Wednesday after the election dawned foggy as the Iowa Democratic Party’s ashes smoldered.
The results were in: Donald Trump and the Republicans swept Iowa. Trump by 14 points over Kamala Harris in Iowa, and 66-33% in Buena Vista County, home to thousands of Latino immigrants.
You could barely find the remains from a spontaneous combustion 10 years in the making, when Sen. Tom Harkin retired. The spirit started to leave the corpus. It was finished and certified last Tuesday.
Democrats lost every congressional race and what little ground the party held in the Legislature. It wasn’t even a race out here. There is only one party. Democratic registrations have been plummeting. The only contests are Republican primaries that push Iowa ever farther right.
The Iowa caucuses got kicked to the roadside by Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee. Rural counties have been written off for a long time. Local Democrats do what they can without money or manpower. The Democratic brand is unmarketable in rural America.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Bernie Sanders shouted into the fog. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Minnesota’s late Sen. Paul Wellstone: If you run a Republican against a Republican, the Republican will win every time.
Or, as Iowa Teamsters leader Jesse Case (Storm Lake native) put it to me, “If you’re gonna get your ass kicked, you might as well stand for something.”
Iowans heard that the Democrats stood for abortion and against anything Trump. Harris is for fracking. The Biden Administration is filling pipelines with carbon credits. Did you hear Democrats campaigning on the fact that the Raccoon River is toxic? That the Great Plains, at any given time, are on fire? That we are running low on water below?
No, what you get is $50,000 if you start a business and $20,000 if you want to buy a home. That was the economic plan, plus whatever Biden already had in place. Not good enough for Cedar Falls when John Deere is laying off or Perry where Tyson shut down. Harris is married to a corporate lawyer. Consolidators are hollowing out our hometowns. The benefits of Bush/Clinton free trade never soaked down to Ottumwa.
Iowans have been under stress for 40 years as the economy changed fundamentally from diverse, independent farmers and businesses and a union to contracted corporate agriculture and Walmart-Dollar General and no union. The Chinese own the hogs and we own their dung.
So yeah, they voted for Trump.
Plus, we’re just a little racist and sexist. Latino and Black men shifted to Trump. Latino men hinted to us weeks before the election that they were skeptical of Harris out of machismo, and because they had no say in her nomination. She was appointed by the corporate overlords, as they saw it. The result: Turnout in Storm Lake Precinct 2, where the Latinos live around Tyson Pork, was half that of the west side of The City Beautiful.
The wave of women roiling out of Ankeny turned out to be a mirage. Ann Selzer of the Iowa Poll is not a goddess after all but a human who wonders how she was so spectacularly so far off. This was certainly no repudiation of the Reynolds Era.
In red states where progressive issues like abortion or paid leave were on the ballot for direct referendum, those issues outperformed Harris by 10 percentage points. If you have a D behind your name in Iowa it’s at least a 10% drag on performance.
That’s because rural voters feel that urban, highly educated elites look down on them and do not share the spoils of wealth created by bloodied and bruised hands. The whole free love/free trade thing is for the duped. The rest of the county is waking up to the idea that the heartland is frustrated, that a great realignment is underway. The working class has been going Republican for some time, and now even the Latinos are blowing that way. They should be the base. When you ignore them, the natural reaction is to vote for the guy who says the whole thing is a big sham. Even if he is the sham artist in chief.
Who campaigns on breaking up the big four meatpackers or chemical companies or oil companies or Big Tech that control what we put in our bellies and our heads? Not Harris, anyhow. Harold Hughes would have. He was a recovering alcoholic mystical truck-driving man who won on liquor by the drink and education. He could speak Ida County. Someone like a Hughes needs to upset the apple cart and win back the working class.
As it stands, this is a one-party state. That is not good for most of us. Iowa’s economic performance is almost as bad as Mississippi. Our surface water shows the worst pollution in North America. School test scores are falling. Our cancer rate is the only one that is rising among the 50 states. What is really stunning is that Democrats can’t win with that.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks. Cullen also publishes at https://artcullen.substack.com/ as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative.
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