Beyond Red & Blue

The two (or three) faces of Iowa

With the Iowa caucuses little more than a week away, the holiday season is already over for political bloggers. I'm not rash enough to make predictions, and I can't add much to the warnings that turnout in the Iowa caucuses is so unpredictable that polls and past election results are of limited value. But there is data to be mined while we wait for the actual vote. Below is a map showing how the general election vote in each Iowa county changed from 2000 to 2004. This is an especially important data point in Iowa, because it was one of only two states to oppose George W. Bush in 2000 but support him four years later (New Mexico was the other), and the result was extremely close both times (Al Gore won by 4,000 votes and Bush won by 10,000 votes). The consensus view is that the Democrats need to win the state back if they have any hope of winning the White House next time.

So this map may give some context to the results of next week's caucuses. A Democrat who does well in the counties colored red (the ones with a significant number of voters who supported Al Gore but not John Kerry) may be better able to appeal to independents or "soft" Democrats in the fall. The three largest counties in this category are Pottawattamie, which borders Nebraska; and Dallas and Warren, which include newer parts of the Des Moines metro area. In the last caucuses, John Kerry won Pottawattamie and John Edwards won Dallas and Warren counties. If Edwards can take Pottawattamie this time, he not only has a good chance of winning the caucuses but also can strengthen his "electability" argument.

On the Republican side, the red counties are where Bush's 2004 campaign had the most resonance, and they represent areas essential for holding onto a 51 percent majority. In 2000, Bush won a majority of the caucus vote in Pottawattamie and Dallas counties, but more conservative candidates held him below 50 percent in Warren County.

The green counties on our map showed more resistance to Bush's re-election campaign, and in a few of them his percentage even declined from 2000 to 2004. A Democrat who does well in these areas may be better suited to a more partisan campaign, one where the right kind of turnout could push the party to just over 50 percent. The three largest counties in this category are Johnson and Story, which both have large universities, and Linn, which includes Cedar Rapids (the largest city in Iowa outside of Des Moines). Kerry won all three in 2004, even though Howard Dean had been expected to sweep the university towns.

Green counties have an opposite meaning for the Republican candidates. They represent the places where the contemporary GOP has had tough sledding, and they are why Iowa has changed from solidly Republican (as late as 1980, when Ronald Reagan took it by double digits) to one of the most unpredictable states in presidential politics. If a Republican candidate shows strength here, he may be able to win back some former GOP voters in November -- unless turnout in the Republican caucuses is so poor that only diehard party loyalists vote. Bush easily carried the two college counties in the 2000 Republican caucuses, but the hard-line conservatives (including Steve Forbes and Alan Keyes)  kept him below a majority in Linn County.

More municipal meltdown

Posting may be relatively light for the next week or two, while the CommonWealth magazine staff work on the Winter issue, but there will be new maps and data before the presidential primary season kicks of in Iowa.

In the meantime, the transcript from CommonWealth's "Municipal Meltdown" forum is now online. It was a lively event, and a great crash course on how many cities and towns are approaching a crisis point.

Not surprisingly, anti-tax activist Barbara Anderson shook things up with some blunt language:

No one is talking to the people who pay the bills. No one is being respectful to them, at either the state or local level where they threaten dire results from overrides not passing and then it doesn’t work out. Until you listen to the voters, you are not going to get respect or cooperation and you are going to be wondering why these things happen.

Dynasty: The Senate members

The role of political dynasties in American politics is once again a hot political topic, thanks to the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination (Hillary Clinton, wife of a former president) and one of the main contenders for the Republican nomination (Mitt Romney, the son of a governor who ran for president in 1968). Are different parts of the country more or less comfortable with the idea of political families holding multiple offices?

The map below shows states where one or both US senators are closely related (spouse, child, sibling) to another major office holder (a state or federal legislator, or a chief executive of a state or city). There are currently 19 such senators; a few, like West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller, are not counted here because there are no other pols in their immediate family, even though cousins or uncles may fit the bill. Only two states have both senators from political families (Maine and New Hampshire). Overall, dynasty senators seem most common in the Northeast and the Rocky Mountain region. The Northeast is also Clinton's strongest region among Democratic primary voters, according to recent polls -- which may mean that criticizing "dynasty politics" may not help her rivals much there. (The list of dynasty senators can be found here.)

Dropping out of high school, dropping into jail

The end of the year brings many gifts to data lovers, and two non-unrelated reports hit computer screens today: the Department of Justice's annual prison population census and the Department of Education's annual report on high school dropout rates. We will be crunching the numbers and mapping the data from these and other surveys in the future, but one thing that jumps out from the Justice report is that New Hampshire had the only double-digit percentage growth in its prison population from 2005 to 2006. The number of prisoners in the Granite State went from 2,530 to 2,805, or up 10.9 percent (versus a national increase of 2.8 percent, and a jump in Massachusetts of 3.1 percent). That's still relatively low for the state's size (Hawaii has more than twice as many prisoners), but the change is startling.

Also surprising is that New Hampshire, which is generally one of the best-educated states, had a high school dropout rate of 3.5 percent in 2004-05, not too far below the 3.9 national rate. In Massachusetts, the rate was 3.8 percent; it was highest in Alaska (8.2 percent) and lowest in North Dakota (1.9 percent).

Is your City Hall sinking?

Gabrielle Gurley's article Municipal Meltdown, in the Fall issue of CommonWealth, is both fascinating and scary, and we've been getting a lot of reaction to the idea that cities and towns are facing a moment of reckoning (cut spending or raise taxes?). Check out the latest comments, both thoughtful and provocative, on our main Web site. To give you a taste of the discussion, here are a couple of points from anti-tax activist Barbara Anderson:

Home rule is a nice tradition but it needs 21st-century adjustment to allow more regionalization. Collective bargaining is a 19th-century anachronism and should be abolished...

And on public education:

Maintenance should be encouraged and new buildings should forego architects, instead using basic blueprints labeled "school."

Presumably, Anderson has in mind something a bit more elaborate than this.

The geography of job insecurity

The Boston Globe's Adrian Walker writes today on the slow progress in creating pilot schools in Boston. Part of the resisistance comes from teachers' union members:

To their supporters, pilot schools are laboratories for fresh educational ideas that eventually can be applied to traditional schools. The union says it supports pilot schools in theory, but clearly it cannot buy into an educational idea that involves tossing union protections out the window.

"You can be removed from the building you've been teaching in for 15 years, and moved to the other side of the city," said Stephen Crawford, a BTU spokesman. "That's just one of the collective bargaining rights teachers sacrifice."

Crawford's concern is understandable but also a bit disorienting, since we've become accustomed to reading about people afraid that their jobs are going to move to the other side of the country, if not the world. Another example of how everyone has a different perspective in a global economy.

The Snowmeister factor

Correspondent Chris V. asks:

If you have not done an article yet on how the moving of the primaries to Super Tuesday in February could lead to weather deciding who the nominees are, now might be the time.  Even if the primaries go on despite a snowstorm, doesn't that change who votes?  A smaller percentage of the elderly and poor, more suburbanites with SUV's? 

Here are the high and low temperatures for February 5, 2007. Note that it never went above 2 degrees in Obama's home base of Chicago, and it stayed below freezing practically everywhere in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York (Clinton and Giuliani's home state). Among the big states that will vote next February 5, California had the mildest weather. In 2004, Super Tuesday was on first Tuesday in March; you can see the a noticable difference on March 5, 2007, when it thawed to the 40s in most of the Northeast Corridor and hit 31 in Chicago.

Among Democrats, Clinton has been strongest among older voters who may not get out in bad weather; then again, it's still up in the air whether Obama's younger supporters will turn out in any weather. In the Republican race, the question is whether a low turnout will help the candidate with the most committed voters -- and they may be the strong conservatives who prefer Huckabee or Romney over Giuliani.

As is often the case, it all may come down to money. The best-financed candidates may be better to get people to the polls in inclement weather, and to remind people that they're supposed to pick presidential nominees before Valentine's Day.