Why is Iowa so Democratic?
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White Cloud
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« on: November 03, 2010, 09:31:10 PM »

I have always wondered why the state of Iowa is so heavily Democratic. Not only in presidential races, but on the Congressional level and in party registration as well. Dems and indies both outnumber Republicans on the voter rolls in Iowa. Three of their five Congressional districts are held by Democrats (who all won re-election yesterday in a year when so many other rural Dems in the Midwest and South went down).

On the presidential level, Iowa has been a good Democratic state since 1988, only failing to go Dem in 2004 and only by 1,000 votes. Obama did well there, you could say the state "made" him. And yet, if you look back at presidential races in Iowa before 1988, it was basically a strong Republican state. Even Carter couldn't win there in 1976. Kennedy got crushed in 1960.

It seems like something changed very dramatically in Iowa politics around 1988 that pushed it very far left. Is that the case? What is going on in Iowa? Why is Iowa so Democratic compared to other prairie states like Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas? It's not really an urban state, so it can't be attributed to urban minority voters. It doesn't have a lot of the ethnic voters that you might find in the urban areas in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan.

The thing that I find fascinating about Iowa is that Democrats, even national-level Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, tend to do very well in rural farm areas that are almost 100% white. You just don't see that in other "heartland" areas, definitely not in the rural South or the Plains. If you look at the 2008 county map, Obama won almost every county in the northeast quadrant of Iowa, and a lot of those counties are very rural.

So what is it about Iowa that makes it so Democratic?
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Joe Republic
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« Reply #1 on: November 03, 2010, 09:36:16 PM »
« Edited: November 03, 2010, 09:38:56 PM by Joe Republic »

You're asking this the day after it re-elected its Republican senator by a 31-point margin, re-elected a former Republican governor over the Democratic incumbent by a 10-point margin, and re-elected its Democratic representatives by none-too-impressive margins (while the Republican representatives each won by 30+ points)?

Iowa is still just about the epitome of a swing state.
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patrick1
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« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2010, 12:16:06 AM »

A couple of points to consider-  Iowa was particularly hard hit by the Farm foreclosure crisis in the 1980's.  Some of the older people on this board will remember Live Aid.  There is also a geographic element to this.  Eastern Iowa is more democratic. This area is along Mississippi and there are frequent floods.  One of the biggest floods was in 1993. People hit more frequently by natural disasters are more receptive to bigger government.  There are also  more cities in Eastern Iowa.
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BRTD
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« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2010, 12:21:48 AM »

I remember the floods of 1993 quite well. We didn't get hit as badly as Iowa of course, but I do remember the streets full of water like canals and being flooded out of my room for a few months (I lived in the basement).
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patrick1
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« Reply #4 on: November 04, 2010, 12:45:51 AM »

I remember the floods of 1993 quite well. We didn't get hit as badly as Iowa of course, but I do remember the streets full of water like canals and being flooded out of my room for a few months (I lived in the basement).

Damn that must have sucked.  What river was nearby.  The Missouri?

Clinton and FEMA were widely praised for their response.  I think certainly helped the democrats.  I always found it interesting how the areas on the banks of the Mississippi are more pro-democratic party.  There is a racial element to that down south, but it holds pretty strong even up north.
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BRTD
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« Reply #5 on: November 04, 2010, 12:58:13 AM »

Yeah Missouri River. Never crossed my mind at the time for obvious reasons but our house was only a few blocks from the State Capitol, must've put a damper on state business.
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dead0man
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« Reply #6 on: November 04, 2010, 12:59:59 AM »

Clinton and FEMA were widely praised for their response.  I think certainly helped the democrats.  I always found it interesting how the areas on the banks of the Mississippi are more pro-democratic party.  There is a racial element to that down south, but it holds pretty strong even up north.
Most of the urban centers are right along the Mississippi.  My hometown (Alton,IL) isn't very big, but it still has an urban feel to it. It's river town and very much a Democrat(ic?) strong hold.  It is true up down the river AFAIK.  Go inland a bit and it becomes more conservative (and more white).
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BRTD
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« Reply #7 on: November 04, 2010, 01:02:41 AM »

You can't really understand this without being there, but the people in cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and Davenport are far more like people in the Twin Cities or Madison, Wisconsin than those "heartland" states to the west of it culturally.
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opebo
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« Reply #8 on: November 04, 2010, 05:16:00 AM »

I remember visiting Iowa as a young boy with my family back in the late seventies or very early 1980s.  Even as a lad I could easily see that people began to speak better, act better, dress better, as we moved north.  Lets face it Iowans are better than Missourians, outside of the small liberal enclave of St. Louis.

