MISSOURI
The double landlocked state home to the Kansas City Chiefs, St. Louis Cardinals, the mighty Mississippi River, and Senator Josh Hawley (plus his fist), Missouri has a storied history as our nation’s Gateway to the West. In recent years, the Show Me State has voted reliably Republican, but throughout the 90s and 2000s it was a hotly contested swing state, there being no better example of this than in 2008, when Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain just barely won the state, beating out Democrat Barack Obama 49.4% to 49.3%.
In the last 16 years, however, Missouri has shifted significantly towards the right. In 2020, Donald Trump won the state with 56.8% of the vote, an identical percentage to his 2016 run and three points higher than Mitt Romney did in 2012. And on a statewide level, Missouri has a Republican Governor and Legislature, as well as two Republican Senators and six Republican House Members. So, does this seemingly solid red state have any chance to fall to Democrat Kamala Harris this November?
Trump’s extremely strong support from rural voters has been his key to success, and in Missouri, this has been no different. A majority of residents voted for Democrat Joe Biden in just three of Missouri’s 114 counties; Trump won everywhere but Jackson County (Kansas City), Boone County (Columbia), and St. Louis County.
And in the 2022 midterms, the GOP showed off their strength with voters outside Missouri’s urban centers. In the 6th congressional district, which represents the rural upper third of the state, Republican House Member Sam Graves cruised to reelection against Democratic challenger Henry Martin with 70.3% of the vote, 3.2 points higher than his 2020 run. In this last election, Republicans even garnered greater support in Missouri’s 1st congressional district (the city of St. Louis and its suburbs), with Republican Andrew Jones finishing a distant second to Democrat Incumbent Cori Bush, but nevertheless receiving 24.3% of the vote, 5.3 points higher than the GOP candidate two years prior.
Even though Republicans may be performing better in this Midwestern state, Trump’s potential victory is complicated by the issue of abortion. After the overturning of Roe v. Wade back in 2022, Missouri was the first state in the country to ban the practice. And although this ban occurred prior to the 2022 midterm elections, which the GOP still made significant improvements in, this November things are different; an abortion referendum is on the ballot in the state of Missouri. This prospective amendment to the state’s constitution protecting the right to an abortion is likely to propel reluctant voters, especially women, to the polls, who will almost certainly vote blue.
And considering a referendum in the similarly right-leaning state of Kentucky failed to outlaw abortion in its constitution, being voted down 52.4% to 47.7%, it’s a definite possibility that voters in Missouri will choose to protect the right to an abortion in their own constitution.
Based on all these factors, we predict that Donald Trump will win Missouri by a slightly greater margin than in 2020. Although this abortion referendum may hurt his chances for big gains in the state, GOP support from rural voters will likely offset this and still boost his numbers in the state.
IOWA
Perhaps the most consistently inconsistent state, Iowa has voted for the Democrat Presidential Candidate in 6 of the last 12 elections and for the Republican in the other 6. Most recently in 2020, Iowans voted for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Joe Biden, 53.1% to 44.9%. But while Iowa is a moderately Republican-leaning state today, just 12 years ago it was a relatively Democrat-leaning state.
Comparing Iowa’s 2012 Presidential elections results, when the state went blue for Barack Obama, to its neighbors of Wisconsin and Minnesota (two other quintessential Midwestern swing states), we see that all three of them voted for Obama by within a percent, Iowa with 52%, Wisconsin with 52.8%, and Minnesota with 52.7%. But just four years later when Democrat Hillary Clinton ran against Republican Donald Trump, she received just 41.7%, 46.5%, and 46.4% of the vote in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, respectively. And while Clinton did end up winning Minnesota by 1.52 points, she barely lost Wisconsin by just 0.77 points and was absolutely blown out in Iowa by 9.41 points.
