Remember how the Washington Post complained when the purple California turned solidly blue? Oh, you don’t remember that? Well, that is because it never happened. However, when a formerly purple state turns red, as is the case with Iowa, the Washington Post can be counted to go into full whine mode over it as happened on Monday in a story by Annie Gowen “Iowa’s sharp right turn: From centrist state to ‘Florida of the North’.”
Republicans were empowered to back “a costly school choice bill and legislation targeting the LGBTQ community, a historic divergence from Iowa’s history as a civil rights bastion.”
Iowa has veered so far to the right in recent years that its political landscape is virtually unrecognizable from the centrist place that chose Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and was one of the earliest states in the country to affirm same-sex marriage. A joke among statehouse reporters is that Iowa is becoming the “Florida of the North” — without the beaches.
Sounds like the “statehouse reporters” are as liberal as Annie Gowen. The complaining continued:
“This isn’t the Iowa I know,” said Lee Schott, pastor of Valley United Methodist Church in West Des Moines, who called herself “progressive” politically. She was standing outside the House chamber on a recent weekday, hoping to lobby Republican legislators against the transgender bills — and not having much luck.
A Republican-led Iowa “used to mean welcoming immigrants, helping refugees, supporting our great public school system,” Schott said. “It doesn’t mean any of those things now. It’s ‘anti’ those things now.”
Legal immigrants? Right now the Biden border policies have led to such a flood of illegal crossings that the support systems of states such as Iowa have become overwhelmed. Of course, no reference to that in the story slamming Iowa for the high crime of going from purple to red.
During last year’s midterm elections, Iowa bucked the national trend and delivered a commanding victory for Republicans — reelecting Reynolds, flipping the one remaining House seat held by Democrats, winning all statewide offices save one and widening GOP majorities in both the state House and Senate.
Political analysts in the state say that Iowa’s swing has solidified over the past seven years as reliably Democratic working-class voters abandoned the party in favor of Donald Trump’s message, and the state’s large percentage of independent voters also moved toward the Republicans.
A swing most definitely in the wrong direction according to the very obvious biases of a rather irked Annie Gowen.
