Iron in Michigan, drawn against the state outline.

Iron County moved another 3.9 points right from 2020 to 2024, landing at R+29.3 after R+25.4. The longer arc is steeper: 31.5 points right across 16 years, from D+2.2 in 2008 to R+29.3 in 2024. The break cycle was 2012→2016, a 19.1-point single-cycle swing from R+8.9 to R+28.0. Obama carried Iron in 2008; every cycle since has run Republican, with only a 2.7-point Democratic tick in 2020 interrupting the trajectory.

Iron County is 95.6% non-Hispanic white across 13,138 people, with 1.2% foreign-born. Median household income sits at $28,560 and 13.7% of adults hold a bachelor's degree, with 11.3% below the poverty line. The low-income, low-college, near-monoracial profile is the demographic backdrop for the county's political readings.

Iron County ran R+29.3 in 2024 while Michigan overall came in at R+1.4 — a 27.9-point gap that puts Iron in a different universe from its parent state. MI-1, which contains Iron, sat at R+21.2, and the United States landed at R+1.4, tracking Michigan's headline read. Iron is the lone deep-red row among the four.

Aitkin County, Minnesota is Iron's closest peer at 0.976 similarity — a near-ceiling match anchored on a shared 2024 margin (R+30.8 to Iron's R+26.2) and the same underlying cluster. All ten peers sit in cluster 8, with margins ranging from R+17.1 in Gogebic to R+41.6 in Alcona, and every one shifted further right between 2020 and 2024. Six of the ten peers are in Michigan, concentrating the match set in the northern Great Lakes rural belt rather than Iron's home state of Wisconsin.