Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
There has been a lot of chatter recently about which potential Republican presidential candidates might be wise to skip the 2012 Iowa Caucuses.
Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has argued that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty should skip Iowa because he will not pass all of the litmus tests imposed by the Hawkeye state’s Republican base. He has made similar points about former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.
In Pawlenty’s case, could a candidate really get away with skipping a state that borders his own, especially when the core of his electability argument is going to be “I can win in the Heartland”?
I think probably not.
More broadly, Ambinder and others seem to assume that Iowa’s Republican base is considerably more conservative than the Republican base nationwide. That would be the argument a candidate wanting to skip Iowa would make to justify his or her decision, but intuitively, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Iowa Republicans didn’t pull their apparent obsession with issues like same-sex marriage out of thin air. Depending on whose narrative you believe, that issue either comes from the Bible or from Karl Rove’s political playbook. Either way, Republicans are against it almost everywhere. Same goes for abortion and for worldviews that seem to deviate from mainstream “Judeo-Christian values.”
While Iowa Republicans may be more conservative than the GOP primary electorate in New Hampshire (which includes registered independents), how many other early primary states aren’t dominated by social conservatives?*
If the dreaded Iowa litmus tests were so unfair as to weed out every “center-right” Republican in the field, Romney would not have been the frontrunner here for almost all of 2007, and he would not have won that coveted “silver medal” on caucus night.
Days after the overly-conservative caucuses, Romney won another silver medal in New Hampshire, from an electorate apparently dominated by moderates. How can one of those two states be rigged against him while the other is fertile ground?
Here’s what’s really going on:
As the Republican party has shrunk nationwide, its spectrum of acceptable political beliefs has shrunk with it. That’s not unique to Iowa; it’s a national story that is covered somewhere every day.
Before a “skip Iowa” strategy makes sense for a candidate, that candidate has to show an ability to win in South Carolina and other states with similar Republican electorates.
Like it or not, the Iowa delegation blends in ideologically at Republican conventions. The base of the party’s power has shifted to the right. If a candidate loses for being too moderate, it won’t just be because of the primary calendar.
* Comparing how some later states voted during the 2008 primary might be an appealing way to answer this question, but I’d argue that in the later, bigger primary states, name ID, money, and electability were just as determinative of success as a candidate’s positions on social issues. On paper, the candidates agreed on almost all social issues anyway.
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