Lora Conrad lives on a small farm in Van Buren County.

The American Hog Peanut is also called American Wild Peanut. Amphicarpaea bracteata is a vining annual plant in the Pea family (Fabaceae). It can also be a short lived perennial. It is somewhat unusual for a legume in that it thrives in shady areas.

Amphicarpaea is reported to mean either “two kinds of flowers” or “two kinds of fruit,” both of which it has. Bracteata means “with bracts” at the base of the flower, which show clearly in the flower photos. It is the only Amphicarpaea sp. native to eastern North America and to the west, throughout Iowa. This BONAP map shows its Iowa and nearby distribution.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

I’ve been muddling through some thoughts about national politics after the November 5 election. I will no doubt have more, but this week I have one for each party.

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years. He is also the co-founder of the Human Restoration Project, an Iowa educational non-profit promoting systems-based thinking and grassroots organizing in education.

In 2022, following a long culture war fight in my own suburban Iowa school district, I resigned from a job I had held for a decade as a high school social studies teacher. When I eventually wrote about these experiences publicly, the feedback I got from students and parents was overwhelmingly positive and supportive, but the most frequent response I got was, “I had no idea all of this was happening.”

Two years ago, we were just beginning to understand what was unfolding in Iowa schools and repeated across the country. It was happening quietly and in isolated pockets, which gave plausible deniability to the idea that this wasn’t an organized, systematic effort to dismantle public education and punish those who refused to go along with it. 

Every Iowa Democratic candidate had reason to celebrate the latest Iowa Poll by Selzer & Co for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom, showing former President Donald Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris by just 4 points (47 percent to 43 percent). But arguably none had more grounds for optimism than Lanon Baccam, the Democratic nominee in Iowa’s third Congressional district.

According to calculations by the Daily Kos Elections team (now publishing as The Downballot), Trump outpolled Joe Biden across the IA-03 counties by 49.3 percent to 48.9 percent in 2020, while winning the state by an 8-point margin. So if Harris trails by only 4 points statewide now, she likely leads Trump in the third district.

Assuming the Selzer poll is off by the margin of error (plus or minus 3.8 percentage points), and Trump has an 8-point lead statewide, the major-party presidential nominees may be roughly tied in the IA-03 counties.

In other words, Baccam won’t have to overcome strong headwinds at the top of the ticket in order to beat first-term Republican Representative Zach Nunn, who carried this district by 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent in 2022.

I’ve been thinking about what else needs to happen for the challenger to win in November.

Dan Guild is a lawyer and project manager who lives in New Hampshire. In addition to writing for Bleeding Heartland, he has written for CNN and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, most recently here. He also contributed to the Washington Post’s 2020 primary simulations. Follow him on Twitter @dcg1114.

Ann Selzer’s gold standard poll is out, and suggests a remade presidential race in Iowa.

The top line numbers from Selzer & Co’s latest poll for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom indicate former President Donald Trump has 47 percent support and Vice President Kamala Harris 43 percent among likely Iowa voters. This poll started contacting respondents on September 8 (before the debate) and concluded on September 11, the day after the debate. At the end of this piece is a summary of post-debate national polling, which has found a gain for Harris of about 1 percent.

When you compare the new survey to Selzer’s numbers from June (Trump 50 percent, President Joe Biden 32 percent in Iowa), you will find a 14 point shift in margin. But purely focusing on the margin may be a mistake.

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization.

The night after Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump duked it out in Philadelphia, unsurprisingly, Chris Hayes dedicated his MSNBC show, “All In With Chris Hayes,” to conversations about the debate.

Rebecca Traister was among the guests who appeared on that show. While my wife Gail and I do not remember ever having heard her before (she writes for the New Yorker), after that night, we look forward to hearing more from her in the future.

William R. Staplin is a former scientist specializing in utilizing molecular biology techniques to investigate RNA plant and animal viruses, research and development of vaccines to protect against infectious viruses; husband to Ruth A. Staplin, a longtime SPPG employee and political wonk; father to two independently minded young adults; cancer and spinal cord disability survivor; and a supporter of women’s reproductive rights, LGTBQ+, and Black and Brown Lives Matter. He is also a full-time greyhound owner and greyhound cafeteria worker.

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to women’s health care rights in 2022, when the conservative majority ruled in favor of Dobbs in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women Health Organization. The 5-4 decision overturned the Roe vs. Wade precedent, which since 1973 had guaranteed a woman or girl the constitutional right to an abortion. The conservative majority’s decision to allow the 50 states to regulate abortion led to a massive upheaval in women’s and girls’ basic access to health care, and in turn maternal and infant care.