Donald Trump’s substantial 2016 victory in Iowa raises the question: Why has the state shifted so far to the right in the last decade? Iowa’s shift towards the Republican party was not actually as abrupt as you may have expected. In fact, in all four of the most recent presidential elections, Republicans increased their share of Iowa’s vote every time, going from 44.4% in 2008 to 53.1% in 2020. But the most significant increase did occur in 2016, when Donald Trump jumped 5 points from Mitt Romney’s performance four years prior.
There is a clear trend in this shift: Iowa’s urban centers became slightly more liberal, while its rural areas became significantly more conservative. And while during this time period states with extremely urban populations, like California and Massachusetts, had a statewide shift towards the left, since Iowa is one of the most rural states in the nation, they unsurprisingly moved in the opposite direction; this is confirmed by a look at Iowa’s county results. Polk County, the most populated in the state and home to the capital Des Moines, went 56.4% for Obama in 2012 and 56.7% for Biden in 2020, a Democrat gain of 0.3 points. On the other hand, Adams County, the least populated in the state, went 51.1% for Romney in 2012 and an astounding 71% for Trump in 2020, a Republican gain of 19.9 points. And while Adams County has less than 1% of Polk County’s population, only 6 of Iowa’s 99 counties went blue in 2020; the remaining 93 red counties more than made up for their smaller populations by sheer strength in numbers.
Now that Iowa is no longer considered a swing state, there is an absence of polling in the state, making it hard to predict whether Democrat Kamala Harris will be able to gain ground for the Democrats this election. However, based on Trump’s consistently growing support with rural Iowans, we predict that the former President will carry the state by a slightly greater margin than he did four years prior.
KANSAS
Located at the center of the contiguous United States, in the heart of the Great Plains, Kansas is probably best known as Dorothy’s home in The Wizard of Oz, but there’s much more to the state than a classic movie. Kansas entered the Union as the 34th state, two months before the outbreak of the Civil War. During its years as a territory, from 1854-1859, the region was rocked by skirmishes between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, a conflict known as Bleeding Kansas. And while Kansas did become a free state, this conflict significantly increased tensions between Northern and Southern states and was a precursor to the Civil War.
Today, Kansans are relatively conservative on average; although they elected a Democrat governor in 2018, they’ve voted for the Republican candidate for President in every election since 1940, discounting LBJ’s landslide 1964 victory. In 2020, Donald Trump carried Kansas with 56.1% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 41.5%, a margin of 14.6 points. And although this substantial margin places the state into the reliably Republican category, it was significantly smaller than back in 2016, when Trump won Kansas by 20.6 points.
So, how can we explain this massive margin decrease in the state? And will Kamala Harris have a shot at closing this gap even further, winning Kansas this November? Joe Biden’s exemplary performance in the Sunflower State came down to a single region: Johnson County. A part of the Kansas City metro, Johnson County is largely suburban, and in recent years, Donald Trump has struggled to attract this group of voters.
Comparing the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections in Johnson, which is the most populated county in the state, we see a significant decline for Trump; he narrowly won the area in 2016 by 2.7 points but lost it to Biden four years later by a sizable margin of 8.3 points. To put it simply, Harris’ path to victory runs right through this county.
While it’s unlikely that Trump can win these suburban areas at the rate he did eight years ago, the 2022 midterm elections do show some signs of hope for Republicans. Although GOP House candidates performed flat, receiving 56.9% of the vote (a quarter point lower than in 2020), in Kansas’ Senate election, Republican incumbent Jerry Moran easily won reelection with 60% of the vote. And in the extremely important Johnson County, he won a respectable 48% of the vote, but still lost to his Democratic challenger Mark Holland by 1.3 points.
So, despite Kansas certainly shifting closer to the center, Moran’s victory shows there’s still some Republican might in the state. We predict that Donald Trump will win Kansas by a greater margin than in 2020. Biden’s amazing performance in the state four years ago is unlikely to be replicated by Kamala Harris this time around. If the former President is able to even come close to matching Senator Moran’s 1.3-point deficit in Johnson County back in 2022, he can expect big gains.
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