Why, I don't know.
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patrick1
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« Reply #9 on: November 04, 2010, 04:57:24 PM »

I think you are making this more complicated that it needs to be.  All 3 democrats are in the eastern portion of the state.  It happens to have more in common politically with Minnesota/Wisconsin or W. Illinois than Nebraska. Many states have this type of political geographic divergence- see Tennessee.
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angus
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« Reply #10 on: November 04, 2010, 05:25:11 PM »

So what is it about Iowa that makes it so Democratic?

It's actually more non-partisan than Democrat.  Last time I checked, there were 600 thousand registered Republicans, 750 thousand registered Democrats, and about 920 thousand unaffiliated registered voters.  Yes, Iowa gave its electoral votes to the Democrat 6 of the last ten presidential elections, and most of the CDs are held Democrats, so Dems have a slight edge over Republicans here, as in other parts of the upper Midwest (and for the same reasons:  farms and unions and such), but it's really more None of the Above than loyalist Democrat.  And Republicans do win statewide office in Iowa regularly. 
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angus
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« Reply #11 on: November 05, 2010, 09:16:07 PM »

Wow.  Hell of a long post.  I guess it deserves a reading.

FYI, I claim to be no expert on the Upper Midwest.  My parents are both from a small town in Northern Minnesota, lived there from birth till about age 18, and they'd drag us to this region every Xmas holiday when I was a kid, but I am only a relatively recent transplant, having lived in Cedar Falls, IA since July of 2007.  Till then I had not lived in this region.

I find Midwesterners to be square and conservative.  Hormel is based in Austin Minnesota, not far from here.  And I think the company and its values capture the area well.  The make chili and have lots of great pig products.  It's all delicious.  And the best schools in America are in New England and the upper midwest.  I'm no fan of the No Child Left Behind Act, but you have to admit that one good thing that comes out of it is that we can now compare apples to apples, so to speak.  The composite fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading scores are all available for all to see now, and we see that the top ten states are always IA, MN, WI, VT, MA, RI, NH, CT, and ME.  This played heavily in my decision to accept the offer here, in fact, as I had at the same time received a slightly better-paying offer in the Keystone State.  But I have a young child--a boy--and I'm sort of a fan of good public schools.  (yes, there are rightists who support the notion of good public schools.  And Iowa has them.)

You are right that Iowa democrats outnumber Iowa repubicans.  I would not argue with that.  I appreciate that you have more recent numbers than those that were stuck in my head from when I first moved here.  I'd also agree with your disagreement with that "quintessential bellweather state" garbage.  Iowa is hardly a bellweather state.  You haven't seen me make such a comment.  I only caution you against concluding that Iowa is somehow more Democrat than the rest of the upper midwest.

BRTD once commented in a post that "Democrats in Iowa are more Liberal than Democrats in California."  I jokingly posted in that thread "Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you that Liberals in Iowa are certainly more Democrat than Liberals in California."  At the time, I was new to Iowa, but I'd lived for many years in California and was well aware of its politics.  To be honest, there's some truth to both of those statements, depending on how you define terms.

But if you're really interested in exploring this issue (Why are IA, MN, WI so Democrat right now while other regions such as Georgia and Florida so Republican right now), look into Daniel Elazar's model of political culture.  Iowa, like most of the Upper Midwest, is Moralist by nature.  Always has been.  But it has a good bit of Individualist mixed in as well.  It's "MI" in Elazar's notation.  And this will explain much of the voting proclivities. of this state.  In this respect, it is really not unlike its neighbors to the north and east.  Illinois, which you mention, has all three aspects, T, M, and I, in equal measure.  It's just that the boundary occurs somewhere south of chicago and the moralist region does include most of Iowa.

