What’s the matter with Iowa?
Why today’s Iowa Republican caucuses won’t represent America.
Friends,
What? You’re not mesmerized by today’s Iowa Republican caucuses? You’re not planning to spend MLK Day glued to your mobile phone for the play-by-play? You’re not excited to find out whether Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis comes in second to Trump?
Nor, to tell you the truth, am I. Iowa is solidly Trump territory.
I knew Iowa when it wasn’t. I campaigned there for every Democratic presidential contender from Walter Mondale in 1984 to Barack Obama in 2012.
I love Iowans — their kindness, their enthusiasm for sports, their personal engagement with politics. I love Iowa’s soft rolling hills, its small towns, its cities that resemble small towns in much of the rest of the nation.
Yet between 2012 and 2020, no state has swung as heavily Republican as Iowa. It went from giving Barack Obama a 6-percentage-point win in 2012 to giving Trump an 8-point win in 2020.
Democrats have now pretty much written off Iowa. For the first time since 1972, the Iowa caucuses will not be the first event on Democrats’ presidential nomination calendar. (The Democratic Party has picked South Carolina to go first, on February 3. Iowa Democrats will vote by mail, and the results won’t be known until March 5, the day of the Republicans’ Super Tuesday, when 16 states and territories vote.)
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What happened? It’s not that right-wing furies have taken over the entire upper Midwest. Over the same years, Illinois and Minnesota moved left.
Iowa is a microcosm of an older, rural, whiter, more Christian evangelical, non-college America — left-behind fly-over country that’s become resentful fodder for Trump. (Not all of Iowa. Even as Iowa’s largely White small towns and rural areas have turned bright red, Des Moines’s educated and prosperous suburbs have moved leftward.)
I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.
The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.
I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.
Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.
When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.
Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.
As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.
This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.
One — mostly well-educated, urban, more secular, younger, and more diverse — votes Democratic. The other — mostly rural, less well-educated, more religious and evangelical, older, and less diverse (Iowa is 90 percent white) — votes Republican.
The Midwest reflects that split. Minnesota and Illinois fall into the first culture; Iowa, the second.
Iowa has banned almost all abortions, transition care for minors, and books that contain sex from school libraries. It provides publicly funded vouchers for private schools and makes it easy to buy guns. It has decided not to provide its children free federal nutrition benefits (through the Summer EBT program).
Illinois, on the other hand, bans high-capacity semiautomatic rifles and has legalized most abortions, as well as access to pot, and will give its children federal nutrition benefits. Minnesota has also legalized pot, allowed unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, and expanded voting access for felons and teenagers. And it’s part of the Summer EBT program.
There may have been a time when Iowa represented America. No longer.
If the Senate and the Electoral College reflected where most Americans now live and the culture they live in, American politics would be a lot different than it is. Even if Trump wins today’s Iowa caucuses, as expected, he wouldn’t stand a chance of becoming president.
Happy MLK Day.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) thinks Donald Trump’s personal vendettas could lead to the collapse of American democracy.
Sanders told The Guardian he believes the “bitter” and “humiliated” ex-president would be more vindictive than ever, if elected for a second term later this year. I could not agree more!
Yesterday Trump told the people of Iowa, “You can’t sit home. If you’re sick as a dog… even if you vote and then pass away, it’s worth it,” mimicking a dying supporter as he delivered the line.
What kind of human being would say something so cruel! Iowa is facing a brutal cold front as voters prepare for the Republican caucus on Monday, with reports saying with wind chill, the state could reach 35 degrees Fahrenheit below zero the day of the caucus.
Thanks to Trump and his Congressional enablers,
America has become the Devil’s playground!
Now he’s subliminally trying to manipulate Supreme Court judges. As a subtle threat he said, “he hopes the Court does “the right thing.”
He said the same thing regarding Mike Pence on January 6th, 2021. Remember, the judges on the Supreme Court have sworn to uphold the Constitution and are supposed to be apolitical!
This comes on the heels of the bomb threat called into the home of Judge Engoron!
I believe Trump not only promotes violence against anyone who tries to hold him accountable, he also enjoys it! That’s why he waited so long on Jan 6 to call off his dogs! They erected a gallows and intended to hang his VP! Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” prompting rioters to chant “hang Mike Pence” and erect mock gallows. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney has described testimony from Trump aides saying he responded by saying Pence “deserves it.”
Until Trump is held accountable for his many crimes it will only get much worse! No one in the Republican Congress condemns him for his despicable behavior! Their Parents must be so proud of what they are doing to our country!
All of these people need to uphold their oath because they are the role models for the rest of us! They all swore to uphold the Constitution not anything else!
I first drove across Iowa in 1974, as a private in the US Army, taking his first leave from Ft. Carson Co to Brooklyn NY, in a spanking new Ford Pinto and a dog, a Border Collie as smart as any drill sergeant during boot camp. I called him Sarge. Sarge and I were on I80 just past Omaha when the Pinto started to buck. This is in the middle of a December blizzard and minus one million degrees with wind chill, and with the Pinto's heater on the fritz. Then the timing chain broke, allegedly (the car was 3 months old). But we were dead in the water somewhere between Dexter and Desoto in a whiteout, with Sarge smartly in the back of the Pinto snarling, guarding the only blanket in the car. Being a fresh recruit, now trained to take on the Rooksies single-handed, I'd packed prepared. I had a canteen of water and a duffle bag of dirty laundry for Mom to wash. Oh, and the dog lease that I wanted to hang myself with at that point (and for more reasons than a storm).
But it was for the grace of Iowans, not God, that I survived that ordeal. One drove Sarge and me into town (two cornfields sewn together), to a diner somewhere in another cornfield, and then a gal gave me numbers to call, and another came and got us to tow the lame Pinto to a community college, where others put it up on a rack to tear the engine apart. Another kind Iowan drove us to a hotel that took dogs, and then we got a hot shower and a nice sleep. Then someone picked us up from that cornfield and took us to the one where the small college was hidden behind domes of snow and husk. That's where we found my horse awaiting, snorting and stamping at the bit to get going again, and even the heater was hot to trot.
My emergency leave from my platoon to go see Dad for the last time was only made possible by the kind hearts of Iowans, folks much different than I knew of who inhabited my home state, NY. Dad died a few days later. If not for the swiftness of some college kids in shop class, and the trustfulness of the hotel owner to take an out-of-state check from a GI, I might have never seen him alive again. So thank you Iowa, after all these years, of which I've never said a word to anyone of your grace and hospitality. That was 1974 Iowa, so I hope you still exist. You do in my heart.