Governor Terry Branstad denied in September that he’s a friend to Big Oil interests seeking to build the Dakota Access (Bakken) pipeline across four states, including Iowa.

But in a move his office did not announce last week, Branstad joined North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple and South Dakota Governor Dennis Daugaard to urge the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers not to delay approval of the final federal easement needed to complete the pipeline.

Iowa Republicans have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars this fall on television commercials and direct mail highlighting supposedly wasteful spending by Democratic state lawmakers. For the fourth election cycle in a row, many of these attacks repeat zombie lies from the 2010 campaign about money spent on “heated sidewalks” and a “trolley for lobbyists.”

As Bleeding Heartland explained here, Iowa House and Senate Democrats never approved money for heated sidewalks. They simply rejected a GOP amendment to a 2010 appropriations bill, which would have prohibited using state funds for “geothermal systems for melting snow and ice from streets or sidewalks.” The amendment was pointless, because planners of the award-winning streetscape project in question had already ruled out heated sidewalks in favor of porous pavement.

What about the Republican hit pieces claiming Democrats spent money on a “trolley for lobbyists”?

Continuing a Bleeding Heartland tradition, I encourage readers to post their general election predictions as comments in this thread before 7 am on November 8. Predictions submitted by e-mail or posted on social media will not be considered. It only takes a minute to register for an account here, log in, and write a comment.

Anyone can enter, whether you now live or have ever lived in Iowa. You can change your mind, as long as you post your revised predictions as an additional comment in this thread before the Tuesday morning deadline.

No money’s at stake, just bragging rights like those most recently claimed by Bleeding Heartland user zbert for Iowa caucus predictions and JoshHughesIA for having the best guesses about this year’s primary elections. This isn’t “The Price is Right”; the winning answers will be closest to the final results, whether they were a little high or low. Even if you have no idea, please try to take a guess on every question.

Minor-party or independent candidates are on the ballot for some races, so the percentages of the vote for Democratic and Republican nominees need not add up to 100. You can view the complete list of candidates for federal and state offices in Iowa here (pdf).

Good luck, and remember: you can’t win if you don’t play.

Pundits agree that Iowa’s demographics give Donald Trump a better chance of winning here than in any other state President Barack Obama carried twice.

However, a growing number of Iowans don’t match stereotypes about our state’s mostly-white electorate.

Hillary Clinton’s Iowa coalitions director, Maryland House Delegate Joseline A. Peña-Melnyk, spoke to Bleeding Heartland this week about the campaign’s outreach to Latino and African-American communities. Peña-Melnyk has put 6,000 miles on her car since August, traveling from Council Bluffs to Columbus Junction and many places in between.

Even in this overwhelmingly white state, a strong turnout among Latino and African-American voters could swing a close election.

Marion County Naturalist Marla Mertz presents more Iowa wildflowers I’ve never seen “in real life.” I highly recommend her previous contributions to this series: Showy orchis and Queen of the Prairie. -promoted by desmoinesdem

This spring, Iowa wildflower Wednesday featured a very small, and more commonly known woodland orchid, the Showy Orchis. It is a notable early spring find, and I always look forward to visiting the woodlands for its appearance.

Some of us don’t trek the woodlands in the fall as often, as the prairies and vibrant blooms of roadsides keep us forever in awe and discovery. Late August, September and October are great times to visit the woods, and if you are looking for orchids, a sharp eye and delicate step bring fascinating finds. Iowa’s fall woodlands hold a few inconspicuous and rare little orchids. Oval ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes ovalis) and Autumn coralroot (Corallorhiza odontorhiza) are two of the most common.

The last three Iowa Supreme Court justices involved in the landmark 2009 marriage equality ruling are on the ballot this year: Chief Justice Mark Cady (author of the Varnum v Brien decision) and Justices Brent Appel and Daryl Hecht. However, this year’s Iowa judicial retention elections aren’t getting much attention, largely because social conservative groups decided not to engage heavily in the fight.