It is worth noting that the comments about Western Iowa do hold true.  Council Bluffs and Sioux city and environs are more like Nebraska than they are like Minnesota, culturally and politically.  In Elazar's terms, they are Individualist, although not purely so.  There's a bit of T and M in the mix out there.  Overall, though, most of the population lives in a few counties.  There are no big cities here.  The largest in the state is De Moines (population 200 thousand, or thereabouts).  My county, at 125 thousand, is considered quite large.  There are farmers here.  It's like "Little House on the Prarie," but a little farther south.  And, of course, it's pretty union-friendly here too.  I could go on about that for days, but really the union-friendliness is an effect, rather than a cause.
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Torie
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« Reply #12 on: November 06, 2010, 04:12:44 PM »

One reason Iowa is different, is that it has next to no military presence, and is very dovish. It is also dependent on government subsidies for agriculture and ethanol. And it has a rather substantial union base in a host of industrial towns making agricultural implements and other related agricultural products and the like, and not much in the way of swaths of GOP exurbs. It has next to no minorities, off which Anglos might bounce off of, and react politically by drifting to the opposite party. It also has a rather sizable Yankee presence (Protestant folks who originally hailed from New England, sometimes with pit stops in places in-between, such as upstate New York), and Yankees among Anglos across the Fruited Plain, tend to be rather Dem relatively speaking, because they tend to be more liberal on social issues - and less religious. (My ancestors from Iowa, on both my grandmother's and grandfather's side, were Yankee stock, and fit that pattern.) Finally, Iowa does not have much of an entrepreneurial culture. The entrepreneurs left the state long ago.  I have next to no one left in my clan in Iowa.  The issue all moved out - mostly to California - where a surprising number did in fact realize their dreams, and then some.
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Nichlemn
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« Reply #13 on: November 06, 2010, 09:25:11 PM »

It's actually more non-partisan than Democrat.  Last time I checked, there were 600 thousand registered Republicans, 750 thousand registered Democrats, and about 920 thousand unaffiliated registered voters.  Yes, Iowa gave its electoral votes to the Democrat 6 of the last ten presidential elections, and most of the CDs are held Democrats, so Dems have a slight edge over Republicans here, as in other parts of the upper Midwest (and for the same reasons:  farms and unions and such), but it's really more None of the Above than loyalist Democrat.  And Republicans do win statewide office in Iowa regularly.  

With all due respect, do you think that maybe you are inclined to understate Democratic support in Iowa, since based on your avatar, you are apparently an Iowa Republican?

I don't know why you would say that Democratic presidential candidates have won Iowa in 6 of the last 10 elections, except to minimize how Democratic Iowa has actually been in the most recent presidential elections. The Democratic presidential candidate has won Iowa in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections. And the one year when the Democrat lost Iowa (2004), he only lost it by about 0.7%. The state has unquestionably swung to the Democrats since the late 1980s.

People have said that Iowa is a "quintessential swing state". But I don't know if that's really true. It is definitely a state that is in play for both Democrats and Republicans. But when I think of quintessential swing states, I think of Missouri, Ohio, Florida, maybe Colorado. For example, while Iowa has gone Democratic in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections, Missouri has only gone Democratic in 2 of those 6 elections. Ohio has only gone Democratic in 4 of those 6 elections. Florida has only gone Democratic in 2 of those 6 elections. Colorado has only gone Democratic in 2 of those 6 elections. If Iowa is a swing state, it's definitely one that leans much more to the left than those other swing states. I would basically call Iowa a blue state or a Democratic state based on its vote in recent presidential elections and the voter registration numbers.

You've cherry-picked the elections that make Iowa look the most Democratic. 538's electoral history charts (particularly the relative electoral histories) give a better picture. Although Iowa leaned quite Democratic relative to the nation in 1984 and 1988, since 1992 it has leaned towards Democrats by a point or two at most. Missouri, Ohio and Florida have all averaged a greater Republican lean.
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BRTD
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« Reply #14 on: November 06, 2010, 09:33:25 PM »

BRTD once commented in a post that "Democrats in Iowa are more Liberal than Democrats in California."  I jokingly posted in that thread "Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you that Liberals in Iowa are certainly more Democrat than Liberals in California."

