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Tuesday, Oct 7, 2008
They sparked Kerry's comeback in the primary season. Will Hawkeye State voters now put him in the White House?
Oct 26, 2004 | Lloyd Pratt, owner of a fledgling Web design business, feels no affinity to either political party. At age 38, he has never voted before. But this year? "Most definitely, oh yes," he said, pausing from repair work on his home in a modest neighborhood of this Mississippi River town. "I totally disagree with the way Bush has managed our country."
Pratt, wearing a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt, ticked off a litany of reasons for his decision to plunge into electoral politics. First, he objects to the war in Iraq, undertaken simply to avenge President Bush's father, he believes. "Bush lied to the country and killed thousands, and nobody is talking of impeachment?" he said incredulously. "In my opinion, it's murder. He should have gone after the person who attacked our country." And by spending money on the war, Pratt said, the government has neglected needs at home, like healthcare. His wife, who runs her own small business, has had cancer, and neither can afford health insurance. Now they also worry about paying rising heating bills as winter approaches. The Bush tax cuts "didn't do me a lick of good," Pratt said, and Bush's "trickle-down" economic policies have meant that "it's impossible for us to operate our businesses. Nobody wants to spend money on new products."
"I have neglected my duties as a citizen," he acknowledged a bit shamefacedly, "but none of the elections before made as big a difference as this year. This year I totally disagree with the person in office."
New voters like Pratt and his wife may prove decisive in the presidential race in this key state with seven electoral votes. Iowa went for Al Gore in 2000 by 4,144 votes out of 1.3 million cast. (Bill Clinton won by a healthy margin four years earlier.) But the U.S. Senate is split between a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat; the House delegation includes four Republicans and only one Democrat; and the state government is split between a Democratic governor and a Republican Legislature. The most recent polls show dead heats to small leads for either John Kerry or Bush, and partisans on both sides see the race as a tossup.
As a result, the airwaves are thick with ads. The pro-Kerry ads stress domestic issues like sending jobs offshore or bequeathing budget deficits to coming generations, and the pro-Bush ads attack Kerry "and his liberal allies in Congress" for being soft on defense or portray Bush as a compassionate, strong leader against terrorism, embracing a little girl. Both candidates and their running mates, as well as proxies, have been working Iowa with nearly the personalized intensity of the state's famous caucuses. After both Bush and Kerry staged major events the week before last (with the Kerry campaign claiming a record turnout for an Iowa political event and reporting empty chairs at Bush's rally), they again held major rallies last week on the same day, separated by only one hour and one county. John Edwards also spent two days campaigning in Iowa last week. Bush, who had already visited Iowa more than Kerry, was back in Davenport on Monday.
After four years of dramatic events and controversial policies -- two wars, terror attacks, four major tax cuts, unusually weak post-recession job growth, rising inequality and disputes over protection of basic rights -- many Iowans are approaching Election Day with strong emotions, often fear.
"John Kerry scares the hell out of me. You don't know what he's going to do or say," said Larry Steward, 65, a retired corrections officer and self-described political independent, who has voted Republican since Reagan first ran for president, as he waited in line for tickets to a Bush event at Republican Party headquarters -- where the walls are decorated with a Halloween-themed poster asking, "President Kerry? Now That's Scary." John Ortega, co-chairman of the local Republican Party, is afraid of what he thinks Kerry will do. "He's for stem cell research, which I think is wrong," Ortega said. "He's for abortion. If he's in office, I think he'll repeal the ban on partial-birth abortions. He's for gay marriage."
But he says he's against gay marriage, I observe. "If he's elected, he'll be for gay marriage," Ortega insists. "It scares me, if he's elected, what will happen."
They're not the only ones feeling scared. "President Bush is the first president who really scares me," explained William Olsen, 51, vice president of a union representing workers at the Rock Island Arsenal, as he went door to door in Davenport talking to union members earlier this fall. "This guy is [for] big business all the way through. He's taken too many rights from working-class people." Olsen is also sharply critical of Bush's Iraq policies. "War isn't always the answer," he said, reflecting on his own bitter experience as a veteran of the Vietnam War.
Polls show an Iowa divided nearly along the same lines as it was four years ago. In the end the race could come down to new voters and those who do not share the deep emotions of partisans. If so, Kerry could very well have the edge.
Iowa has "been a battleground state in every election," Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack told Salon in an interview. "We have strong feelings, progressive and conservative, and each election is won by a fairly small margin." The recent exception is senior Sen. Charles Grassley, a Republican, who seems headed toward an easy victory this year with a campaign that is very personal and not closely linked to Bush's campaign.
But Vilsack is optimistic about Kerry's chances in his state. "It's all in the numbers in the early voting and registration war," he said. Iowa is divided into roughly three equal parts politically, but independents have the edge in registration. In 2000 there were about 25,000 fewer registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, but this year Republicans lead by only 8,000. Part of the reason is changing demographics -- Iowa is now less rural and more Latino.
"We've become more competitive as Iowa has become more urbanized," Iowa Democratic Party chairman Gordon Fischer said. "Now the 10 most populous counties -- with cities like Des Moines, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo and Iowa City -- have more population than the ... 89 [least populous] counties."
Most of the voters registered by the party and partisan groups such as unions, the Iowa Citizen Action Network (an affiliate of USAction) and America Coming Together (the leading independent "527" group) are likely to vote for Kerry. But the work of some nonpartisan groups may also indirectly benefit him. The New Voters Project, for example, has registered 36,000 18-to-24-year-olds in Iowa, including 12,000 around Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa and the third largest New Voters Project operation in the country. "We've been getting an amazing response from young people," said organizer Aaron Saeugling. "A lot of people said, 'I didn't vote in the last election, but I am this year.'" Although 70 percent registered as independent, a study by Harvard University's Institute of Politics suggests they will disproportionately vote for Kerry.
The Democratic forces in Iowa have pushed harder than the Republicans for early votes, in both absentee ballots and satellite early polling stations, and the balloting has gone strongly to Kerry. Late last week, Democrats figured that at least 108,000 out of 190,000 early votes went for Kerry, since they came from identified supporters, and 56,000 went for Bush, with the remainder probably split roughly in the same proportion. With a week to go, already 60,000 more absentee ballots have been cast than in 2000.
Republicans assert that Democrats are simply moving up the date of their votes, not adding voters. But Fischer argues, based on the party's voter identification file, that "about one-third of the absentee ballots are [from] weak-voting or sporadic-voting Democrats." When the party surveyed nonvoters in 2000, it found that about one-fourth didn't vote because of some unexpected Election Day crisis. "We think it's smart to bank these votes early," he said. "Even if just getting out others who would vote, we can click them off the list and save a tremendous amount of time, effort and money to focus on other voters on Election Day."
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