A way of life is eroding as small towns hemorrhage younger residents, a potent but unpredictable undercurrent in a closely fought Senate race.
Iowa's landscape has been changing, giving rise to sights like wind turbines in a cornfield outside Blairsburg to go along with standbys like the grain silos in Laurens. The changes have had an impact on Laurens-Marathon High School, where shrinking enrollment forced a switch to an eight-on-eight football team, instead of the typical 11 players per side. Photographs by Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Iowa's landscape has been changing, giving rise to sights like wind turbines in a cornfield outside Blairsburg to go along with standbys like the grain silos in Laurens. The changes have had an impact on Laurens-Marathon High School, where shrinking enrollment forced a switch to an eight-on-eight football team, instead of the typical 11 players per side. Photographs by Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Iowa's landscape has been changing, giving rise to sights like wind turbines in a cornfield outside Blairsburg. Photograph by Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
LAURENS, Iowa — Pocahontas is running out of students. Public school enrollment in this corn-blanketed county in northern Iowa has plummeted 32 percent over the past decade as the population steadily shrinks. Schools have merged, classes have combined, and sports teams have consolidated, wiping out generations of tradition and rivalry.
As Joe Kramer, a school superintendent in the county, sifted through the cruel math of his latest casualty (a girls’ varsity basketball program), he wore the weary look of an overbooked funeral director.
“It’s a struggle for a community to make decisions like this,” he said. “It’s so much a part of our identity.”
Two hours south, Dallas County faces a very different problem: It is running out of schools. With the population swelling, in what used to be farmland ringing Des Moines, enrollment in its largest district has doubled over the same 10 years. As soon as a gleaming new high school is completed, construction on another begins.
The hard conversations here, said Dave J. Wilkerson, the local superintendent, are telling parents that their children’s schools have become overcrowded.
“I apologize that we will have to send your children off to a new, state-of-the-art school,” he said. “I would rather be dealing with this challenge than with what Pocahontas has.”
Iowa, the quintessence of heartland America, is undergoing an economic transformation that is challenging its rural character — and, inevitably, its political order.
As Iowans prepare to elect a new United States senator for the first time in three decades, the scale at which people and power have shifted from its rural towns to its urban areas is emerging as a potent but unpredictable undercurrent in the excruciatingly close race, offering opportunity and risk for both sides.
The state’s once ubiquitous farms are supporting fewer workers, the towns built around them are hemorrhaging younger residents, and a way of life eroding for decades is approaching a denouement. Farm fields are yielding to the new headquarters of banks, insurance companies and health care providers, whose rapid expansion is luring waves of Iowans to cities and suburbs, and contributing to the state’s enviable 4.5 percent unemployment rate.
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In jarring and telling tableaus, new housing subdivisions, with names like Stone Prairie and Walnut Creek Estates, are rising up in the Republican precincts west of Des Moines and downtown office buildings in the Democratic-leaning state capital are being remade into loft-style apartments. When researchers at Iowa State University studied population trends between 2000 and 2013, they found that the state’s metropolitan areas had grown by 13.3 percent. The population of communities outside those urban areas fell by 3.6 percent, a gap that far outstrips the rest of the Midwest.
Those changes have turned Iowa’s older, Republican precincts even redder and its younger, Democratic districts even bluer, while giving rise to suburbs whose politics can be harder to categorize — a mixture of millennial generation religious conservatives, baby boomer libertarians and Generation X liberals.
Such places “are not red state or a blue state. There are a lot of pastels in there,” said David A. Yepsen, the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University and former political writer for The Des Moines Register.
The Republican Senate nominee, Joni Ernst, who is trying to become Iowa’s first woman elected to Congress, has appealed to conservative rural voters, portraying herself as a hog-castrating, gun-firing daughter of Iowa’s agricultural roots. The Democrat, Bruce Braley, a fourth-term representative, has embraced a more urban-friendly agenda, speaking out forcefully on climate change, advocating a higher minimum wage and backing same-sex marriage, which the Iowa Supreme Court legalized in 2009. In the campaign’s highest-profile blunder, Mr. Braley was caught on tape belittling Iowa’s senior senator, Charles E. Grassley, a Republican who would become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee if his party won the majority, as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.” He later apologized.
The potency of that urban-rural divide was captured in a Des Moines Register poll in September. It showed that Ms. Ernst had built a nearly 4-to-1 advantage over Mr. Braley among rural voters, which Ms. Ernst underscored in a debate by questioning whether Mr. Braley had forsworn his rural roots.
Mr. Braley shot back: “I have not forgotten my rural values.”
No matter what the outcome, it is clear that Iowa, eternally satirized for monochromatic, pitchfork simplicity in “American Gothic,” is a swing state grappling with changes that defy long-held assumptions. Its farmers are emerging as leaders in sustainable energy, its rural towns are becoming magnets for Latinos, and its cities laboratories for high-tech start-ups.