Uh, no I didn't. I said that whites in Iowa are more Democratic than whites in California (as backed up by exit poll data.)
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memphis
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« Reply #15 on: November 06, 2010, 09:39:46 PM »

A better question would be why is Iowa not uber-GOP considering it has no very large cities or many minorites. The whole upper Mississippi is pretty friendly to the Dems.
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Nichlemn
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« Reply #16 on: November 06, 2010, 09:56:56 PM »

BRTD once commented in a post that "Democrats in Iowa are more Liberal than Democrats in California."  I jokingly posted in that thread "Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you that Liberals in Iowa are certainly more Democrat than Liberals in California."

Uh, no I didn't. I said that whites in Iowa are more Democratic than whites in California (as backed up by exit poll data.)

I wonder if Iowans moving to California become more Republican over time - that is, is the contrast effect significantly to blame?
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angus
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« Reply #17 on: November 07, 2010, 12:23:35 PM »

BRTD once commented in a post that "Democrats in Iowa are more Liberal than Democrats in California."  I jokingly posted in that thread "Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you that Liberals in Iowa are certainly more Democrat than Liberals in California."

Uh, no I didn't. I said that whites in Iowa are more Democratic than whites in California (as backed up by exit poll data.)

ah.  yes, whites!  that was it.  I remember it now.  "Whites in Iowa are more Democratic than whites in California."  And I think I said, "I don't know about that, but Democrats in Iowa are more white than Democrats in California."  And that makes sense.  Thanks for the clarification.

But anyway, it's all in Elazar's model.  The moralists, as they spread westward to this region, brought with them their values.  And the schools data supports that.  I still say that the most honest statement vis-à-vis the original post is that democrats have a slight advantage over the republicans here, but not a huge one.  And that advantage also exists in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  And which party happens to attract those moralists changes from time to time.  Prior to about 1932, it was the Republicans.  Since then, it h been the Democrats.  It will probably shift again one day, as priorities shift withing parties and re-alignments are necessary, but the underlying political culture of this region has been constant for over a century.
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Verily
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« Reply #18 on: November 07, 2010, 10:48:11 PM »

A better question would be why is Iowa not uber-GOP considering it has no very large cities or many minorites. The whole upper Mississippi is pretty friendly to the Dems.

Vermont would like a word with you.

Anyway, Iowa does have cities. They're not big enough to have experienced urban decay, so they don't have substantial minorities or suburban white flight. They are, however, big enough to feel metropolitan, especially to people who grew up on farms, and that makes them quite Democratic.
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TheDeadFlagBlues
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« Reply #19 on: November 08, 2010, 01:05:28 AM »

The farm crisis in the 80s pushed rural Iowans towards the Democrats in a big way. Almost every city in Iowa is reliably Democratic. There really doesn't need to be an explanation for Iowa City, Waterloo, or Des Moines. Dubuque has been a Democratic town since the beginning of time thanks to the fact that it is a stronghold for Catholicism. Some small towns outside of Dubuque are so Catholic that there are no other churches in town but the Catholic church.

I feel like I'm rambling here but overall I think the perceived failure of the Republicans in helping Iowa during the farm crisis has a lot to do with Iowa's movement towards the Democratic Party.  That and the fact that the GOP has moved towards being a party of the southern conservatives hasn't helped as well, when the GOP in Iowa was always more moderate, and reserved. Iowan cities have always been fairly Democratic, all it took was a continued trend and for farmers to shift towards the Dems and well you see what happens.
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opebo
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« Reply #20 on: November 08, 2010, 03:15:42 AM »

Hormel causes terrible flatulence.
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Kalwejt
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« Reply #21 on: November 09, 2010, 02:05:36 AM »

It seems like something changed very dramatically in Iowa politics around 1988 that pushed it very far left.

