Iowa

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Sioux County is extremely Dutch

Okay but are they Amish or something? You're probably right because there was a county in Nebraska (Saline I think) that always voted Democrat, even in Republican landslides, and when I looked it up I found that it had a large Hungarian population. I guess different European ethnicities vote different ways in the midwest.

I live kind of close to there. The answer is they are not Amish, but they mostly belong to ultra-conservative Calvinist sects. That place is kind of like another world. Pretty much all businesses closed on Sundays. Not a single bar or liquor store in the entire county. Much similar to the ultra-conservative parts of the Netherlands (yes, they exist) that vote for theocratic parties.

As for the original post, it's basically comes down to the eastern part of the state still being populist and voting on economics like Northeastern Minnesota and parts of Wisconsin, and that unlike the states to its west, the larger cities are still fairly liberal. They're certainly not Minneapolis or Madison (except Iowa City of course), but definately far to the left of Omaha, Wichita or Sioux Falls.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I think Bush might've really narrowly won it, I know he did in 2000, but it is far more Democratic than its surroundings, due to being fairly blue collar. I know a couple people from there (I don't really go there, but I do meet them when I'm in Sioux Falls from time to time) and from what I've gathered they consider themselves to basically be a different state from Sioux county and the rest of Northwest Iowa.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm Lutheran and so are about 40% of the people I know. I'm kind of suprised whenever people outside the Midwest think Lutherans are pretty rare, I keep forgetting that almost all of us in the US are here.

Another thing is that plenty of people outside the Midwest think all Lutherans are ultra-conservative, which is largely true outside of the Midwest, Scandinavia and parts of Germany, but it's definately not true of the majority.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm Lutheran and so are about 40% of the people I know. I'm kind of suprised whenever people outside the Midwest think Lutherans are pretty rare, I keep forgetting that almost all of us in the US are here.

Another thing is that plenty of people outside the Midwest think all Lutherans are ultra-conservative, which is largely true outside of the Midwest, Scandinavia and parts of Germany, but it's definately not true of the majority.

They were the first Lutherans that I knew about, I might have known others. And, as a Catholic, most Protestant sects are not that different from one another. I just thought Lutherans were a mainstream branch of Protestantism.

well there's different Lutheran churches. The ELCA, the largest and mine is a pretty standard mainstream Protestant denomination. The Missouri Synod is much more conservative. And the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod is a hardcore fundamentalist one that puts the Southern Baptists to shame. There's also a few small splinter groups that might as well be cults.