What explains the way Iowa votes?

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Also, Semafor tattles: How does the state of Iowa vote in presidential elections?

In recent years, the state's pattern has been hard to explain. Here's the way the state voted in 2008:

Iowa presidential election, 2008
Obama: 53.9%
McCain: 44.4%

Obama won by almost ten points. Here's where things went from there:

Iowa presidential election, 2012
Obama: 52.0%
Romney: 46.2%

Iowa presidential election, 2016
Trump: 51.2%
Clinton: 41.7%

Iowa presidential election, 2020
Trump: 53.1%
Biden: 44.9%

Offhand, we can't puzzle that out. Consider the shift in statewide voter sentiment from 2012 to 2016:

Nationwide, the Democratic candidate lost a bit less than three points from 2012 to 2016. The party went from Obama's 51.1% nationwide vote in 2012 down to Clinton's 48.2% four years later.

Statewide in Iowa, the Democratic candidate lost more than ten points over that same period—from Obama's 52.0% all the way down to Clinton's 41.7%.  That was a very large drop—almost four times the nationwide norm. Four years later, Biden only won back three points.

Offhand, we can't explain that statewide voting pattern. Now, the Iowa poll suggests that Candidate Harris might actually win the Hawkeye State! (Or possibly not, of course.)

In our view, tis a dream devoutly to be wished. Is it going to happen? We have no idea.

Meanwhile:

On this very morning, fire trucks from the New York Times arrived at the scene of the fire.  As noted this morning, we refer to this "News Analysis" piece from the front page of today's print editions:

NEWS ANALYSIS 
Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds

It took just two minutes for former President Donald J. Trump to utter his first lie of the evening, claiming once again that the 2020 election had been stolen.

By four minutes into the televised interview on Thursday night, he was claiming that this time around “we’re leading by a lot” in the polls, setting up another false claim of a stolen election should he lose on Tuesday.

[...]

Truth is not always an abundant resource in the White House under any president, but never has the Oval Office been occupied by someone so detached from verifiable facts... 

The analysis piece goes on at great length. It arrives at the scene of the conflagration clownishly late in the game.

As we've long noted, the endless misstatements of Candidate Trump should have formed a major "news hook" long ago. As we've frequently noted, when a major party nominee makes so many crazy misstatements, that behavior should count as front-page news every time it happens. 

(Stating the obvious, endless unsupported claims about past and future "stolen elections" should be viewed as especially noxious, given the basic structure of our failing American system.)

The Times has arrived at the scene of the blaze just as the ashes fly. Apparently, some people inside the New York Times may have agreed with this assessment as this candidate's lunacy—and the silence about it at the Times—continued to move along.

This morning, Semafor tattles! At that site, Max Tani describes the apparent unrest in a lengthy report which starts in the manner shown:

In a frank internal meeting, The New York Times wrestled with its political role

With the 2024 presidential election a few weeks away, one question was top of mind for staff at The New York Times: Had the paper’s leadership noticed how many Democrats had become furious at it over its coverage of Donald Trump?

The Times, and the American media at large, absorb endless vitriol from the right. At a rally Sunday, Donald Trump joked that he wouldn’t mind if another would-be assassin had to “shoot through” the press pen to get to him.

But when the country’s most influential newsroom assembled at the paper’s New York headquarters for a nearly 90-minute-long off-the-record Q&A with the paper’s top editors on Oct. 24, some of its journalists voiced a different set of concerns about the 2024 election and how its outcome might shape the paper’s future.

Semafor obtained a recording of the meeting, which offers extraordinary insight into a key American institution under intense external scrutiny and internal pressure...

The report is there for all to peruse. To read the report, click here.

The Times has arrived at the scene of the crime. Election Day is tomorrow.

In our view, this silence has been a form of journalistic inanity pretty much all the way down. We leave you with this week's top question:

Might this journalistic failure to perform also turn out to be one of our nation's deeply destructive "new normals?"