Trump In Danger Of Losing Swing State In 2020: report

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The 2020 presidential election just keeps getting closer, and attention is turning to how the situation has changed since 2016. A new report in the Associated Press has outlined signs that in 2020, President Donald Trump might not just lose the most high profile Midwestern swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan. He might also lose previously solid Republican states like the highlight of the AP piece: Iowa. Trump’s almost ten percent leading margin in the state in 2016 was the largest of any Republican presidential candidate since Reagan, but in the time since, Democratic voter registrations have spiked and they’ve successfully flipped two Congressional seats out of Republican hands.

Polling in the state gives Trump a leading margin over possible general election challenger Joe Biden of just about 2.5 percent — which is hardly insurmountable. In the same 2018 midterm elections in which Democrats ousted two Republican members of Congress, more votes overall went to Democrats than Republicans. In those same elections, Democrats flipped back about half of the counties that Trump had flipped following previous victories for Obama in those places. A full 14 of the 31 counties that went to Obama in 2008 and then Trump in 2016 went back to Democrats in 2018.

The state’s former governor Tom Vilsack — the state’s only two-term Democratic governor in the last fifty years — commented:

‘They’ve gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back. This is an actual correction.’

Veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link added:

‘We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans. I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.’

Even longtime Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data analyst John Stineman admitted:

‘I think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state. I believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.’

In Dallas County, which is right outside the state capitol of Des Moines, Democratic registrations have spiked a full 15 percent since 2016 alone, while Republican registrations spiked by just two percent — and with a concurrent 20 percent increase in independent registrations, unaffiliated voters now outnumber Republicans there.

The changes in electoral outcomes — and they’ve been dramatic in the state, which went to Al Gore in 2000 and then George W. Bush in 2004, among other shifts — have most recently followed demographic changes like dramatic increases in the portion of college educated voters in urban and suburban areas. Increases in college education have historically indicated increases in Democratic votes, and since 2000, “the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural area.” In numbers, the portion of urban and suburban voters with a college degree grew from 25 percent to about 33 percent over that time period, while the increase was only two percent for rural voters.

Iowa has just six electoral votes, but the state swinging back to Democrats in 2020 could indicate other shifts on the horizon. Trump won in 2016 because of thin margins in key Midwestern states that gave him the electoral votes needed to overcome his overall popular vote loss.