Senator Tom Harkin, the Democrat whose retirement sparked this year’s race, said the election would turn on which candidate acknowledged the new landscape.
“There is this ideal of Iowa,” he said. Those who have left its farmlands “aren’t too far removed from those small towns.”
But, he added, “they know they are not going back there.”
Rural Collapse
John Stumpf is not going back.
A generation ago, Treasure Chest, the consignment business his grandmother operates on the forlorn retail strip in Laurens, in western Pocahontas County, would have passed unthinkingly into his hands. Now business is agonizingly slow, and Mr. Stumpf, a 21-year-old film major at the University of Iowa, said small-town living ill suited him.
“There is nothing for me here,” he said, sitting in the store’s stockroom as his grandmother, Millie Burnham, nodded in reluctant agreement.
An air of diminishment, of something slipping away, surrounds them.
“Everything is closing,” she said.
“School will, eventually,” he said.
Laurens, which flirted with a population of 1,800 in the 1960s, was down to 1,476 in 2000, then 1,258 in 2010. The story is similar across Iowa: Once-vibrant communities have been shattered in two waves, first by the farm crisis of the 1980s, then by technological improvements that encouraged far bigger farms and required far fewer farmers.
In Rural Iowa, Whites Drive Population Losses
LOSS
POCAHONTAS
GAIN
Waterloo
IOWA
Storm Lake
Sioux City
Cedar Rapids
Marshalltown
POLK
Iowa City
DALLAS
Des Moines
Change in population
1990-2010
±1,000
±10,000
Iowa’s population
White
Hispanic
89%
5
2010
96%
1990
Sioux City
Cedar Rapids
Iowa City
Des Moines
Change in population
1990-2010
Gain
Loss
±1,000
±10,000
White population
Hispanic
2010
89%
5
1990
96%
As of 2011, Pocahontas’s farming industry employed 764 people, about half as many as in 1980.
Those who stay are largely Republican. Susie Mayou, a 55-year-old conservative, described herself as heartsick that Democrats had carried Iowa in six of the last seven presidential elections. “If Iowa gave power based on land ownership, the state would swing 180 degrees,” she said. “The city people push the agenda.”
That now includes people like the city-bound Mr. Stumpf. Despite his grandmother’s Republicanism, he plans to vote for Mr. Braley, quoting from his campaign commercial attacking Ms. Ernst for opposing a federal minimum wage.
Downtown Revival
It is known as Silicon Sixth: a stretch of Sixth Avenue in downtown Des Moines that houses about two dozen technology start-ups. A few blocks over, the Des Moines Building, an old office building, is undergoing a makeover into a 136-unit apartment building, complete with a dog-walking terrace. Up the street, the downtown’s first full-service supermarket is under development.
The once sleepy core of Des Moines, known for its commuter-friendly 9-to-5 hours and drab overhead skywalk system, is taking on cosmopolitan hues. The population downtown has doubled over the past decade, and 1,500 new units of housing are planned.
As a result, Des Moines’s home, Polk County — where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 20,000 and President Obama’s margin of victory widened between 2008 and 2012 — is growing even more influential in statewide politics.
Mickey Davis, a 23-year-old musician, was so confident he would leave Iowa after college that on his arm he tattooed the corporate emblem of Travelers Insurance Company, a mainstay of downtown Des Moines, to take a bit of the state with him.
Appealing to Young Artists
Mickey Davis is a manager at the Des Moines Social Club, an art and performance space in downtown Des Moines.
Video by Luke Sharrett on Publish Date October 20, 2014.He is now the program manager at the Des Moines Social Club, a hive of cultural activity inside the Art Deco quarters of an erstwhile firehouse, which hosts operas, poetry readings, bands, art exhibits and yoga classes.
“Des Moines,” he said over lunch, “is actually a happening place.”
Hispanic Growth
City Councilman Pete Rodriguez navigated his white Toyota sedan down Main Street, jabbing his finger at the passing houses.
“Hispanics live there,” he said of a white ranch. “That’s a Hispanic house,” he said of a beige Victorian. The phrase echoed like a soundtrack. Hispanic house. Hispanic house. Hispanic house.
Iowa, with its 92 percent white population, remains a place where diversity seems oxymoronic, “so white that you almost need special glasses to pick the people out from the snow banks,” Wade Rathke, the founder of Acorn, the social activist group, wrote in 2008.
But in the city of Denison, in far western Iowa, decades of stereotypes are falling away, revealing corners of the state where Latino immigrants are remaking the landscape. Here, where meatpacking plants crave low-wage workers, Hispanics make up 42 percent of the population, more than twice as much as a decade ago.
New Arrivals in a Small Town
Pete Rodriguez, a City Council member in Denison, Iowa, says that he was ignored when he first arrived, but that the city is becoming more accepting of new immigrant groups.
Video by Luke Sharrett on Publish Date October 20, 2014.These migrant towns now pepper the state: West Liberty, Storm Lake, Muscatine and Marshalltown. State data shows that the 168,000 Latinos in Iowa are now its largest minority, 6 percent of the population, and the figure is expected to surge because Latinos are significantly younger than their white neighbors and have far higher birthrates.
