Greetings from the heartland! I’ve got a few items from here in Iowa I want to share, so I’ll cover them all here in one diary.
To the Races
First is news about the district of the festering boil growing out of the NW quadrant of the state otherwise known as Steve King. Actually, it’s about his district (IA-04), and the district adjacent to the south (IA-03). IA-03 is a district that includes the state capitol, Des Moines, and it’s suburbs, and covers south-central and southwest Iowa.
Anyway, it seems that these districts are moving away from the GOP, as explained by the blog Bleeding Heartland:
Two of Iowa’s Congressional districts are among the seventeen U.S. House seats where Sabato’s Crystal Ball has adjusted its ratings in favor of Democrats. Until now, the non-partisan election forecaster saw Iowa’s first district (Rod Blum) as a “toss-up” race, IA-03 (David Young) as “lean Republican,” and IA-04 (Steve King) as “safe Republican.”
Today analysts moved Young’s race to “toss-up” and King’s to “likely Republican.”
Now, King being “likely Republican” may not sound like much to some, but in the wave environment we’ve been experiencing where special elections in formerly safe GOP districts have been transformed into GOP losses or narrow GOP wins, it means King and the GOP will have to put in some work to hang on to his seat. And his challenger, JD Scholten, is a newcomer as a candidate, but is no slouch:
After college, J.D. pursued a professional baseball career, playing in Canada for the Saskatoon Legends, for his hometown Sioux City Explorers over the course of 4 seasons, and in Europe (Belgium, Germany and France). In 2013, J.D. had the honor of pitching with the UCLA Alumni baseball team for 5 games during their tour of Cuba; including giving up a single to current major leaguer Yasmany Tomas. Though the Majors remained elusive, he kept playing for the love of the game and for the love of supporting his teams. All told, he’s played baseball professionally in 7 countries, and with teammates from 6 continents (the invitation is open to anyone from Antarctica).
Between baseball seasons, J.D. began a career as a litigation paralegal, specializing in eDiscovery, Intellectual Property law and trials—a career that taught him the ins-and-outs of the law, good governance, and how to fight for people’s rights. He was proud to support the asylum case of a Cameroonian man tortured by his own government, and to help a Minnesota company protect its Intellectual Property rights against a giant Canadian corporation.
Though a first-time candidate for office, J.D. is a lifelong Democrat who in October of 2002 took a 20 hour one-way bus ride to protest the Iraq war and has volunteered on local, state and national campaigns. He is still an avid sports fan, loves to play cards, enjoys black coffee, and Casey’s pizza. He lives in Sioux City, having bought the family home. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, J.D. is truly “Standing Tall for All!”
King should be sweating. Scholten is young, energetic, photogenic, and is running rings around King in fundraising:
SIOUX CITY -- For the third straight quarter, Democratic challenger J.D. Scholten brought in more campaign donations than eight-term incumbent Republican Rep. Steve King.
Scholten, a former paralegal and professional baseball player from Sioux City, raised $269,162 in the three-month period ending June 30. That's more than triple the $70,601 King collected during the most recent quarter, according to reports filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.
Scholten finished with $254,566 cash on hand after spending $209,944 in the quarter. After $40,298 in expenditures, King, of Kiron, had $117,554 in the bank at the end of the period.
Also worth noting: the poll accompanying the article above asking “Which Iowa 4th District candidate do you like?” lists Steve King, JD Scholten, and Charles Aldrich (Libertarian candidate). Results, while unscientific, are encouraging: as of this writing, Scholten has received 471 votes, or 75.2% of the total, to King’s 147 votes, or 23.5%. Aldrich trails badly with just 8 votes, but his mere presence in the race is encouraging as well, since he is far more likely to siphon votes away from King than Scholten, and in a close race every vote counts. Aldrich may provide a “safe place” for discouraged GOPers unwilling to cast a vote for a Democrat or stay home to throw a protest vote.
Finally, just want to mention one more time that IA-03 was moved to Toss-up from Lean Republican. This race features incumbent Republican David Young vs. Democrat Cindy Axne. Axne beat two opponents in the Democratic primary with 58% of the vote. IA-03 went to Trump by just 3 points in 2016, and went to Obama by 4 points in 2012, so this is definitely within pick-up territory given the current environment.
Voter Registrations
Ok, moving on to the next subject: registered voters.
