The Democrats Need To Win Back Iowa By Fielding Real Democrats, Not Republican-Lite Squishes

Abby Finkenauer-- Iowa's Joe Manchin

This is the weekend that all the Republican candidates descend on the Iowa State Fair to smile for the cameras while eating the kind of food that would normally make them puke. Trump won’t be taking part in any of the official GOP events hosted by Gov. Kim Reynolds and Joni Ernst but he’ll be there today dominating everything— pretending to hand out free pork chops and perhaps having Marjorie Traitor Greene, Kari Lake and Lauren Boebert do a 3-way nude mud-wrestling routine, while his cult followers harass the other candidates. He dragged along a host of Florida Republicans who have endorsed him to make a point about DeSantis (who really is a disgusting person). Mike Pence already made headlines trying to defend himself from those who are convinced that he is a traitor, not to America per se, not even to the Republican Party per se but to what some see as the personification of both… yep Señor Donald J. Trumpanzee.

Yesterday, Politico did a rundown of Biden’s path to reelection, basically holding onto all the states he won last time, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona plus adding North Carolina, Florida and Ohio for an official landslide. But not Iowa. Iowa, which Michael Dukakis won, which Bill Clinton won twice, which Al Gore won, which Kerry only lost by a fraction of a point, where Obama won twice. That Iowa— not even in contention. Last two times Trump routed Hillary by 10 points and Biden by almost 9.

Now both senators and the governor are all Republicans— not to mention the Attorney General and Secretary of State. The state Senate has 34 Republicans and just 16 Democrats and the state House, 64 Republicans and 36 Dems, increases for the GOP in both chambers since 2020. And among the state’s 4 congressional districts— all red. In the past IA-04 has always been horrifyingly red. The PVI is R+16, not just Republican, fascist-leaning; it’s Steve King’s old district. But the other 3 districts have all been swing seats. The new map’s partisan swing in the 4 districts helps Republicans. IA-04 went from R+28 to R+27, helping IA-02 (the northeast district) go from R+4 to R+6. In terms of partisan swing, IA-03 (the Des Moines district) stayed at R+2 and IA-01 in the southeast went from R+5 to R+4.

Last year the one Democrat left in office, conservative GOP-lite New Dem Cindy Axne was narrowly defeated by Zach Nunn, 156,262 (50.35%) to 154,117 (49.65%). Axne won Polk County (Des Moines) but lost all 20 other counties. The two then-freshmen, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson had no problem holding onto their seats in races against 2 weak GOP-lite candidates. Miller-Meeks beat Christina Bohannan 53.4% to 46,6%, losing just Johnson County (Iowa City), while winning all 19 others, including Scott (Davenport) and Jefferson (Fairfield), the two swing counties. And Hinson beat Liz Mathis, another GOP-lite candidate, 54.1% to 45.9%, losing Linn and Black Hawk counties while winning the other 20 including Dubuque, Cerro Gordo (Mason City) and Winneshiek (Decorah), the 3 swing counties.

Let’s take a quick look at those 4 swing counties that all went for Republicans last year. This is how they voted in recent presidential elections:

• Scott- went for Dukakis, Clinton (both times), Gore, Kerry, Obama (both times), Hillary and Biden

• Jefferson- went for Clinton (both times), Kerry, Obama (both times) and Trump (both times)

• Cerro Gordo- went for Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton (both times), Gore, Kerry, Obama (both times) and Trump (both times)

• Winneshiek went for Democrats Dukakis, Clinton (both times), Kerry, Obama (both times) and Trump (both times)

What happened to Iowa? Yeah… yesterday Anjali Huynh and Reid Epstein tried to figure out why “Iowa Democrats are at their lowest point in decades. ‘It is so bad,’ said Claire Celsi, a Democratic state senator from West Des Moines. ‘I can’t even describe to you how bad it is.’ Celso and others described themselves as exhausted by repeated defeats at the ballot box, an inability to slow Republicans at the State Capitol and the loss to South Carolina of the first-in-the-nation status in Democratic presidential contests. Deep in the minority, Democrats in the State Legislature have squabbled among themselves, ousting their party’s State Senate leader in June after a dispute over personnel. In interviews this week, Iowa Democrats said the state now stood as a warning sign for what happens when their party falls out of touch with voters who once made up key parts of its electoral coalition.”