Many Republican-controlled states quickly enacted abortion bans, or allowed laws from before Roe to take effect. Fourteen states (mostly in the southeastern U.S.) have total abortion bans.

Anna Ryon is a Des Moines attorney who practices in the field of utility consumer advocacy. Her experience includes nearly nine years of service at the Iowa Office of Consumer Advocate.

When Brenna Bird was elected attorney general, she took an oath to faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of her office, as state law requires. The official website of the Iowa Department of Justice describes the attorney general as “the state’s chief legal officer.” In that capacity, it is reasonable for Bird to know what duties she is required by law to discharge.

However, Bird’s record suggests she either does not understand all the duties the law requires her to discharge or has simply chosen not to fulfill some of those duties. Her failure to discharge the duties required by law has left Iowa landowners subject to unconstitutional eminent domain and their neighbors subject to the dangers of hazardous carbon dioxide pipelines without the legal representation they deserve.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com   

I don’t want to be scared. I avoid roller coasters. I don’t like horror movies. I’m not a fan of people jumping out even if they’re yelling “surprise,” and I don’t pay to be scared in Halloween haunted houses.

But when I was 15, the church youth group went to a haunted house sponsored by another church. Even then, I tried to find an excuse to skip out, but it was a church event. How scary could it be?

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

I have fielded a bunch of emails, text messages and phone calls in the days since the school shooting in Winder, Georgia.

Each one is from Perry, Iowa. Each one had the same question for me and the Iowa Freedom of Information Council. Each one came from a parent, teacher or other concerned person asking, why isn’t the public allowed to read the official findings by state agents about the shooting at Perry High School and Middle School last January 4?

The last few weeks could hardly have gone worse for the Libertarian Party of Iowa. Republican activists successfully forced the party’s three U.S. House candidates off the ballot, leaving Nicholas Gluba, Marco Battaglia, and Charles Aldrich to run write-in campaigns in the first, third, and fourth Congressional districts.

Meanwhile, a crowded field of presidential candidates imperils Libertarian prospects to retain major-party status in Iowa for the next election cycle.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

You’re invited to time travel with me today, to April 1968, fifty-six years ago. Newspaper headlines on April 1 said President Lyndon Johnson won’t seek reelection. Some might have thought it was an April Fool prank. A much bigger jolt came April 4, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The number of Marines in Vietnam peaked just under 86,000. Tragically, U.S. fatalities in Vietnam also crested in 1968, almost 30 percent of all American battle deaths happening that year. And, after 249 shows, the final episode of the Andy Griffith Show aired. Bucolic Mayberry seemed strangely out of synch with what was going on in America.

On April 27, 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey formally declared his candidacy for president. The second paragraph of his announcement:

Bruce Morrison is a working artist and photographer living with his wife Georgeann in rural southeast O’Brien County, Iowa. Bruce works from his studio/gallery–a renovated late 1920s brooding house/sheep barn. You can follow Morrison on his artist blog, Prairie Hill Farm Studio, or visit his website at Morrison’s studio.

I first came across Pale-spike Lobelia (Lobelia spicata) 40-45 years ago in the Waterman Wildlife Area (Waterman Prairie) in southeast O’Brien County.

When my wife and I moved to our acreage and two small pastures 22 years ago, we realized just how many native forbes and grasses had survived decades of livestock browsing. Each year we would discover new species.

In 2008 I found my first pale-spike lobelia on our own pasture, a few feet down the north slope of a gravel ridge. I recognized the plant upon close examination and marveled how diminutive they were.

Dan Guild is a lawyer and project manager who lives in New Hampshire. In addition to writing for Bleeding Heartland, he has written for CNN and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, most recently here. He also contributed to the Washington Post’s 2020 primary simulations. Follow him on Twitter @dcg1114.

So much has happened since the first presidential debate in June—it is hard to find another period in modern political history as tumultuous. A debate that ultimately drove a sitting president from the race. An assassination attempt on a former president. A badly conceived VP choice. Two conventions.

And after all of that, we come to what is probably the only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Former President Donald Trump. And the single most important piece of data as we head into this night is from the Siena poll for the New York Times, released over the weekend.

