Category: Living in Society

How does one cope with the fact Republicans hold all four Iowa congressional seats? Figure out a connection to some other Democrat. For me, that’s Jan Schakowsky who represents Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, including Skokie, where our child lives. Her periodic newsletters keep me up to speed without all the high drama of following Democratic leadership, and avoids the complaint-filled disinformation of my Republican member.

The passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) is always a dogfight. Rep. Schakowsy tells it like it is as a Democrat. The good thing about following her is it gives me a starting point in discussing politics with our child. She is also in the thick of what’s happening. Here is her June 19 newsletter about the NDAA passing the U.S. House:

Last week, I joined nearly all Democrats in voting against passage of the shortsighted and harmful National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025. The original NDAA that passed out of committee 57-1 included numerous provisions that would make life better for service members and their families, including a 19.5% pay raise for junior enlisted troops, a 4.5% increase for all other service members, increased investments in childcare, and a restoration of the full Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH). These policies would go a long way towards helping ensure our military personnel and their families have what they need and deserve to thrive.

Unfortunately, the version of the NDAA that made it to the House floor included poison pill provisions that would make it impossible for women in uniform to get access to the reproductive health care they need, eliminate the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Department of Defense, and attack the rights of LGBTQI+ service members and their families. This bill would do active harm to our national security and military readiness, and I could not vote for a bill that assaults our fundamental freedoms and attacks countless Americans.

In closing, I would like to take time to recognize Juneteenth National Independence Day. It was on this day, 159 years ago, that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with word of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. At long last, the remaining slaves were freed.

Black history is American history, and it should not be ignored, morphed, nor hidden. Juneteenth is a day for us all to come together to talk about our past and look towards our future. We cannot allow those who peddle fear and prejudice to take our country backwards. I will continue to use my platform to fight for a more equitable nation for all.

Have a great rest of the week, Jan.

If you seek to follow your children’s congressperson, or anything happening in the U.S. House, here is a link to the House master alert page. Follow this link to find a specific congressperson.

Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said the message for Democratic candidates is clear in 2024. There are two issues: reproductive freedom and public education. Both are equally important. Where the rubber meets the road, during local political canvassing, many voters equate a discussion about “reproductive freedom” with one about “abortion.” In fact, Konfrst used both terms in her speech to delegates at the June 15 state convention. My question is will “reproductive freedom” do the work?

In my latest iteration as a political canvasser, beginning during the 2004 election cycle, I’ve been meeting with voters where they are. No one keeps track of how many voters they contact, yet certain themes stand out. One of them is abortion.

There is a hard line for people who oppose abortion. It’s the first question they ask of a canvasser, and the first one to shut down any dialogue if the answer is wrong. “Your candidate wants abortion to be legal? This conversation is over.” The main purpose of the canvass was accomplished: This voter is in the no column. It’s time to move on.

Polling done by the Des Moines Register is clear: “61 percent of Iowans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases and 33 percent said it should be illegal in most or all cases.” Establishing the ability for women and their physician to choose to have an abortion as part of women’s health care has broad support. The key question is will that matter in a hyper-partisan election? The Magic 8 ball returned “Reply hazy, try again.”

At one of my workplaces, my supervisor was an anti-abortion activist. That made for interesting conversations while traversing the countryside together in a rental car, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and making sales calls. I can’t count how many times I heard statistics on abortions from him. Some facts: before Dobbs, in 2021, there were 3,761 recorded abortions in Iowa. 625,978 were reported to the Centers for Disease Control that year. Literally millions of children were being killed by abortionists, my supervisor said. This was the same person who enabled me to meet John McCain, allowed me to register people to vote in the workplace, and let me lobby for the company with Dave Loebsack while we were in D.C. It was a weird work experience.

My point in telling this story is I learned the anti-abortion crowd is well financed, highly organized, and well connected. Groups like Heritage Action, part of the dark money Koch network, plan to keep awareness of how to restrict abortion rights front and center. They are in it for the long haul and are willing to spend resources and time accomplishing their objectives.

It is important to remember anti-abortion activists worked continuously for five decades to overturn Roe vs. Wade. They will not walk away from an electorate because polling shows voters favor the ability to have an abortion. We recently saw debates about abortion pills, in vitro fertilization, military policy toward abortion, and more. Women’s health care will be a constant presence in the election, creating a haze of what-aboutism, misinformation, disinformation, and outright deception. The intent is to obfuscate and by doing so, prevent Democrats from getting elected. Konfrst is right: we need to address this head on through our campaign messaging.

Will voters who support restricting abortion rights crossover and vote for Joe Biden and down ballot Democrats? I wouldn’t think so. We must know who they are and formally identify them in our database. Talking to them may be a lost cause, yet it is part of the canvassing work.

Democrats can bridge the gap where people live. There may be people, regardless of party registration for whom right to choose is valued. According to the Register poll, there are a lot of them. Once we find those people we must give them support, and if needed, some cover in return for a vote. That’s a lot different from asking whether they will vote for a specific candidate. It requires a longer term commitment to community that goes beyond elections. It would be good for Democrats to learn how to do that, and fast.

When it comes to messaging for the November election, we should follow the lead of our political leaders. To the extent Democrats do that, and frame the discussion as one of “reproductive freedom,” winning is possible. In the end, though, we will be talking about abortion because that is the vernacular voters use. There is no escaping it. We should embrace it.

The metaphor Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart used at the June 15 state convention was apt. After saying Democratic candidates had a tough road ahead, she likened the work leading to the November election to clearing rocks from a farm field. Hart talked about her experience farming in Iowa, having to pick rocks from fields with her siblings, reported the Iowa Capitol Dispatch.

