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Elections in Iowa |
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The 2024 United States presidential election in Iowa was held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States presidential election in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia participated. Iowa voters chose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. The state of Iowa has six electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which the state neither gained nor lost a seat.[1]
An Upper Midwestern state previously considered a battleground and a bellwether state for decades, Iowa voted significantly more Republican than the nation-at-large in both 2016 and 2020 and is now considered a moderately red state at the federal and state levels. Republican Donald Trump won the state by a comfortable margin of 8.2% while losing nationally in 2020, despite polls indicating a close race. Biden became the first Democrat to be elected president without winning Iowa since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Furthermore, during the 2022 midterms, all three statewide incumbent Republicans (governor, secretary of agriculture, and secretary of state) won reelection by more than 18%, two of three statewide incumbent Democrats (28-year incumbent attorney general and 40-year incumbent treasurer) lost to Republican challengers, and the remaining incumbent Democrat (4-year incumbent auditor) won by less than 3,000 votes and 0.23%. Republicans also won all four of Iowa's U.S. House seats.[2][3] As such, for most of the race Iowa was expected to be a safe red state in 2024.[4] A poll performed by Selzer and Co. and published by the Des Moines Register on November 2 claimed Harris to be up by 3%, leading some to predict a far closer race than initially expected.[5][6][7]
Incumbent Democratic president Joe Biden was running for reelection to a second term, and became the party's presumptive nominee, but withdrew from the race on July 21.[8][9] He then endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who launched her presidential campaign the same day.[10]
Attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has gathered enough signatures to appear on the ballot, as he announced in April.[11]
Donald Trump won the state by a margin of 13%, the widest margin for a candidate since 1972.[12][13] This is the first time since 1996 that Iowa was carried by double digits and the first for a Republican since 1980. It also marks the first time since 1984 that the state voted Republican in three consecutive presidential elections and the first time since 2012 that it voted for the winner of the national popular vote. Trump's 56% of the vote in Iowa is the largest percentage a Republican has achieved since the 1972 election. This also marks the first time since 1984 that Scott County voted for the Republican candidate.