Democrats took control of the U.S. House of Representatives by taking upper-middle-class suburban districts from Republicans. But the most interesting result might have been a narrow Republican win in a district the incumbent had previously carried by 20 points.
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, almost lost on Tuesday, posting barely 50 percent as of early Wednesday morning.
More interesting is where he lost votes. Namely, the rural religious right went lukewarm on King, still preferring him, but with lower turnout and plenty of defections to the Democratic nominee, J.D. Scholten. The result was a race far tighter than anyone expected.
But it wasn’t totally unforeseeable. If you looked closely at the different types of rural precincts in Iowa, and how they responded to Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP, you could have anticipated King’s troubles. The same counties that rejected Trump in the caucuses, and that slightly blanched at him in the general election, were the Republican counties that cooled on King.
Rural voters in Iowa in 2008 and 2012 caucuses were described as the “evangelical vote,” as they caucused for the likes of Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney. It turned out that under the surface, there were two different species of “rural vote” — the populist vote, and the religious right vote.
This distinction became clear in the 2016 caucuses. Compare rural counties like Fremont in the Southwest corner of the state, where Trump exceeded 40 percent, to just-as-rural counties like Sioux, near the northwest corner, where Trump barely hit 10 percent in the caucuses.
What’s the difference? Mostly, it’s about church. In Fremont, a desert of social capital, Memorial Baptist Church closed in 2013, Locust Grove Methodist announced in 2014 it was shutting down, and in 2016, Norwich United Methodist Church would follow suit.
Meanwhile, Sioux County seems overflowing with churches. “There are 19 of them in this town,” Sioux County transplant Jordan Helming told me of Sioux Center, “a town of 7,000 has 19 churches.” All in all, about 85 percent of the county are active Christians, according to the Association of Research Data Archives, compared to 50 percent of the nation adhering to any religion.
When I visited Sioux County before the 2016 caucuses, I found warm attitudes toward refugees and upturned noses toward Trump. Helming said the folks of Sioux County “vote Right and live Left.” What he really meant was that the Christianity of this Dutch Reformed place translated into a communitarianism.
This might explain why Democrat J.D. Scholten, with his Dutch ancestry and his explicitly Christian campaign message, came within 5,000 votes statewide of a 8-term incumbent who typically posts margins 10 times that size. Scholten surged after King’s decision to associate with a white nationalist in Canada and the Freedom Party in Austria, and otherwise expressed what sounded a lot like racist sentiments.
In Sioux County, for instance, King lost 2,400 net votes — about 16 percentage points — compared with the last midterm election in 2014. King underperformed Republican governor Kim Reynolds (who barely won statewide) by 13 points, or 2,000 votes, in Sioux County.
Neighboring Lyon County, the second-Dutchest county in the state, saw Scholten more than double the vote total of his 2014 Democratic counterpart, and outperform the Democratic gubernatorial candidate by 10 points.
Hancock County was another conservative county that rejected Trump in the caucuses. There, King’s margin was nearly 1,600 votes in 2014, and Reynolds’ margin was 1,800 votes on Tuesday. But King couldn’t even post a 1,000-vote margin this year. Hancock is heavily Norwegian, packed to the gills with evangelical Lutherans, and has the most associations and organizations per capita in the state, according to a Penn State analysis of social capital. Winnebago is even more Norwegian and more evangelical Lutheran. King won Winnebago by about 500 votes in 2014, and by about 50 votes this year, compared to Reynolds nearly 1,000-vote win.
Trumpiness, in other words, is an asset in many parts of rural America, but not the parts where churches are most packed.
This tells us something about the Trump era realignment of politics. The populists are tacking to Trump. The elites are tacking to the Democrats. The conservative Christians who go to church are finding themselves in an awkward middle.
