Anxiety that built in Iowa over at least three decades crested during the pandemic and continues to needle the body politic.
Inflation dropped like a stone to 3% while wages rose 4% in the latest report. The border is quiet for now. Russia is on its heels with Ukraine. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack just dropped $25 million on a new cattle slaughter facility in southwest Iowa. Farmers have made good money the past few years.
Yet, Donald Trump probably beats Joe Biden in Iowa if the vote were today.
While most of the rest of the nation nudged left in the midterms, Iowa continued to veer hard right. Republicans claimed the Iowa House-Senate-governor trifecta in 2016, gutted Medicaid, stripped labor rights, cut taxes by more than $2 billion annually while doling out vouchers for private schools, and capped if off with a one-day special session that bans abortion at the sign of a heartbeat.
It’s starting to come home to roost. The Pocahontas nursing home followed Newell and Albert City in closing their doors to the rural elderly, who vote Republican, thanks to handing Medicaid over to private insurance companies. The truck driver earning $50,000 a year worries about what to do with mom, and how to pay for the kid at Iowa State where tuition has been rising every year. Highway 4 is a wreck, and so is Highway 10.
If you ask the people in Keokuk what their top issue is, as the community organizing group TeamCan did in 2021, it turns out to be potholes. Followed by health care and economic security. Not abortion or gays. They didn’t ask for vouchers. Could you just get the street fixed? My co-pay is killing me. Middle-school curriculum was not top of mind.
It wears, just like it did when the jobs drained out of the river towns for Mexico. Bill Clinton waved them goodbye. Hope and change missed Fort Madison. Hell, you might as well vote for Trump for all the good the Democrats did you. Or cast your lot with Kim Reynolds. Trump is angry. So is Ron DeSantis. Chuck Grassley’s campaign theme: Leave us alone. That’s been a winning message.
Trust is the first thing to go in a political culture built on deceit. Do you really trust Biden or Trump to know what to do with cluster bombs? Or railway safety rules? Or protecting agricultural workers? Or your tax dollars when they can’t even patch the potholes? You might as well vote for a $2 billion tax cut because those clowns don’t know what to do with it. That line works for awhile.
It takes some time, but eventually you can’t find a room for mom at Shady Acres. Storm Lake can’t afford or find music teachers. If you don’t need that private school voucher in Sioux Rapids but the teachers are quitting, all that educational freedom feels like frustration.
We used to be a high-end, quality state where people were proud to live. But in under a decade, the wealthy have stolen all the screws and left Iowans sitting on furniture held together by duct tape, living with a sense that at any moment it’s all going to come crashing down and we’re going to fall on our collective rump.
Death by 1,000 cuts is long and painful. Independent voters are starting to feel it. They decide Iowa elections. Big crowds showed up at the capitol to protest the abortion ban. Families with children are nervous about draining public education through private school vouchers for the elite.
The Democrats have a problem in that they have no structure or message to capitalize on the opportunity. They never really supported JD Scholten or Mike Franken or Deidre DeJear. Biden is bound to fly past Iowa on his way from Georgia to Arizona — note the swing states where the new battery plants are going. We appreciate the new cattle plant, which might go the way of old new cattle plants like the one at Tama that is no more. You can find cover crops if you look real hard in the spring and have some time to drive. The USDA is larding the money on corporations like Cargill to ramp up the climate-smart agriculture program while the farmer at Fonda finds he cannot qualify. We do get subsidized pipelines for an ethanol industry not long for this world. The handful of Democratic senators in Des Moines just threw their leader overboard in a mutiny. They do not appear to be positioned to capitalize on public wariness of an unchecked right-wing agenda.
It will take a couple years for public schools to fall apart. Reynolds, if she is not already vice president, will be up for re-election as governor in three years. By then, a safe rural nursing home will be a rarity. Tuition at Iowa Central is bound to rise along with water and sewer rates. Health insurance costs only go up. Climate anxiety is real. If that frustrated energy were addressed in a deliberate way, Iowa could have a two-party political system again. That’s a big “if” when the Democrats can’t find Storm Lake with GPS.
Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.
From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2023
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