I just loled.
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Highpointer
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« Reply #22 on: November 08, 2012, 08:00:37 PM »
« Edited: November 08, 2012, 08:15:59 PM by Highpointer »

What I'm getting at is, would Illinois even be a blue state without the large black vote in Chicago? Would Michigan be a blue state without the black vote in Detroit? I don't think they would. Iowa does not have those demographics at all, but Democrats win there. It just seems like there is a different dynamic going on in Iowa.
I looked up the election results for 2000, the election in recent years with the most closely divided results. George W. Bush won the electoral college with 271-267, with Al Gore earning the electoral votes of Iowa and Illinois.

According to Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, in 2000,  Gore carried the State of Illinois by 569,605 votes. Gore carried Cook County, which encompasses the City of Chicago and its innermost suburbs, by 746,005 votes, which was greater than his victory margin in the entire state. Thus, if Chicago and its innermost suburbs were removed from Illinois, Bush would have carried Illinois.

While Gore won Cook County, the other Illinois counties of the Chicago metropolitan area, including DuPage, Kane, Lake and Will, went for Bush. Outside of the Chicago area, it appears that most of the Illinois counties that Gore carried were near the Mississippi River. Some of these were in southern Illinois, close to St. Louis, MO, but the largest number of Democratic counties were in northwestern Illinois near Iowa.

Thus, it appears that western Illinois shares liberal its political proclivities with Chicago, and most of the remainder of the state is conservative.

We can conclude that without Chicago, Illinois would have went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.
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Sasquatch
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« Reply #23 on: November 08, 2012, 08:09:10 PM »

Native Iowan speaking. I can't speak to much for the western part of the state, I was born in the eastern part, but it's all about unions as far as I can tell. There are lots of proud union members throughout the region. Then you have, the very liberal, Iowa City. However, the Democratic lean started in the 1980s.

Also, I remember that 1993 flood. That was surreal.
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snowguy716
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« Reply #24 on: November 09, 2012, 12:09:02 AM »

Just going by personal anecdote.. I've always felt the more liberal parts of Iowa were similar to the adjacent areas of SW WI and SE MN (as well as the MN River Valley)... they have a distinctly upper-midwestern culture dominated by northern German and Scandinavian heritage that brought with them very moralistic politics, as Angus pointed out above.

Things like good public schools, healthcare, and welfare aren't done because it is practical or serves some purpose to keep the masses sated while a small minority run everything... but because it's the 'right thing to do'.

An uncanny sense of shared culture coupled with a complete lack of cultural awareness (trust me, it's possible) means that "the right thing to do" governs political leanings rather than tradition or pragmatism.  It's why Minnesota has put forth politicians like Paul Wellstone or the Happy Warrior that championed civil rights for blacks as part of the Democratic Party platform (and began the long, bloody slide of the south over to their mortal enemy party, the GOP).

Ask an Iowan or Minnesotan to define their culture... and they'll shrug their shoulders and say "I dunno... ask the next guy"... because he will have no idea what his culture actually is.. but he knows the next guy is part of that same, undefined culture.  That or they'll start on a rant of self-deprecating anecdotes involving a guy named Ole, his friend Sven, and a boat load of hotdish.

At the same time, when I've been to Nebraska.. I get a much more "individualistic"/western feel.  The big businesses in Omaha were meat packing from cattle that came in from ranches in the western part of the state.  And oddly, an influx of Italians there means you often get a side of spaghetti with your steak at the steakhouse.  Nebraska seems to have a competent state government and excellent schools... and I can never get over how good their freeways are in Omaha compared to the Twin Cities (which are all functionally obsolete, narrow, grid-locked, and riddled with old fashioned clover leafs that require heroic acts of weaving through speeding traffic just to change freeways)... but yeah... Iowa seems to be more the land of family farms where they're likely to have fields of corn and soybeans and a barn full of pigs.. where individualism and self sufficiency is encouraged... but accepting aid from a neighbor, or more importantly, offering aid to a neighbor in need, is most important.  Meanwhile Nebraska has more of the cattle ranchers that rely on themselves or their immediate family. 

Chucking it all off onto farm subsidies and unionization is over simplifying it and completely ignoring the cultural fabric of the state.  Like Angus said above, and if I might take it a step further... those things are effects... not causes... of their political culture.
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