After Last Night, Will Americans Ever Trust Iowa Again To Start The Presidential Selection Process?

Forget Kansas-- Iowa Flipped Out Too

Iowa has 4 congressional districts, all of which are in Republican hands, primarily because the local Democratic Party has given up on progressive politics and pursued an abysmally-failed Republican-lite strategy. One district, IA-04 is out of reach for a Democrat. Trump won that district with 62.2%. The three other seats are all in swing districts and the Democrats should be making serious efforts in each. They’re not, in part because Biden didn’t win any of the districts in 2020).

IA-01 (Mariannette Miller-Meeks)- R+4 partisan lean

Miller-Meeks beat Christina Bohannan 53.4% to 46.6%

IA-02 (Ashley Hinson)- R+6 partisan lean

Hinson beat Liz Mathis 54.1% to 45.9%

IA-03 (Zach Nunn)- R+2 partisan lean

Nunn beat conservaDem incumbent Cindy Axne 50.35% to 49.65%, one of the closest races in the country (2,145 votes out of 310,379 cast)

Bohannan, a former state Rep., is running again. She has no policies on her website, a sure sign she’s not worth supporting. She’ll probably run on reproductive Choice and not much else. In IA-02, Sarah Corkery’s website is just as lame and has set herself up to lose unless there’s a strong Democratic wave election, although if you read it, you will lean that she is “a mother of three wonderful kids,” has “a child with a physical disability,” and “had breast cancer twice.” Would she support Medicare-For-All? No way to know. And the 3rd district has a primary with 3 Democrat-- Lanon Baccam (endorsed by Tom Vilsack and State Auditor Rob Sand), Melissa Vine and Tracy Limon-- with 3 incredibly embarrassing websites that look like they’ve been hacked by Republicans.

Yesterday, Joe Klein, unethusiastic about Iowa, focussed on the state: The Heartland Goes Rancid. In nearly 5 decades of covering Iowa’s caucuses he found that “the people were almost always nice, and decent, and rational, even when they held opinions that I considered well off the beaten track. They said hello on the street… I spent a lot of time interviewing Evangelicals there. These were not angry people. They were, for the most part, frightened. They were worried about their children. Most were working-class, two-earner families and they were freaked about what their kids were up to after school, while they were still at work. Their churches helped ease that concern: there were after-school sports leagues, and social clubs for teens and day-care for toddlers, praise bands, pancake breakfasts and spaghetti dinners, Bible study and just hangout space. The kids were safe there. There was a sense of community, not readily available in secular society. There was the comfort of faith. So I could understand why they voted for people like Pat Robertson, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.”

Something very terrible has happened in Iowa. Reality doesn’t live there anymore, at least among Republicans, who have come to dominate the state. (Iowa was purple when I started visiting, with liberal populists like Tom Harkin to match every stolid conservative like Chuck Grassley). Iowa has gone nuts. How else can you explain the 62% of caucus goers last night who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, according to the entrance polls; how else could a similar number say they would vote for Trump even if he were convicted of a crime?

Think about that for a moment. It means most Iowa Republicans do not believe that the most basic ceremony of our democracy functions properly, even after the 2020 vote counts were certified and reviewed by countless election boards and courts across the country. It means that most Iowa Republicans do not believe Donald Trump can get a fair trial— and so the judicial system, a second bulwark of democracy, can no longer be trusted, either. It also means they don’t care about morals or values; they care about the appearance of strength. They don’t care about crude language, fantastic lies, a flagrantly immoral lifestyle; they care about entertainment value. Trump’s Iowa legions may not represent a majority of the American public, but they are the most coherent force in our country right now. You can not sustain a democracy like that.

We’ve all read and watched and listened to endless accounts of the cult-like nature of the Trump constituency. But it just felt different, more concrete last night, as I watched the votes come in. I had entertained the notion that the big Trump poll numbers might not be real support, but a form of venting: a screw-you nose-thumbing directed against the elites who scorned them. His support would begin to evaporate when it came time to actually choose a President. It didn’t, at least not last night.

New Hampshire established its tradition of being the first primary state in 1920 and in the 1970s Iowa's caucuses gained prominence as the first event in the nomination process, leading to the unique distinction of Iowa and New Hampshire as the initial states to weigh in on the presidential race, something that Democrats have decided to upend. The two states have populations that are significantly less diverse than the nation as a whole, which means that the early primary process doesn’t accurately represent the broader electorate, particularly in terms of race and ethnicity.