Bear in mind reading the following quote that we’re talking about numbers since the beginning of 2015, so the election of 2016 factors into these numbers.
DES MOINES - More than 250,000 Iowans have registered to vote since the beginning of 2015, according to the Iowa Secretary of State's Office.
Secretary Paul Pate's office says the all-time high for active registered voters was broken in January 2017 at 2,045,864.
“It has never been easier to register to vote in Iowa,” Secretary Pate said. “The simplest way to register is online. Since my office instituted online voter registration in 2016, almost 90,000 Iowans have registered to vote or updated their voter registration through that system. I encourage every eligible Iowan to register to vote and to be a voter.”
Another sidenote: Fellow Iowans, if you need to register to vote, want to verify your voter registration information, or want other information related to voter registration, go to sos.iowa.gov/…
I dug into some numbers to see how the voter breakdown is looking right now compared to November 2016, here’s what I found, for what it’s worth:
Iowa Active Voter Registration
|
November 2016 |
July 2018 |
Democratic |
629,081 |
618,388 |
Republican |
662,167 |
642,826 |
Libertarian* |
|
11,150 |
No Party |
693,999 |
694,741 |
Other |
10,900 |
2,622
|
*Libertarian registrations were not broken out in the 2016 numbers and are included in the “other” totals.
So, there has been a drop in the total number of active registered voters of about 30,000 since November 2016 as some people’s registrations have gone inactive, but one number worth noting is that the Republicans seem to be losing active voters faster than the Democrats. From Nov. 2016 to July 2018, the GOP has lost 19,341 active voters, or 2.9% of the 2016 total, compared to 10,693, or 1.7% for Democrats. Evidence of a lack of GOP enthusiasm, perhaps? “No Party” voters, on the other hand increased, albeit only slightly, adding 742 registrations.
So what do those number mean? Well, others might be better able to parse the specifics than I, but it is encouraging to see the GOP losing active registrations at a faster rate than Democrats. Also, the increase in “No Party” probably bodes well for 2020 as the GOP sheds turns off independent voters — these new registrations are probably a combination of people fed up with Trump’s shenanigans and finally registering and Republicans bailing on their party affiliation.
Tariffs
Finally, let’s talk tariffs. This is an issue that has huge potential to swing Iowa voters. Trump’s tariffs are hitting Iowa farmers and manufacturers hard, and the GOP proposal of a $12 billion dollar farmer bribe/bailout isn’t selling quite as well as the GOP might have hoped:
President Donald Trump administration's plan to provide $12 billion in federal aid to American farmers hurt by a trade war drew a sharp mix of reactions Tuesday from Iowa farm groups, politicians, agricultural economists and others.
U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue described the initiative as a short-term strategy that will protect agricultural producers while Trump works on long-term trade deals to benefit agriculture and the entire U.S. economy.
But critics suggested the bailout is contrary to the traditional Republican philosophy of free markets and smaller government. They also pointed out that while Iowa farm income has been down, agriculture had been doing well from an export standpoint before it was negatively affected by Trump's decisions to impose tariffs and pick trade fights with China, Mexico, Canada and other major trading partners of the United States.
The usual GOP suspects are trying to put lipstick on the pig of a bailout idea, but even the ones trying to rally people to the cause aren’t calling it anything other than a short-term fix:
Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican campaigning for election, agreed with other Republicans that the $12 billion in federal aid to farmers is simply a short-term fix.
"As I've said all along, nobody wins in a trade war. We must continue to expand and open markets, protect the Renewable Fuel Standard and allow Iowa products to be sold across the globe. Iowa farmers are the most productive in the world and will always win when they have unrestricted access to markets," Reynolds said.
Neil Hamilton, a law professor and director of Drake University's Agricultural Law Center, said Trump's decision to impose tariffs on the country's best agricultural customers couldn't have come at a worse time for farmers. That's because of low commodity prices, potentially large crops and challenging economic situations.
Meanwhile, in addition to farmers, manufacturers in the state are feeling the pinch, too. Whirlpool has a major facility here in Iowa, for example:
"The global steel costs have risen substantially, and in particular, in the US, they have reached unexplainable levels," Bitzer told analysts. "Uncertainty" around additional tariffs and global trade has disrupted Whirlpool's supply chain and heightened pricing pressure.
