Washington Post asks what's the matter with Iowa

Iowans ask what's the matter with Democrats

The Washington Post complains that Iowa has taken a “sharp right turn: from centrist state to ‘Florida of the North.’” The Post neglects to note that until recently, Florida was fairly centrist.

The Post quotes a progressive pastor who says, “this isn’t the Iowa I know.” But Iowa voters are saying this isn’t the Democratic party they knew.

What are the policies and proposals the Post identifies as marking Iowa’s “sharp right turn?” Most of them are LGBTQ-related.

They include limiting bathroom use in schools by biological sex, prohibiting the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through sixth grade, and banning puberty blockers. Back when Iowa earned its reputation as a centrist state, Democrats weren’t clamoring for boys to use girls bathrooms; for teaching “sexual orientation and gender identity” to elementary school students; and for puberty blockers.

As one Iowa legislator put it:

We’re moving from a purple state because the message the Democrats are using is not the message the average Iowans want to hear. I think in general Iowans support all Iowans but not teaching those types of [LBGTQ] things in third grade and having underage people doing transition surgeries and taking hormone blockers. We’re trying to be supportive of all Iowans but the other side is happy to promote the most egregious, far-left agenda and that is where we are at.

We see the same dynamic with other Iowa initiatives cited by the Post. It mentions “proposals to prohibit spending on diversity and inclusion offices in state universities and to allow health-care providers to refuse care on the basis of religious beliefs.” When Iowa earned its reputation for centrism, the DEI industrial complex hadn’t flowered in the state; nor were health care workers being forced to violate their religious beliefs.

The Post mourns the fact that anti-woke initiatives have gained traction in a state that “was the first to desegregate schools in 1868, amended its civil rights law to protect sexual orientation and gender identity in 2007 and legalized same-sex marriage in 2009.” The Post fails to understand the distinction between anti-discrimination principles and woke indoctrination and the distinction between a live-and-let-live mindset and shoving non-mainstream points of view down the throats of citizens, including small children.

More importantly, those who run the Democratic Party don’t seem to understand these distinctions. Iowans apparently do.

The Post cites one more movement in Iowa that, in its view, signals a sharp right turn — school choice. New legislation will allow all Iowa families to use taxpayer-funded education savings accounts for private school tuition.

Is this a right-wing measure? Only in the sense that left-wing Democrats, spurred on by teachers’ unions, hate school choice.

But Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, supports school choice. And a 2022 poll found that two-thirds of Democrats and two-thirds of independents support the concept.

In sum, it’s true that Iowa has shifted decidedly away from Democrats and towards Republicans, but misleading for the Post to claim that the state has lurched to the right. Ideologically, Iowa voters are probably about where they traditionally have been. It’s the Democratic Party that’s shifted.

Will other states follow Iowa’s electoral shift? I think so, unless Democrats stop backing woke policies that a majority of voters find weird and/or unpalatable — provided that Republicans don’t put up candidates that voters find weird and/or unpalatable.