Looking to rebuild, Democrats face major challenges in rural Iowa

Democrats running in a crowded primary race for Iowa governor are confronting an uncomfortable reality: Their party’s reputation is in tatters in rural Iowa.

Battered by years of discordant messaging, ham-handed strategy and myopic focus on the state's urban centers, the party's candidates now face a steep climb as they try to build statewide coalitions for the 2018 election.

That reality was apparent in campaign swings by gubernatorial candidates Nate Boulton, Fred Hubbell and John Norris in recent weeks. From Independence in northeast Iowa to Bedford in the far southwest, local activists worried aloud that Democrats have become estranged from members of the rural middle class and distrusted on the core issues of economic opportunity that drive their votes.

“We feel like we’ve been forgotten and that the Democratic Party is controlled by Des Moines,” former state Rep. Gene Ficken told Hubbell during a campaign meeting at an Independence coffee shop. “We need somebody to listen to us.”

In Bedford, Taylor County Democratic Chairwoman Betty Brummett lamented a polarized political environment where being outed as a Democrat can strain friendships and hurt business. Asked how the party might rebuild its brand, she was all but at a loss.

“I don’t know how we change it," she said. "I wish I did.”

Democrats’ challenges in rural Iowa are plain to see in its electoral history over the last four election cycles. Since 2010, the party has lost six of seven races for president, governor or U.S. senator. Across those six losses, the party won just 15 of Iowa’s 99 counties; in five of those losses, the Democratic candidate carried fewer than 10 counties.

INTERACTIVE MAP: Turning Iowa red

During a visit last month to Corning, the seat of Iowa's smallest county by population, Boulton met Kathy Ennis, a barista at Backgrounds Coffee Bar and the wife of Tim Ennis, a two-time Democratic candidate for the Iowa House.

Tim Ennis challenged longtime incumbent Republican state Rep. Jack Drake in 2014, losing badly in a strongly GOP district, Kathy recalled as she prepared a latte for Boulton. When Drake died the following year, her husband ran — and lost — again in the special election to fill the seat.

“It’s just impossible in this district. Just impossible,” Kathy Ennis said with a sigh. “Anywhere west of I-35 is just all Republican.”

Ennis isn’t wrong: The western-most seat currently held by a Democrat in the Iowa Senate ends at the Polk County line. Save for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election victory, no Democrat running for president, senator or governor has won a single county west of Interstate 35 since 2008.

But it wasn’t always this way.

Between 1998 and 2008, Democrats won seven of 10 top-of-the-ticket contests by routinely carrying 50 or more counties — including wide swaths of rural western Iowa. Even Ennis’ corner of the world was once hospitable to Democrats: Adams and neighboring Union County both went Democratic in five marquee statewide races between 2002 and 2008.

So what happened?

A big part of the problem has been the party’s message, activists said, which has sometimes been too liberal for rural voters but more often too specific and doctrinaire.

“We’ve let ourselves get defined as the party of causes, rather than the party making certain that the people who live in the state have the economic opportunity to raise their families and get ahead,” said Patty Judge, the Democratic former lieutenant governor and secretary of agriculture from rural Albia who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2016.

At a Boulton campaign meet-and-greet in Corning, Adams County Democratic Chairman Martin Olive provided a concrete example of that very problem: the party’s hardening commitment to a $15-per-hour minimum wage.

The increase has been embraced by candidates in Iowa and across the country, largely on the argument that it will raise living standards and dignity for the urban working poor.

“Let me tell you how that translates down here,” Olive told Boulton. “You’ve got hardworking welders at (local manufacturer) PPI who make 15 bucks an hour who think lazy people at McDonald's are going to make the same thing they make — and they are pissed. That’s how it plays out here.”

Olive has a point, said Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price.

“The problem is that our message has gotten so specific that we only talk about $15 minimum wage or a higher minimum wage when really we need to be talking more about values,” Price said. “You have to talk about the values that define the party, and we haven’t done as good of a job with that in the last few cycles as we need to.”

The party has stumbled at a strategic level in rural Iowa as well.

Sometimes, state and local activists said, the party has ignored rural Iowa outright, on the misguided belief the state could be won in the cities alone.

“This idea percolates every now and again that we just have to win 10 counties and then we win statewide,” Price said. “I’ve never actually seen that be successful in my 20 years of doing this.”

Several activists pointed to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. After campaigning extensively across Iowa during the caucuses, Clinton visited only Des Moines and Cedar Rapids in the general election campaign. On Election Day, she carried just six counties — the ones encompassing the state’s three largest metro areas and three public universities.

Gene Ficken, the former state representative from Independence, recalled bad advice he received from the state party as he sought re-election in 2010, the year in which the party’s long downward slide began.

“We were getting hammered out here on the gay marriage issue, and when we talked to Des Moines, they said, ‘Well, our polling shows that it’s not an issue,’” he recalled. Ficken lost his race, and Democrats lost control of the House.

“Too often I think the Democratic Party has been controlled by urban people, and they don’t listen enough to what’s going on in rural Iowa,” he said.

So what’s the way forward?

Candidates, party officials and activists believe they can reintroduce the Democratic Party to rural Iowa by showing up and listening to voters’ concerns, by making the case that Republican control has taken the state backward and, above all, by convincing voters that Democrats’ values match their own.

In Bedford, Brummett, the Taylor County chairwoman, carries a stack of business cards with her everywhere she goes. Printed across the front in oversized letters are the words “I am an Iowa Democrat.” On the back, the cards read, “We share these values: Integrity; Responsibility; Security; and Stewardship.”

When she handed them out at the county fair last summer, some people recoiled at the notion of even associating with a Democrat.

“I said, ‘Read the back, and if there’s anything on there you disagree with, let’s talk,'” Brummett recalled.

That person-to-person, back-to-basics approach is exactly what the state party and statewide candidates say is necessary to make up a decade of lost ground.

“If you re-engage on those shared values, then you begin a better conversation on the things we need to do,” gubernatorial candidate John Norris said. “We can have a productive process going forward about policies we can agree on. But it has to start with the conversation about shared values.”

Norris has committed much of his campaign so far to rural outreach, visiting some 70 counties since announcing his candidacy. At a recent event in Garner, in north-central Iowa, he drew three local activists for a conversation that lingered longest on hog confinements and rural job opportunities.

Once the conversation is underway, Democrats are confident they can make a compelling case that their agenda does more for voters than the one Republicans have enacted since taking full control of state government last year.

Price has begun writing op-eds pitching the Democratic agenda. One ran late last month in the Lyon County Reporter, a newspaper serving the conservative northwest corner of the state.

“They are making it easier for us because they’re continuing to find ways to make it harder for people in rural Iowa,” Price said of Republicans. “They’re going to pay a price for that next November.”

The gubernatorial candidates have boiled down their agenda to the broad strokes of supporting public education, ensuring access to health care and raising family incomes.

“If we want to keep people living in rural Iowa — and keep their children and grandchildren living in rural Iowa — then we have to do better on those three things,” Hubbell said in an interview following his visit to Independence. “All parents want their kids to have a good education, all kids want a decent job after they graduate, and all of them need health care. Those are the big issues out there.”

Even more elemental than offering an agenda, though, is simply showing up. Boulton, Hubbell and Norris alike stressed that view, committing themselves to extensive travels beyond Polk County and the Cedar Valley in the campaign ahead.

“This is step one,” Boulton said last month as he walked through downtown Corning on the way to Ennis’ coffee shop. “You’ve got to make the argument in person. You can’t hope they’re going to get it through 30-second TV ads the week before the election if you’re not showing up in the community to talk about it ahead of time.”