“Sometimes, I think we’re in a rocky place right now, right?” Hart said. “And we’ve got to pick up that rock that makes the most sense for us. … Find the thing that you can do, that you can contribute to this effort, and do it in spades. That’s what we’ve got to do from now until November.”

Democratic political operatives are more used to having a specific plan, falling in line, and then working the plan. “Find the thing that you can do…” is counterintuitive. People scratch their head and ask, what does that even mean. I believe Hart is getting at the idea that Democrats must take more ownership of our politics now that the coordinated campaign is in the rear view mirror. There is no presidential campaign to filter down directives on what should be happening on the ground. As individual Democrats, we own this campaign. If we do the work, we have a chance of winning. There will be no more bitching about the coordinated campaign because it’s permanently gone. Simply the work remains.

It will also be challenging for Iowa Democrats to stay on message during the upcoming fall campaign. That’s mostly because the Republican Party is such an unruly, authoritarian mess. Legislation passed in recent sessions obfuscates the legislative terrain and serves as chaff clogging the radar of Democrats getting their bearings.

A case in point is the law passed last session related to immigration. Democrats and everyone with half a brain knew from jump street the law would not pass judicial muster. Republicans didn’t care if they would be sued over it. When U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction, everyone knew the argument that federal immigration law preempted the state law would prevail. As reported by the Cedar Rapids Gazette, “As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Locher wrote in his decision. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”

Whether it be abortion, education, immigration, or whatever, poorly written, Republican-backed legislation is expected to raise a number of political issues this year. Attorney General Brenna Bird will be busy. It will serve as a distraction from Democratic work to focus messaging on women’s health care, abortion policy, and education.

At the convention, Iowa House Democratic Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst had a message for all Iowa Democratic candidates for this fall’s elections: When talking to voters, stay on message, and that message should be about reproductive freedom and education policies.

“Message discipline is critically important this year, every year,” Konfrst said as reported in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. “But this year especially because Iowans are voting on two issues this year: What’s on their mind is public education and abortion and reproductive freedom. And guess what. They’re with us. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. … “(Republicans) are wrong on public education and reproductive freedom. They’re wrong, and Iowans aren’t with them. Iowans are with us. So we’re going to talk about the issues that matter to Iowans, not just to us.”

Democrats own a clear goal for concise messaging. Republicans are all over the map with bad laws, lawsuits, negative reactions to the federal government, and generalized hubris cluttering the campaign battlefields. I don’t know if that creates an electoral environment where Democrats win. It clears the field for a new kind of politics. What do Democrats have to lose?

I was selected as a delegate to the Iowa Democratic Party state convention which convenes at 10 a.m. today. There weren’t enough volunteer delegates nominated at the county convention, so I threw my hat in the ring knowing I might not attend. By the time readers see this, I will have decided. I don’t believe a political convention is needed to fairly and effectively organize a political party. Our current habits go way back to before the state’s founding.

During the early 1830s, Iowa didn’t have much of a government. Decisions of consequence were made by businessmen such as George Davenport, Antoine LeClaire, and others. A concern for having clear title to sell lots in the fledgling city of Davenport was real, but not always a main concern for speculators. There was also the sticky issue that the Sac and Fox indigenous tribes believed they had not ceded land for early settlers. The resulting 1832 Black Hawk War settled the matter, as far as that goes, in Eastern Iowa and Southwestern Minnesota. When Davenport, LeClaire and others decided to invest in land speculation, as they did when in 1835 some of the initial platting of city blocks occurred in Davenport, there was little government to restrain them.

On July 9, 1840, in what was then called Bloomington (now Muscatine), Democrats held the first territorial convention in Iowa. Delegates from 16 counties adopted a “non-interference with slavery” platform. The convention elected Augustus C. Dodge as delegate to the national congress and approved a brief platform with multiple resolutions for Dodge to take with him to Washington. Read more about early Iowa political conventions in David C. Mott’s Annals of Iowa article titled “Iowa Political Conventions and Platforms.”

The Democratic Party’s first convention after Iowa achieved statehood on Dec. 28, 1846 was held April 24, 1884 in Burlington. Its purpose was to elect delegates to the national convention of 1884. Resolutions adopted at the convention include granting 160 acres to former Union soldiers in perpetuity, reducing taxes and tariffs, and eliminating laws that infringed on the freedom of Iowans. Delegates approved a state central committee of 13 members. In short, these are the sorts of things Democrats do at current state conventions. If all this sounds familiar, it’s because a lot hasn’t changed.

The most significant change that impacts party politics has been decentralization of information through the internet. We no longer need a group of “special” state delegates to represent our interests. What we do need is a way to be more inclusive in our politics, a way that enables us to participate directly if we so choose.

The Iowa precinct caucuses that chose presidential delegates to the state and national convention was an organizing method that engaged people in Democratic politics. More people attended caucus during presidential years, while in the background the same small group of people ran the party. This year, as part of my convention registration, I had to declare I was a Biden delegate. The meaning of that is much less than if I had joined my colleagues at the Biden table during the 2020 precinct caucuses.

With the demise of presidential preference caucuses, the Iowa Democratic Party must change how we operate. Party Chair Rita Hart is well aware of this and has stated as much in public. I am not hopeful the state party as represented by today’s delegates realizes this as well as Hart does. It seems to me, from emails I received in the run up to the convention, there are too many insiders protecting turf through seldom read resolutions and initiatives. Iowa Democrats, and I’m not talking about the small cadre of leadership, must stop tinkering around the edges of having a party, and devote more energy into electing Democrats where we can and across the board. If the state party doesn’t help us do that in tangible ways, we should ditch it.

I don’t believe the national party will let us do away with a state convention. That said, I’m not sure of the value of meaningless rituals like participating in the convention. Presidential preference used to hold our interest. It is likely a good thing that went away so we can focus more on local races. Whether we will is an open question.

Good luck to today’s delegates.