Polls gave the left hope that states like Iowa could go blue again. The election told a very different story
Dancing in the streets was sweet after a democracy on edge reclaimed itself by virtue of its great metroplexes. Come Monday, sobriety recalled four days spent glued to TV maps of great rural swaths of America awash in red. Iowa and Ohio, which Joe Biden himself thought were in play, went red again. The blue wall barely held in Wisconsin. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looms large.
Poll after poll showed dead heats between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Iowa, and between the Republican senator Joni Ernst and Democrat Theresa Greenfield. The pandemic was worsening. The economy was not well despite massive agriculture bailouts. Ernst flubbed the price of soybeans during a debate. It appeared Iowa could swing back to the Democrats. After all, Barack Obama is not that distant a memory.
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Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book, Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland