That won’t be the case this year. A new sentiment has echoed throughout recent conversations with Democratic strategists, activists and campaigns, a consensus that would have been unthinkable just eight years ago: Iowa is no longer a battleground. Not in 2020, anyway.

After decades spent at the center of both parties’ strategies for winning the Electoral College, Iowa is suddenly an afterthought. Its six electoral votes no longer seem essential, not when states like Texas and Arizona and Georgia — longtime GOP strongholds — all were decided by tighter margins in 2016, and all have demographic tailwinds that benefit the Democratic Party.

Few states received more time and attention from Barack Obama during his White House campaigns than Iowa. Part of that was due to its pride of place in his political ascent; Iowa, after all, was the state that vaulted him from long shot to Clinton slayer. But there also was as widespread view then that Iowa was up for grabs in November. Now, less than five years removed from his presidency, Democrats talk openly about not contesting the state at all.

Former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg campaigns Sunday in Coralville, Iowa. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

“The trends here are much more red than purple. I could see that swinging back at some point, but probably not with Trump on the ballot,” says Ben Foecke, who served as executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party four years ago. “It became clear to us in 2016 that this was the path we were heading down, at least in the short term, so I'm not surprised when I hear these conversations or read these memos explaining that Iowa isn’t really a swing state in 2020."

At a glance, this fatalism might seem exaggerated. Democrats carried the state in six of the seven presidential contests before Trump came along, and the one exception — George W. Bush’s victory in 2004 — was decided by 1 percentage point. Even today, the RealClearPolitics average of general election polling shows Trump leading Joe Biden by just 3 points and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders by 6 points apiece —hardly the indicators of a blowout.

Moreover, there’s recent history to consider: Democrats flipped two Republican-held congressional seats in the 2018 midterms, giving the party control of three of the state’s four districts, and also won a number of bellwether legislative races in the suburban areas around Des Moines. These victories, on top of ousting the Republican state auditor, gave some Democrats confidence of being able to compete statewide with Trump’s apparatus in 2020.

And yet, embedded in those 2018 results were trend lines that demonstrate just how distinct Trump’s advantage in Iowa has become. Despite overall midterm turnout spiking by some 180,000 votes, Republicans were able to hold both chambers of the Legislature and several statewide offices, including the governorship, all while growing their advantage in active party registration. The reason: Even in a terrible environment for the GOP, driven by suburbanites fleeing the party, Republicans performed even better in rural areas than they did in the 2014 cycle, one of the best in modern history for the party.

“Joni Ernst ran up significant margins in rural Iowa in a great Republican year in 2014,” explains David Kochel, the longtime Iowa GOP strategist who led the senator’s campaign. “But the Trump effect put those margins on steroids to such an extent that [Gov.] Kim Reynolds won many counties in a bad Republican year at even higher margins than Ernst.”

Officials from different parties who studied these 2018 results reached a similar conclusion: That Republicans can afford to continue bleeding support in 11 of the state’s 99 counties, as Reynolds did, so long as they continue to expand their dominance of the remaining 88 counties. For all the talk of Iowa becoming younger, more diverse, more metropolitan, the fact is that no party in the foreseeable future can hope to win the presidency while getting crushed among the older, white voters from rural areas, a segment of voters that makes up the backbone of the state’s electorate.

“We absolutely cannot concede rural America. We did that in 2016 and 2018, and it didn't work,” says Patty Judge, Iowa’s former Democratic lieutenant governor. “The lesson for Democrats is, we’ve got to listen to what's going on in the heartland, to understand that people feel they've been left behind, that they’re having a hard time aligning themselves with some of what they hear from the Democratic Party right now. Until we understand that, we can't get back to being a blue state—or at least, back to a purple state that voted for Barack Obama twice.”

Indeed, Obama’s twin victories in Iowa — including a relative blowout by 9½ points in 2008 —continues to fuel a stubborn optimism among Democrats here who believe Trump’s win, by an identical 9½ point margin, was something of a fluke. But there is no denying how fundamentally the politics of the state, and the country, changed over those eight years. The sorting and self-selection of voters accelerated all over the country at an unprecedented clip, leading to a polarized electorate and a predictability of outcomes that has gradually shrunken the battleground map in presidential races. For the same reasons Republicans won’t be competitive in Virginia and Colorado this fall, Democrats aren’t expected to put up a fight in Iowa.

“We knew Barack Obama would not be president of the United States without winning the Iowa caucuses, so we threw everything at it. Did that have ancillary benefits in the fall? Of course — he had such visibility there,” says David Axelrod, the chief strategist of Obama’s campaigns. “What's different for the Democrats today is that we're so much more polarized now than we were then. The breaks around geography and demography are really stark in the era of Trump, and because of that, Iowa becomes a more difficult state. So does the whole region, really.”

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To some Democrats, that is precisely the reason Iowa should lose its place at the front of the nominating calendar: A state that remains predominantly white, working-class and culturally conservative does not reflect the party, nor does it look like the future of the national electorate.

Then again, maybe this is exactly why Iowa should go first.

“Competing in Iowa, if nothing else, should be a great training exercise for Democrats to win in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If you can win over some of the swing voters here, you can win them over there,” says Pat Rynard, a former Iowa Democratic staffer who runs the popular blog IowaStartingLine.com. “So even if the Democratic nominee doesn't come back to Iowa in the fall, they've at least learned some key lessons here that will help them win those other states—and hopefully, the Electoral College.”