There’s no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa,” said former Representative Dave Loebsack, whose eastern Iowa seat, which he had held for 14 years, flipped to a Republican when he chose not to seek re-election in 2020. “It’s difficult even to recruit people to run when we’re so far down.”

Iowa’s transition to a deep-red state has taken place with remarkable speed. Democrats controlled the State Senate as recently as 2016. In 2018, Democrats won three of the state’s four congressional seats and three of the six statewide offices. But after the party’s bungling of its 2020 presidential caucuses, Trump cruised to victory in Iowa that November.

The midterm elections last year were a Democratic blood bath in Iowa, even though the party had over-performed in much of the rest of the country.

The underfunded, little-known Democratic nominee for governor lost by 19 percentage points to Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, and carried only four of the state’s 99 counties. Republicans took all four congressional seats for the first time in 50 years, enacted a gun rights amendment in the State Constitution, ousted two of the three Democrats in statewide office and took supermajority control of both chambers of the Legislature.

The three congressional seats Democrats held as recently as 2020 are still winnable, Democrats say, but the party doesn’t have 2024 candidates for any of them so far.

“We should have candidates out there thinking, ‘If I get a few breaks, I can win,’” said Pete D’Alessandro, a senior aide to Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in Iowa. “That we don’t is a direct reflection of having an incompetent party for the last couple of years.”

Democrats, including D’Alessandro, express optimism about the party’s new chairwoman, Rita Hart, who has sought to empower county-level leaders. Hart, who in 2020 lost the congressional race for Loebsack’s seat by six votes, said Iowa Democrats would have to fight for a focus on local issues.

Hart took over the party in January, after a period in which Iowa Democrats had four leaders in less than two years. She has sought to instill some continuity while reorienting the party’s priorities away from the presidential cycle and toward local needs.

“The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we’ve got to talk to our fellow Iowans,” she said. “I’m very convinced that we’ve got to empower our county parties to do just that.”

The struggles of Iowa Democrats reflect the broader migration of white, rural voters to Republicans, a long-term trend that has accelerated during Trump’s political career. Iowa has just two big cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and two college towns that state Democrats can still count on winning.

Interviews with two dozen Democrats in the state suggest that the party has suffered from a confluence of problems, including diminished campaigning during the coronavirus pandemic; Trump’s appeal to the white, rural voters who dominate state politics; and weak messaging in the 2022 elections.

Democrats have faced numerous setbacks this year, including Republicans’ passage of a six-week abortion ban— which has been temporarily halted by a court order— and a new program that allocates state money toward private school vouchers.

…”The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t prepare for the transition to understanding and using social media,” said Jack Hatch, a longtime state legislator who was the Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. “Some individual campaigns understood, but not the party. As a result, we had one message for all campaigns, which weakened all our campaigns. One message doesn’t work in Iowa.”

No mention of the fact that the Iowa Democratic Party has been running garbage careerist candidates that no thoughtful Democrat could possibly get excited about. Zach Nunn beat Cindy Axne, a shit candidate who voted like a Republican, something that didn’t help her win Republicans but turned off Democrats and discouraged them from bothering to vote. Loebsack started as a progressive populist and went in a less and less progressive direction and in 2020 election endorsed Pete Buttigieg in the primary. That year Ashley Hinson faced off against Democratic incumbent Abby Finkenauer, one of the worst Democrats in the House, a real Kyrsten Sinema type. A lazy and disliked state legislator, she took on corrupt Republican incumbent Rod Blum and beat him in 2018. Two years later— after one horrible term— she lost the seat. She then decided to run for the U.S. Senate— and lost the primary.

Iowa Democrats want to win but they don’t want to get garbage candidates like Axne and Finkenauer shoved down their throats. Remember, in 2008, Iowa Democrats rejected Hillary and gave Obama a big win in the caucuses. And in 2016, Hillary marched into the state as the presumptive winner, only to scrape by with the closest margin in the history of the caucuses: 49.8% to 49.6%, after shenanigans for Clinton by the party organization. If the Democratic Party wants to start winning again, they will need to stop cheating in favor of the more conservative candidates and start remembering that values that the Democratic Party has stood for over the decades. That’s a long way off.