Small towns, rural areas and state legislatures

2018 votes for Iowa Governor, by county
Source: CNN. Used without permission.

The divide between successful and unsuccessful places--often oversimplified as "urban vs. rural"--has emerged as a major fault line in contemporary American politics, along with the ever-present racial divide. Where the economic outlook of a place is less than positive, voters--at least white voters--have turned to the Republican Party's anti-government and traditional values ethos, recently overlain with restraints on trade and immigration. (Whether the Republicans, led by the ever-improvisational President Donald J. Trump, will overplay their hand, remains to be seen. For now they are speaking to voters in these places as Democrats and internationally-minded urban elites seem unable to.)

This is reflected in Iowa's political ride this decade, from purple to red. It's a predominantly white state, where most voters live in economically stalled-to-struggling areas, and Republicans have dominated recent state elections.

Iowa has 99 counties, reflecting its past where most labor occurred on farms, and small towns across the state served as market centers for those farms. In this decade, and for the last several decades, most of those counties have lost population. (In the absence of easily-obtainable economic performance data, I use population change as an indicator of strength, assuming that successful places need more workers, and workers are attracted to successful places where they can find a better choice of jobs. Economic success often funds cultural vitality, which is also attractive to people, particularly younger workers.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau [with Governor Kim Reynolds's percentage of the two-party vote]:

• 70 of Iowa's 99 counties have lost population between 2010 and 2018 [60.1% of 426,605 votes]
• 11 counties gained marginally, less than 1 percent (Black Hawk, Boone, Cedar, Crawford, Jasper, Jones, Marion, Muscatine, Plymouth, Pottawattamie, Woodbury) [54.3% of 209,142 votes]
• 6 counties gained at least 1 percent, but less than 2.9 percent, half the national growth rate (Bremer, Buchanan, Clarke, Davis, Lyon, Washington) [60.9% of 40,246 votes]
• 5 counties gained at least 2.9 percent, but less than the U.S. growth rate of 5.8 percent (Dickinson, Dubuque, Madison, Scott, Sioux): one near Des Moines, two housing the central cities of Davenport and Dubuque, and two predominantly rural counties in northwest Iowa [54.4% of 140,523 votes]
• only 7 counties gained population faster than the nation as a whole (Dallas, Jefferson, Johnson, Linn, Polk, Story, Warren): four around Des Moines and Ames, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Fairfield... Fairfield?? [40.8% of 482,145 votes]

Republicans had a tough year nationally in 2018, and lost seats in the Iowa House, but actually increased their already-large majority in the Senate. So, this year, we once again have a legislature and a governor whose support came predominantly from less successful places. One might assume, then, the state would be pursuing policies to help those economies.

One would be wrong. Here is what the Iowa legislature achieved in the 2019 session, which ran from January to April (Gottburg 2019, Rodriguez and Opsahl 2019):

• legalizing betting on sports events at casinos
• legalizing growing hemp and loosening restrictions on medical marijuana
• adding the right of individual gun ownership to the Iowa constitutions, and subjecting any restrictions to "strict scrutiny"
• city or county property tax increases above 2 percent will require a 2/3 vote
• prohibiting use of Medicaid funding for sex-reassignment surgery
• barring Planned Parenthood from receiving federal sex education funding
• requiring public college and university campuses to adopt "free speech" policies
• giving the Governor greater influence on judicial selection
• trespassing penalties for undercover investigations of farms
• creation of children's mental health system
• $15 million for flood recovery in western Iowa

Only the last two conceivably could help distressed people in small towns and rural areas, and one of those is a response to a short-term emergency. The rest is nutrition-free candy, mostly for their ideological allies, many of whom admittedly live in small towns and rural areas. I understand a lot of people love guns, and hate transgender people, Planned Parenthood, college faculty and administration, and "liberal" judges, but shouldn't they and their elected representatives also be pursuing constructive solutions to actual problems?

Nationally, a study by FiveThirtyEight found similar outcomes in other states with unified Republican governments (Bacon 2019). Those 22 state legislatures pushed looser gun laws, restrictions on "sanctuary" cities, restrictions on lower governments' abilities to divest from Israel, restrictions on abortion, "right-to-work" laws weakening labor unions, and work requirements for Medicaid recipients. All crowd-pleasing candy, nothing nutritious to help places grow.

No legislature, however well-intentioned, can bring back the 1950s, or whatever form of paradise white Iowans want to think the 1950s were. The future of the American economy is going to be predominantly metropolitan, although we can argue whether the locus of the action will continue the move back to central cities begun in the middle of the last decade (Frey 2019, Florida 2019, Hurley 2018). For example, the State of Arizona, which is growing faster than the U.S. as a whole, is seeing most of that growth near Phoenix and Tucson, and shrinkage elsewhere.

We also know our economic future is going to be primarily service-driven, not centered on farm work or manufacturing or resource extraction. Employment will be less stable, and whatever we do will have to accommodate the realities of diversity and climate change.

Successful places are those that have adapted to the post-industrial economy, but the cost of living, and the cost of doing business, in places like Seattle, San Francisco and Boston--and Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York--are becoming prohibitive, despite their attractions. Smaller places and their environs can position themselves to take advantage of this, and to be significant players in the economic future. BUT! this requires recognizing the realities of the 21st century, and enhancing the assets that are already in place, not playing to anti-elite resentments and culture wars nostalgia.


SOURCES
Perry Bacon, "What Republicans and Democrats are Doing in the States Where They Have Total Power," FiveThirtyEight, 28 May 2019
Woody Gottburg, "Iowa Legislature Wraps Up 2019 Session," KSCJ, 29 April 2019
Barbara Rodriguez and Robin Opsahl, "Iowa Lawmakers Have Adjourned for the Year. Here's What You Need to Know About the 2019 Session," Des Moines Register, 27 April 2019

SEE ALSO:
"Iowa Losing Millennials, Needs Workers," 14 February 2019
"What is the Future of Iowa's Small Towns?" 3 July 2018