Whirlpool and rivals, such as LG and Samsung, have increased prices on washing machines since the tariffs went into effect. That led some people to pass up a new purchase. Washing machine prices in June were up close to 20% from a year prior, according to the Labor Department.
Meanwhile, just a week ago Iowa was hit hard by multiple tornadoes that did damage to several major businesses (Vermeer’s manufacturing plant in Pella took a hard hit, destroying parts of the facility as well as a lot of employee’s cars, but fortunately no one was killed) as well as a number of smaller local businesses and residential areas. Rebuilding that damage is going to take steel, aluminum, replacement appliances for homes, etc. The cost of all that is now higher thanks to the Trump tariffs.
And of course, it doesn’t just affect big industries or rebuilding storm damage. Smaller businesses take a hit, too:
DEWITT, Iowa (AP) — An eastern Iowa factory has laid off workers, reduced production and delayed expansion plans in response to tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump's administration on steel imported from Canada.
The Black Cat Wear Parts factory in DeWitt has confirmed temporary layoffs of 10 of its 17 production employees this week, the Quad-City Times reported.
Plant Manager Josh Daniel said he hopes to rehire the employees, depending on future negotiations within the trade dispute. Canada began imposing retaliatory tariffs this month on $12.6 billion in U.S. goods.
[...]
The DeWitt factory has scaled back about 80 percent of its production capacity and is moving around 90 tons (82 metric tons) of monthly steel manufacturing to Canada, Daniel said. The company chose to move the factory's steel production to avoid paying the U.S. tariff, he said.
The tariffs have also halted the company's expansion plan, Daniel said. The DeWitt branch had purchased another location this year.
10 to 17 employees doesn’t sound like much, but DeWitt is a town of only about 5,300 residents, and of course there’ll be a domino effect here as these laid off employees tighten their belts, and of course this plant is far from the only business facing cost increases because of Donald’s Folly.
But the tariffs aren't just affecting farmers. Chuck McCarthy runs a cold storage meat warehousing business in the port of Wilmington, N.C.
"Well I'll tell you, we're a relatively new company," he says. "We've been very busy the first year and a half but have noticed a change since the tariffs with China and all have started."
McCarthy says his biggest customer was sending him sizable loads of pork products every day to ship to China. It was a lot a work — more than $100,000 a month.
"We're blast freezing that product for them, we're storing it for 'em, we're preparing it for export, we're loading the containers out," McCarthy says. But he says that about four weeks ago, "it just stopped."
McCarthy called to find out why. "They said their company was not packing anything for China as a result of the political situations that were going on."
So the trade fight between the Trump administration and China means a big hit for McCarthy's business.
And of course, to wrap up and circle back to agriculture where we started, the farmers are feeling it, which is why Donnie is desperate to wave cash under their nose to keep their votes:
Soybean prices last week fell to $7.79 per bushel, according to a Bloomberg report, the lowest in years.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a 7 in front of beans for a price,” said Robb Ewoldt, whose Scott County farm in Eastern Iowa includes soybeans, corn and cattle. “That’s really scary when our break-even is $9” per bushel.
Shipley similarly said the price of beans has fallen $2 a bushel below his cost of production.
“That will affect our bottom line,” he said. That price “is not sustainable. I cannot continue to do that if I sold today.”
[...]
Some farmers already are feeling the impact and dipping into their savings, Thiele said.
“We did have some saved up,” Thiele said. “We are burning through some of our reserves. If it continues on for another five years, it could be very detrimental to the whole pork industry and the whole state of Iowa.”
Some farmers hope contracts they signed over the winter, before prices dropped, will help minimize the damage.
Ewoldt sold a portion of his crop when prices were still in the range of $10 per bushel, and such contracts are not uncommon. The impact of that, however, will be lessened by the expected bumper crop, Ewoldt said. Instead of locking in what he thought would be roughly three-fourths of his crop at that price, it appears likely it will be only roughly half.
Thiele warned falling crop and livestock prices will not hurt only Iowa farmers, but rural communities in general. When farmers have to cut back on spending.
“When you expand, all that money goes to the construction worker, the concrete worker, the electrician. All of those people in rural Iowa make a living off this,” Thiele said. “Without us making any profit, it’s cutting into rural Iowa just as much as it is the Iowa pig farmer. It’s an everlasting effect.”
That’s all for now, folks.