The Denison school system is now recruiting Spanish-language teachers. The Walmart Supercenter has dedicated an aisle to “Hispanic food.” The City Council has its first Latino member, Mr. Rodriguez.
But for now, the power of the Latino vote is more potential than reality.
The Latinos of Denison have a dismal record of casting ballots. Not long ago, the mayor, Brad Bonner, cracked open a binder containing the city’s voting rolls in search of Hispanic names. “There were 12 of them,” he said. “They don’t vote.”
Patricia Ritchie, a community activist, chose a coffee shop in the city’s quaint downtown to explain why. Inside, Denison’s aging power brokers — about 15 bankers, lawyers and farmers — held their weekly breakfast meeting over slices of egg, sausage and Velveeta casserole.
They were all white.
“See?” asked Ms. Ritchie, a 41-year-old Hispanic and an Army veteran.
Hispanics in Denison, she said, “are afraid of the white power structure.”
Those who have participated in the past have not always been heartened by the results. Vicenta Cardenas, 43, who crossed into the United States illegally from Mexico but is now a citizen, registered to vote in time for the 2008 general election, casting a ballot for Mr. Obama. She did the same in 2012. They were votes, she believed, to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
Across the State, Growth in Hispanics
POCAHONTAS
Waterloo
IOWA
Storm Lake
Sioux City
Marshalltown
Cedar Rapids
POLK
Iowa City
Des Moines
DALLAS
Population
change
1990-2010
+1,000
+10,000
Waterloo
Storm Lake
Sioux City
Cedar Rapids
Iowa City
Des Moines
Change in population
1990-2010
±10,000
±1,000
Amnesty has not come. “Personally, I feel Obama tricked Latinos,” she said, sitting at her kitchen table.
Asked if she intended to vote this year, Ms. Cardenas shrugged.
Conflicted Farmers
The campaign commercial opens with a rural tableau of windmills and rows of soybeans. “I grew up walking beans on our family farm,” Ms. Ernst says. The ad concludes with an appeal to Iowa’s of-the-land pride, suggesting the triumph of entrepreneurial farmers over the bureaucracy of Washington. “I’ll take our values there,” she says of the Senate.
But Iowa’s rural values, conflicted by farmers’ deepening reliance on government and colored by a growing investment in the green economy, are no longer reflexively Republican.
The crosscurrents are on display at Campbell Grain Farms in Clinton County, near Iowa’s eastern border. Its owner, Dennis Campbell, a sixth-generation soybean and corn farmer, acknowledges that he is a walking contradiction: both a victim of an overreaching federal government and a poster child for the benefits of federal intervention.
He walked up to a gas tank on his property, a totem, he said, of federal rules run amok. To cut down on fuel deliveries — reducing costs and carbon emissions — he bought a 10,000-gallon behemoth. But for one that size, the government mandates a double-walled model, to prevent leaks. That cost him tens of thousands of dollars extra, an expense avoided by neighboring farmers who stick with tanks that are smaller, older and riskier. “I’m being penalized by the government,” he said.
But a few feet away, he showed off a wall of 256 solar panels on the roof of his shed that will generate enough electricity to power his farm. It is a money-saving technology whose economics, he conceded, work only because of some $80,000 worth of tax credits from the same federal government that insisted he buy the pricier gas tank.
“I am talking out of both sides of my mouth,” said Mr. Campbell, who intends to support Ms. Ernst.
State in Play: Iowa
CreditLuke Sharrett for The New York Times
Iowa farmers received more than $1 billion in federal aid and subsidies in 2012, according to the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.. It is no wonder that the most heated policy debate in the Senate race here is over a federal measure, coveted by farmers, that guarantees a market for corn-based ethanol by requiring energy companies to blend billions of gallons of the biofuel with gasoline for cars.
Ms. Ernst, a Tea Party favorite, declared herself philosophically opposed to rule, known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. That prompted a series of attacks from Mr. Braley, and ever-firmer assurances from Ms. Ernst that she would nonetheless fight to protect the fuel measure. The Iowa Corn Growers Association PAC was not satisfied: In a move that stung Ms. Ernst’s campaign, it endorsed Mr. Braley.
A similar dissonance has surrounded the issue of climate change. Ms. Ernst, skeptical about the role of human activity in global warming, is wary of any government mandates to cut carbon emissions. Mr. Braley is a proponent of government measures to curb climate change, such as strict fuel efficiency requirements for carmakers.
But as the candidates debate the urgency of action, Iowa farmers have reached their own conclusion about sustainable energy: It is profitable.
Harold and Virginia Olson, farmers in Calhoun County, have no computer in their home. But they do have a windmill on their farm. Gamesa, an energy company, pays them $6,000 a year for allowing the company to use the family’s land.
“It’s our air,” Mr. Olson said. “We should capitalize on it.”