Hawkeye Pierced

The Republican Party squandered its best chance to pick up a Democratic U.S. Senate seat when Joni Ernst - whose major qualifications for the office are being a Tea Partier and being a pig farmer - was nominated to run for outgoing Democratic Senator Tom Harkin's seat in Iowa.  Her views on climate change are incoherent and her opposition to the minimum wage is unconscionable.  She sounds like a candidate that would be very hard for the Democrats to lose to.  Iowa Democrats, though, actually worked hard at losing to her by nominating Bruce Braley, a congressman who, like too many Democratic candidates for statewide legislative office, looks great on paper and would probably make a great senator, but is a lousy campaigner and an awful candidate. Ernst has capitalized on this, pulling ahead of Braley by six points in one poll. I suspect that Tom Harkin - who first won this seat in 1984 by running a populist campaign against corn-pone right-wing Republican incumbent Roger Jepsen - wishes he'd run again. 

Braley is not Harkin, whose race against Jepsen I followed for a election analysis project for a political science course back in college.  Braley's a populist without the popular appeal. Ernst has exploited Braley's soft, white underbelly,  making of an issue of a brouhaha that Braley had with a neighbor over chickens from his neighbor's farm to show just how insensitive he is to the little guy.  Or something like that.  Of course, the issue has nothing to do with who's better at representing the Hawkeye State in the Senate,  and Ernst's positions are extremely insensitive to the little guy, but who cares when all that matters is projecting an everyperson image for the voters - a time-honored tradition in America going back to the age of Andrew Jackson?  Like most far-right Republicans, of course, Ernst has been spectacularly successful at that, even as she makes Braley look like an elitist - pretty hard to do in Iowa, where there's no elite.  But Braley has made himself look bad enough.      

This race could determine which party controls the Senate, and it looks increasingly likely that the Guardians Of Privilege (GOP) will win in the end.  Maybe Iowa's open U.S. Senate seat will stay Democratic, despite the current poll numbers. I know this much:  If Braley loses, he will not get a second chance for a Senate seat against Charles Grassley, Iowa's incumbent Republican senator, in 2016, even if his loss doesn't have any effect on the outcome of which party has the Senate majority - because he's a Democrat, and Democrats who lose the first time don't get a chance at a second time.  If Ernst loses, expect her to go for Grassley's seat should he choose to step down in 2016.  Why?  Because she's a Republican, and Republicans try and try again until they win, or give up on their own, or until they die. (This is known to old-timers as "the full Stassen.")  But then, the world created by Citizens United has set that in stone.  The way things are going in these elections is not good for Iowa, and it's not good for the country.