched between Chickasaw County to the south and Minnesota to the north, experienced the largest shift of any county in the state, swinging 52.45 percentage points toward Republicans in presidential elections over the last 12 years.

Neil Schaffer, chair of the Howard County Republican Party, has seen this change firsthand. In 2016, Schaffer wasn’t Trump’s biggest fan.

“I think there were 17 candidates running in 2016, and I think Donald was my 17th candidate,” Schaffer said.

But during his first term in office, the president grew on Schaffer. He said Trump’s appeal to others in the county could be his alignment with Iowa’s “independent streak,” a quality he saw in other lawmakers, including Obama, former Democratic U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin and Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley.

“There was something different about him (Trump), and I think people in the county recognized that he was not a traditional Republican candidate, just not a traditional politician,” Schaffer said. “We were just getting tired of the same old, same old. Every election, nothing ever seemed to change.”

Mike Wilgenbusch, who lives outside of Lime Springs in Howard County, feels the same way as Schaffer. He voted reluctantly for Trump in 2016 because he “wasn’t going to vote for Hillary.” By the end of Trump’s four years in office, however, he was happy with the president’s work, such as enacting the 2017 tax cuts and cracking down on illegal immigration.

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Wilgenbusch moved back to Iowa 13 years ago to be near family and to return to small-town life after living in Florida and Colorado. Wilgenbusch said he voted for Obama in 2008 at the urging of his parents. He was in his late 20s and didn’t keep track of politics at the time. He didn’t vote in 2012.

Then, in 2015, he started a construction business.

While Trump was in office, Wilgenbusch said, “Every month, I felt like I had more money in my accounts. Business was good, people were spending more money.”

He voted for Trump again in 2020 and 2024.

‘It’s tense and you can feel it’: Political polarization in Iowa’s communities

Warren Crouch, 68, was born and raised in Maquoketa, which sits on the southern side of Jackson County. He’s lived outside the county during periods of his life, but eventually moved back.

Crouch, who had a career in public works and wastewater treatment before retiring, consistently voted for Democrats in the last few presidential elections, but he describes himself as an independent.

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His mother was a Republican who made multiple trips to Des Moines for party conventions. And political party allegiance looks different between his family members.

Today, Crouch lives in Bellevue, roughly 25 minutes away from his hometown. He said Jackson County has seen few changes since he was younger.

“We're still little town America, which is nice,” Crouch said. “God forbid, whatever happens, meteor strike or whatever, we're gonna probably be that way. But it's a fun place to raise a family. It’s quiet.”

One change Crouch noticed started to take place in 2016 when Trump was elected. Rifts began to form between him and people he’s known for most of his life. Old classmates stopped talking to him because he voted for Democrats.

“Donald was a pot stirrer, and he really got ‘er boiling,” Crouch said. “People just take things right now and they just hold on to it. Everything's a grudge. It's personal. Everything's personal.

“It's tense, and you can feel it.”

It isn’t just Crouch’s relationships with people he knows in the county that have changed significantly in the last 12 years.

Jackson County went to Obama by nearly 17 percentage points in 2012. Since then, it has swung roughly 49 percentage points toward Republicans, with Trump picking it up by 32.33 points in 2024.

This political polarization Crouch sees in Jackson County has increased across the country since 2016.

According to a 2024 American Psychiatric Association study, 41 percent of Americans said they have argued with a family member about a controversial issue and one in five have become estranged from family members over political views.

Kedron Bardwell, a political science professor at Simpson College, said social polarization, where disagreements on political views filter down into relationships with family, friends and neighbors, is on the rise across the country. He said increased social media use and the continued loss of identities, including religion and occupation, primarily contribute to this trend.

Partisan issues seep into schools, neighborhoods

“They're taking these partisan polarization issues, and they're bringing them down to the school, neighborhood, friendship, family levels at times, and actually creating those divisions there where they may not have existed before,” Bardwell said. “They could still get along with the uncle that had very different views. But now they may not talk because it's gotten so heated.”

Unlike other families she knows who don’t talk anymore due to politics, Tami said she and Adrian still get together. Since Trump first won in 2016, Tami cut anyone out of her life who supports him, except for her son.

“It's hard to find a middle, my son and I, we just don't talk about anything like that. We talk about my grandkids because we can't talk politics because it would end badly, and I love my son, I love my grandkids,” Tami said. “That's what I've heard with so many families, is this is tearing families apart because we are so polarized, and there isn't a middle ground.”

While she still is racking her mind about why Adrian, who was raised in a Democratic household, went on to support Trump, Tami said she tried to focus on her grandchildren instead.

And Adrian said he does everything he can to avoid talking politics, both because his wife hates it and he doesn’t want his kids to see family arguments.

“We've had our falling outs before with that … we just stay away from that topic. And we found that it's best if it doesn't get brought up at family holidays or anything like that, because it just results in somebody getting mad,” Adrian said.

Adrian said his family still is able to get along when discussions about politics are taken off the table, but he’s seen other families who weren’t able to do the same thing.

“I've heard a lot of cases where people won't go see their families because of the difference,” Adrian said. “We’ve kind of come to the conclusion, let's just not talk about it, and everything's fine … some families can't get past that, but it's either you see your family or you don't, that's what it ultimately comes down to.”

'(Democrats) want to give people everything'

The number of Republican registered voters has steadily grown in Iowa in the past 12 years while the number of Democrats has shrunk.

In December 2012, the state had about 636,000 active registered Democrats, 640,000 Republicans, and 722,000 independents.

Fast forward 12 years. In December 2024 there were about 514,000 active registered Democrats, compared to about 704,000 Republicans and about 558,000 independents.

Nationally, Democrats have lost ground to Republicans in every state that keeps track of party status, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Russ Stevenson, who’s lived on a farm near Lime Springs for 54 years, said he’s steadily soured on the Democratic Party, even for locals who run for office.

“I used to 20 or 30 years ago, I’d go down the ballot and I said I think this guy is the guy I want in there,” Stevenson said. “Back and forth, Democrat and Republican. Lately, I’ve been so down on Democrats, I don’t want to vote for a Democrat.”

Why is he so down on Democrats?

“We’ve had to work for everything we get and they want to give people everything,” Russ said.

It’s the national brand, not necessarily the local candidates, he doesn’t like.

“I may be throwing some of them in the wrong basket,” Stevenson said. “But I can’t bring myself to vote over in that column.”

Trade with China is especially top of mind for the farmer.

“He’s trying to work with China,” Russ said of Trump. “I don’t know if it’ll work or it won’t work. We need foreign markets. We can’t survive without it, but we can’t let them beat us up either. They have to be fair.

Adrian Haught found that life didn’t end when Trump was elected in 2016. Likewise, he believes Democrats’ claims that Trump will destroy democracy or dismantle the health care system are overblown.

Adrian’s mother, Tami, can’t live without her HIV medication, which she receives under the federal, bipartisan, Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program AIDS Drug Assistance Program for low-income people with HIV with limited or no health insurance. Tami watched and worried as the Trump administration froze spending, dismantled USAID, and canceled grants, which impacted international efforts to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS.

Just a few months before Adrian was born, in 1996, Tami watched her husband die before medications were available.

“I know what that death looks like, and I don’t want it. I don’t want to have to watch my family watch me die,” Tami said.

Adrian won’t let it happen, regardless of who is in power.

“She knows that, well, maybe I haven't told her, but if it ever came down to it, and she couldn't get her medicine, more than likely, me and my family would end up back moving in with her,” Adrian said. “And we'd get her medication paid for somehow, some way. She'd always have her medication. I wouldn't care what it would take.”