Iowa — 3rd District

Rep. Cindy Axne, D-Iowa. Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images

In a year when Democrats have high hopes of expanding their House majority, the task starts with defending the ground they gained in flipping the chamber in 2018. A rematch in swing-state Iowa will offer clues about whether forces that drove the party's success two years ago will hold up on Nov. 3. Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne, 55, aims to win a second term in Iowa's 3rd District in the southwestern portion of the state. She faces Republican David Young, the former two-term congressman whom she narrowly beat in 2018. In the district and in many others around the country, highly educated suburban voters — and White women in particular — showed signs of moving away from President Donald Trump and the GOP and toward Democrats who pledged to forge an independent path in Washington. With Trump at the top of the ticket again, 2020 will start to test whether the midterm results point to a longer-term trend. "Much of the story of 2018 (and 2020) is a story of suburbanites, particularly white suburban women with a college education who cite community security, health care and education as important policy concerns," Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, wrote in an email to CNBC. Des Moines, the Iowa capital, sits in the northeast corner of the 3rd District. She added that suburban voters are generally more likely to disapprove of the president's immigration policies and handling of the coronavirus pandemic, along with Trump's overall "tone and tenor." Republicans such as Young have tried to regain seats they lost in the Trump era by pledging to recapture the strong pre-pandemic economy and bolster small businesses. The geographically diverse 3rd District includes young city dwellers and rural farming communities to whom Axne and Young have tried to appeal, forcing them to walk an at times tricky political line. But for political observers looking in Iowa for signs of how the rest of the country could vote, the suburbs to the north and west of Des Moines may hold the most clues.

A changing district

Iowa Congressman David Young votes in his home precinct on November 6, 2018 in Van Meter, Iowa. Steve Pope | Getty Images

Iowa's 3rd District underwent a demographic shift over the last decade similar to that of many of the U.S. House seats that flipped to Democratic control in 2018. The area's median household income topped $67,000 in 2019, a spike from about $52,000 in 2009, according to U.S. Census data. Last year, 24.6% of the district's residents older than 25 had bachelor's degrees, up from 20.6% a decade earlier. In the same time period, the share of people over 25 in the 3rd District with a master's degree climbed to 7.6% from 5.8%. Paine Caufield said that as suburbs near Des Moines "have grown and developed, they have attracted more highly educated residents with higher median incomes." One example is Ankeny, a community north of the capital city that also sits close to Iowa State University in Ames. At the same time, the area has not become much more racially diverse, as some suburban districts that shifted toward Democrats in 2018 did. About 88% of the district's residents were White in 2019, down from about 90% in 2009. Polls show that Axne fares better among more highly educated voters. In a Monmouth survey released last week, she held a 52% to 43% lead over Young among registered voters. The disparity in voter preference by education was stark: She had a 20-percentage-point advantage among White voters with a college degree versus a 5-percentage-point lead among voters without one. The poll also showed a bigger lead for Axne among women, 12 percentage points, than among men, 8 percentage points. The GOP's recent struggles to win over suburban women have led Trump to make explicit pleas to the voting bloc, including a series of thinly veiled attempts to stoke White fears of people of color moving into their communities. "Suburban women, will you please like me?" Trump asked at a rally in Pennsylvania earlier this month.

The policy debate