Retiring Guy's Digest: 2024 Iowa caucuses: Trump kicks butt in MAGA-fied Lucas County

As in many other rural Iowa counties, presidential elections had been competitive contests until Trump came along.

In 2012, Mitt Romney outpolled Barack Obama by 6.1 percentage points.

In 2016, Donald Trump outpolled Hillary Clinton by 37.6 percentage points. Four years later, he boosted his winning margin to 43.3 percentage points against Joe Biden.

Source: Wikipedia

3rd-party candidates received 18.6% of vote in 1992, 10.8% of vote in 1996, 5.5% in 2016;

(Alabama segregationist George Wallace received 6.2% of the vote in 1968)

No surprise that Trump did better here than he did statewide (51%).

New York Times, 1/8/2024

In Lucas County, a sparsely populated rural county with Iowa’s second-lowest rate of church adherence, Marci Prose, the lead pastor of the Chariton Church of the Nazarene, ministers to a congregation of around 30 people. The church recently moved out of its building into a smaller space that used to be a fitness studio.
When the church hosted a luncheon for the congregation’s senior-citizen members, “the only people who weren’t invited were one woman in the church and my husband and I,” she said.

Like many other rural Iowa counties, Lucas County's population peaked more than 100 years ago. It is now down 46% from its 1900 peak. The county has fewer residents now than it did in the late 1860s.

Demographically, residents of Lucas County are overwhelmingly white, have significantly lower levels of education, and are older compared to statewide and national averages.