2016

Guest post from Addisu Demissie I landed at the Des Moines airport as a 22-year-old on May 31st, 2003 completely unaware of what I was getting myself into.  A month or so earlier, I had been offered a job as a Field Organizer for John Kerry in the Iowa caucuses. I knew nothing of what…

I am a Democrat because of Socks the Cat. Okay, there’s many other reasons than that, but that’s where it started. When you’re a seven-year-old kid with a black cat and the new President has a black cat too, that’s reason enough to support a political party. As I grew up, the values I developed…

Here we are: the final few days of the Iowa Caucus. How a candidate spends their time in the precious waning hours says a lot about the state of the race and what each feels they still need to accomplish. The three Democrats plan on barnstorming the state, with Hillary Clinton bringing in Bill and…

Democrats comforting themselves with the thought that 2016 will be a cakewalk with Donald Trump or Ted Cruz as the most-likely Republican nominee may want to think again. Take a look at what’s happening on the other side in Iowa and there’s some disturbing trends at work. Marco Rubio is about to finish a strong…

Union members have a lot at stake in the 2016 elections, public employee workers top among them. To fight back against Republicans’ efforts to roll back workers’ rights, many of the nation’s largest unions have endorsed Hillary Clinton to lead the ticket this fall. One of the biggest efforts has been spearheaded by AFSCME, the…

It’s that time in the Iowa Caucus campaign where you can easily run into a celebrity, business leader or famous political figure pretty much anywhere you go in Iowa. This Tuesday afternoon Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben and Jerry’s dropped in to meet customers at Smokey Row Coffee shop in Des Moines on…

A sense of fatalism has crept into the leadership of Iowa Republicans. Faced with the very real possibility that Donald Trump could be Republicans’ standard bearer in the fall, many leading Republicans in Iowa are cozying up to the bombastic front-runner. Now they’re sharing stages with the man whose policies they’ve distanced themselves from several…

Bernie Sanders has talked to a whole lot of people in Iowa. On Sunday he passed the big milestone of combined Iowa turnouts of 50,000. It happened at a notably smaller and more subdued conference room at Upper Iowa University, filled with about 300 people. But, true to form, the event was still very good…

Planned Parenthood President and CEO Cecile Richards is traveling around Iowa this weekend in support of Hillary Clinton, who the Planned Parenthood Action Fund has endorsed. She’s hitting up a number of house parties and Clinton field offices to meet volunteers, supporters and undecided Iowans to persuade them on Clinton’s record of women’s healthcare access…

Clinton County was not Clinton country in 2008. The eastern Iowa working-class county situated on the Mississippi River broke for neighbor-state Senator Barack Obama in his 2008 Iowa Caucus win, besting Hillary Clinton here by a 37% to 34% margin. That defeat in the county that shares a name with the former Secretary of State…