1984 United States presidential election in Iowa

1984 United States presidential election in Iowa

← 1980 November 6, 1984 1988 →

Nominee Ronald Reagan Walter Mondale Party Republican Democratic Home state California Minnesota Running mate George H. W. Bush Geraldine Ferraro Electoral vote 8 0 Popular vote 703,088 605,620 Percentage 53.27% 45.89%

County Results Reagan   40–50%   50–60%   60–70%   70–80%   80–90% Mondale   50–60%

President before election Ronald Reagan Republican Elected President Ronald Reagan Republican

Elections in Iowa
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v t e

The 1984 United States presidential election in Iowa took place on November 6, 1984. All 50 states and the District of Columbia, were part of the 1984 United States presidential election. Voters chose eight electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president of the United States.

Iowa was won by incumbent United States President Ronald Reagan of California, who was running against former Vice President Walter Mondale of Minnesota. Reagan ran for a second time with former C.I.A. Director George H. W. Bush of Texas, and Mondale ran with Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York, the first major female candidate for the vice presidency. The presidential election of 1984 was a very partisan election for Iowa, with over 99 percent of the electorate voting only for either the Democratic or Republican parties, though several parties appeared on the ballot.^[1] While the majority of counties turned out for Reagan, the politically volatile state of Iowa was a relatively narrow victory for him, thanks in part to the Midwest Farm Crisis of the early 1980s. The relatively weak Republican trend for this election is highlighted with the loss of Des Moines's highly populated Polk County to Mondale.

Iowa weighed in for this election as 11 points more Democratic than the national average. As of the 2020 presidential election^[update], this is the last election in which Scott County (Davenport), Black Hawk County (Waterloo), Linn County (Cedar Rapids), and Story County (Ames) voted for a Republican presidential candidate.^[2] Iowa would not vote Republican again until 2004.

Reagan won the election in Iowa by a 7.4% margin. While a sound victory, this made Iowa 10.8% more Democratic than the nation, a signal of Iowa's increasingly liberal bent over the second half of the Cold War period. Of the four Republican landslides during the Cold War (1952, 1956, 1972, and 1984), this one featured the weakest Republican win in Iowa. Iowa had been a double-digit win for Republicans in the nationally close elections of 1960 and 1968, but in 1976 had gone for Ford by just a little over 1%. In 1980, Reagan won Iowa by a somewhat larger margin than he won the nation by, but by margin, his support in Iowa receded in 1984, as the long-time bellwether county of Palo Alto, which had last voted for a loser in 1892, switched to Mondale. Democrats would go on to carry the state in six of the next seven elections until Republican Donald Trump decisively won the state in 2016 and 2020.