Iowa More Likely to Flip from Blue to Red in 2016

At LAT, "Iowa is more likely than any other state to flip from blue to red in the presidential election. Here's why":

Harriet Allspach has lived her entire life in this town 30 miles east of Des Moines, where a Maytag plant once employed every fourth person and summer weekends are for watching kart racing at the dirt track.

Allspach married one of those Maytag workers, took a job herself serving elementary school lunches to her neighbors’ children and never minded party lines, voting for Democrats as well as Republicans.

No longer.

She and her husband, Gary, who retired before they watched the plant close and decimate the local economy, are fed up. They are adamantly not backing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, despite their misgivings about Donald Trump.

“Trump scares me a little with some of the things he says, but I’m more willing to take a chance on that rather than a chance on the status quo,” said Allspach, 65. “The middle class, they are being squished.”

The Allspachs are typical of a demographic — older, white, less educated — that mostly backs Trump and is more concentrated in Iowa, where 91% of residents are white and three of four adults lack college degrees. The populace is a key reason that Trump is doing well in a state that President Obama won twice. Add to the mix an embrace of Trump by conservative leaders here and Democrats who are lukewarm about Clinton, and Iowa is suddenly regarded as the state most likely to flip from blue to red in next month’s election...

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