I moved to the purple state of Iowa in 2007. It had a Democratic governor and an ideologically diverse state legislature and political discourse. And it soon became the launching pad for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, our first black president.

Iowa was never perfect. My politics always sat well to the left of anyone who held office in 2007. But having moved here from Indiana, I found it a breath of fresh air. Compared to Indiana’s four decade long decline into hard conservatism, Iowa practically felt like California.

It doesn’t feel like California now. Looking back two decades later, I have to ask: what happened?

Iowa’s Decline

Plenty of people have tried to explain Iowa’s decline. And they’ve given no shortage of answers.

Partisan realignment stands at the center of many of these answers. They especially cite alignment around education and race. Combined with the deep bench of Christian nationalists in the northwest part of the state, right-wingers now form a semi-permanent majority.

On top of this, Democrats haven’t done a good job responding. They’ve split into two factions, both of which most Iowans find deeply unappealing. Mainstream Democrats pander to well-off fiscal conservatives while progressives close ranks around the highly educated and the issues they (and mostly only they) care about.

Pretty much no Iowa Democrats seem interested in building a social democratic majority coalition.

What’s it Like?

But I digress. As fun and interesting as it might be to explain Iowa’s decline, I’d rather describe it. What does it feel like to live through a state two decades into a long-term slide?

At the state level, it sucks. We’re obviously bleeding both people and ideas. Smart, interesting people don’t enjoy our state anymore. And they’re leaving it. We’re systematically worsening our systems of education and our cultural amenities.

But the local level looks a lot different. It’s not just that Iowa City stands out as an exception to Iowa’s decline, we’re actively moving in the other direction. As Iowa becomes more regressive, we get less regressive. And those two things, I think, are connected.

Here’s one interesting manifestation in terms of our politics. As the range of electable candidates at the state level moves to the right, the range of electable candidates in Iowa City moves to the left. And the kinds of cultural amenities we might have in Iowa City have also changed for the better. Great things we couldn’t have had in 2007 are things we now can have.

And so, I have mixed thoughts about all of it. The state of Iowa is clearly much worse in 2026 than it was in 2007. But Iowa City is clearly better.

It would be nice if our state didn’t need to flush itself down the shitter in order for that to happen.

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