November 2018

During the 2016 campaign, Trump and his supporters crucified Hillary Clinton over her use of private emails while she served as Secretary of State in the Obama Administration. Trump’s campaign rallies regularly featured chants of “lock her up” based on Clinton’s use of emails. Trump called Clinton’s email usage a scandal “bigger than Watergate” and…

 Iowa Starting Line Podcast host Pat Rynard discusses the changing voter trends in the Iowa suburbs with Ankeny Area Democrats Chair Zaak Barnes and Representative-Elect Jennifer Konfrst, who flipped a red Iowa House seat to blue to in the Des Moines suburbs.

The woman in charge of Democrats’ campaign efforts in the House next year will be Cheri Bustos, one of the party’s leading strategist on winning difficult Midwestern seats. The Illinois congresswoman was selected today by her House colleagues to chair the DCCC, the party’s campaign arm that oversees most House races. She beat out two…

I’ve learned a lot of lessons about money, some easier than others, in the years since I pushed a lawnmower back and forth across Mrs. Carroll’s and Mrs. Greiner’s yards in Bloomfield long ago. My start as a gainfully employed contributor to the U.S. economy was inauspicious in the grand scheme of things. But I…

 Iowa Starting Line Podcast host Pat Rynard updates you on where Starting Line is headed for the rest of 2018, and we recount a recent forum with national reporters at ISU, discussing their takes on identity politics voting, the new Democratic Party and the future of the Iowa Caucus.

There has been a chorus of criticism demanding that acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker recuse himself from the Mueller investigation. It’s primarily based on Whitaker’s previous statements referring to the Mueller investigation as a witch hunt and his loyal support for President Trump’s push-back on the probe. That combined with Whitaker’s previous statements on ways…

Fred Hubbell campaigned extensively throughout rural Iowa during the 2018 election. Voters may just not have noticed it. As Iowa Democrats pick up the pieces from another stinging statewide loss, a lot of focus has been paid to the party’s continued lopsided defeats throughout rural Iowa. Carrying only 11 counties statewide, as Hubbell did against…

We Iowans like to think of ourselves as the true occupants of middle America, the geographic and societal equivalent of Baby Bear’s porridge. We are not as conservative as some sections of our country, nor as liberal as other sections. We don’t have the wealth that some regions do. We don’t have the poverty that…