National Democratic groups are investing significant funds in Iowa’s first Congressional district race, suggesting they believe Christina Bohannan has a solid chance to defeat two-term Republican incumbent Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

The House Majority PAC, a super-PAC connected to House Democratic leadership, has reserved another $2.3 million in television advertising time for the IA-01 race, Ally Mutnick reported for Politico on September 9. Those funds will be divided among the Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Quad Cities markets, which collectively reach seventeen of the district’s 20 counties.* Mutnick noted the super-PAC “reserved just $350,000 in that district in July.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which also spends heavily to influence U.S. House races, has already reserved $1,551,000 in tv air time in Des Moines, $534,000 in Cedar Rapids, and $438,000 in Davenport. Much of the DCCC’s Des Moines market buy will be directed toward the third Congressional district, where Democrat Lanon Baccam is challenging first-term Republican incumbent Zach Nunn.

The planned spending is a huge contrast to the 2022 cycle, when Democratic-aligned groups spent less than $100,000 on the IA-01 race, while GOP-aligned groups spent more than $2.7 million on messaging that supported Miller-Meeks or opposed Bohannan. Ad reservations on this scale indicate that internal Democratic polling shows Miller-Meeks is vulnerable.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

Cinematically-minded Iowans of middle age or older recall two films set in Iowa in the 1980s. The best remembered and most beloved was the Kevin Costner’s ode to baseball sentimentality, Field of Dreams.

The other was Country starring Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, a hard-edged look at the farm crisis that gripped the Midwest during the decade. Country personalized the worst agricultural downturn since the Great Depression, costing Iowa more than one-quarter of its farm ownerships and reducing farm land values by 70 percent.

The opening scenes of the 21^st century version of Country already are running. Corn and soybean prices have fallen almost 40 percent. Iowa farmers are enduring a drop in income of more than 25 percent since 2002. The effect isn’t limited to the countryside; the closing of Tyson Foods processing plant at Perry as well as a sequence of layoffs at Deere & Co., Firestone, and other implement plants have cost almost 2,000 Iowa manufacturing workers their jobs.

Longtime agricultural banker Terry Hotchkiss, chairman of the American Bankers Association agricultural and rural bankers committee, said farm lenders “feel like they are looking over a cliff with regards to the agricultural economy.”

What might have been a slow news week in state government took an unexpected turn on September 3. Governor Kim Reynolds announced that Lieutenant Governor Adam Gregg was resigning, effective the same day. Minutes later, the Iowa Bankers Association revealed that Gregg would join the association as president and CEO, beginning on October 1.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Dave Miglin is Chair of the Broadlawns Board of Trustees.

In January 2021, the people of Polk County made their voices heard and I was honored to be appointed as a Trustee for Broadlawns Medical Center to complete the term of retired Trustee, Mary Fuller. At that time, our county hospital was dealing with an extraordinary health care crisis (COVID-19) and internal transition brought by the retirement of longtime CEO Jody Jenner. Those months of transition and uncertainty could have easily derailed the positive momentum that was underway at Broadlawns – but it didn’t.

Together with my fellow Trustees, our hospital leadership, and community partners, Broadlawns not only survived these trying times, but it has flourished. Since I joined the Board, we have started or completed many projects that will help Polk County families for years to come, including:

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Tom and Ruth Harkin leaned forward in their Fleur Cinema seats in Des Moines in the early evening of July 17 as a film chronicling the civil rights journey of people with disabilities rolled across the screen.

They knew the activists, people with a range of physical disabilities, some here, some departed for decades. And the Harkins sat next to Democratic State Reprepresentative Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, Iowa’s first visibly and permanently disabled legislator that night in the theater. The old political warriors encouraging the new.

The Harkins, Tom, a defining Iowa voice in the U.S. Senate and House for 40 years before retiring a decade ago, and Ruth, a pioneering force for international development and the ascendency of women, have made advocacy for those with physical and intellectual disabilities a feature of their shared public service.

“Native White Vervain (Verbena urticifolia) is notoriously difficult to photograph well,” Lora Conrad wrote in the Iowa wildflower enthusiasts Facebook group in mid-July. “Several of us have tried and admitted our failures–no, not disasters, but just not the brilliant crisp sharp photo we want of those tiny flowers and their sprangled out in all kinds of directions flower stems on that three foot high plant!!”

Lora (whose photography skills are outstanding) added that she has “deleted so many images I made of White Vervain–far far more than I have kept.” I can relate—in fact, I leaned on Phil Specht and Wendie Schneider to provide many of the pictures in my post from 2018 featuring this species.

Just for fun, Lora organized the first photo challenge in the four-year history of the Facebook group where she, Katie Byerly, and I are administrators. We crowdsourced the judging: the winner was the photo with the most “likes” in the contest thread. I enclose the top performers below, along with some other entries.