The Dems' Iowa debacles

 Josh Kraushaar:

President Biden traveled to Iowa for the first time in his tenure on Tuesday to promote the new infrastructure law and unveil plans to tackle soaring gas prices, which include allowing ethanol-blended gasoline to be sold during the summer. The move should appeal to farmers in the corn-rich state.

But despite the president’s belated attention to the state, Democrats have all but written off Iowa in their political future. The national party is weighing plans to abandon the state's famed first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, even while it loses ground in pivotal congressional contests. In the latest embarrassment, the party’s leading Senate candidate, former Rep. Abby Finkenauer, was ruled ineligible for the June 7 Senate primary ballot because she didn’t gather enough eligible signatures. Her failure to qualify—if the judge’s ruling holds—all but ensures GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley will be elected to a historic eighth term.

The setback follows a string of recent high-profile Democratic blunders in the state: In 2020, the party failed to tabulate caucus results in a timely and transparent manner, becoming a national punchline at a time when trust in election administration was already growing frayed. Two years earlier, the state’s top recruit for a swing-district House seat (Theresa Greenfield) was embroiled in scandal, as her campaign manager was charged with a felony for faking signatures on her ballot petition. Greenfield then became the party’s much-touted 2020 Senate nominee, but she ended up losing to Sen. Joni Ernst by 7 points, despite expectations that the race would be winnable.

The party’s bad run of luck in Iowa may have begun in 2014 when then-first lady Michelle Obama mispronounced the name of the party’s Senate nominee, former Rep. Bruce Braley, during a campaign visit. (She called him Bruce Bailey.) Iowa was seen as a critical contest that year; Democrats lost badly on their way to surrendering control of the Senate. Call it the Iowa jinx.

Since voting for President Obama twice and electing three Democrats to the state’s four-seat House delegation in 2018, Iowa has swung hard to Republicans. President Trump nearly won the state by a double-digit margin in 2020, matching his statewide victory in 2016. There’s only one Democratic member of Congress left in the state—Rep. Cindy Axne—and she’s one of the most vulnerable House Democrats nationwide this year. Republicans have now held the governorship for more than a decade.
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The Democrats keep doing things to alienate rural and conservative voters across the country.  And, Biden is a poor salesman in that state. 

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