By this point in 2010, television commercials calling for a “no” vote on three Iowa Supreme Court justices had been on the air for six weeks. Bob Vander Plaats and allies were holding “Judge Bus” events across Iowa. In a radio ad, Representative Steve King urged listeners to “vote ‘no’ on Judges [Marsha] Ternus, [Michael] Streit and [David] Baker” to “send a message against judicial arrogance.” For about a month before the 2012 general election, conservative groups paid for tv ads asking Iowans to “hold [Justice] David Wiggins accountable for redefining marriage and legislating from the bench.”

In contrast, Vander Plaats and like-minded Iowans have made a lower-key case against Cady, Appel, and Hecht, largely relying on e-mail, social media postings, and letters to the editor. They probably realized a full-court press was unlikely to succeed in a presidential election year. Nor did they have a way to fund a more extensive anti-retention campaign, with the biggest donor from 2010 and 2012 staying on the sidelines this year.

Supporters of retaining the Supreme Court justices are taking no chances, though. Two groups are leading the fight to persuade and remind voters to mark “yes” for all Iowa judges, especially Cady, Appel, and Hecht. I enclose below a sampling of messages from the Justice Not Politics coalition and the Iowa State Bar Association.

Unless turnout a week from today shatters the record set in 2012, nearly a third of the Iowans who will participate in this year’s general election have already cast ballots.

Iowa’s 99 county auditors had received 472,085 absentee ballots as of November 1.

One week before the 2012 general election, Iowa county auditors had received 531,996 ballots, which was about 33.5 percent of the 1,589,899 votes cast. I expect this year’s turnout to fall a little below the 2012 level, because both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unpopular among Iowa voters. The number of Iowans who vote but leave the presidential line blank on their ballot, or support a third-party candidate for president, will probably also be higher than in years past.

Absentee ballot requests from Iowa voters totaled 593,435 today. At the same point in the 2012 campaign, 660,643 Iowans had requested an early ballot–41.6 percent of the number who eventually voted.

Follow me after the jump for more on how this year’s early vote numbers compare to the last presidential election. Iowa Democrats slightly increased their absentee ballot lead over the past week; click here for daily tables showing absentee ballots requested and received statewide and in each of Iowa’s four Congressional districts. Pat Rynard examined the county-level early vote numbers as of October 31.

Iowa is blessed with an unusually large number of competitive state legislative districts, thanks to our non-partisan redistricting process. Most election years, at least half a dozen Iowa Senate seats and twice as many House seats are in play. Campaign finance reports showing where candidates and party leaders are spending the most money provide the best clue on which legislative races are worth watching.

That said, most years at least one little-noticed candidate pulls off a big upset in an Iowa House or Senate district neither party was targeting. Now-disgraced Kent Sorenson won his first race in 2008, taking a House seat that had been considered safe for Democrats. Two years later, Kim Pearson got no help from GOP leaders en route to winning a House seat where the Democratic incumbent had been unopposed the previous election. Republican Mark Chelgren won an Ottumwa-based Senate district for the first time by ten votes. That seat had been considered so safe that the Democratic incumbent was knocking doors for a colleague in another district during the final weekend. I learned later that internal GOP polling had Chelgren almost 20 points down a couple of seeks before the election.

I can’t shake the feeling that in this strange campaign with two unpopular presidential nominees, something weird will happen in a down-ballot race no one is watching. So before I get back to Bleeding Heartland’s last few battleground Senate and House race profiles, a few words on why I feel a race in Iowa’s southeast corner could produce a shocking result.

Guest author Bill from White Plains takes a close look at a U.S. Supreme Court case that is a perennial issue in presidential campaigns. You can read earlier posts in his series on the Supreme Court here. -promoted by desmoinesdem

“Abortion? I personally don’t think abortion is that important. I think it’s just an issue to evade whatever issues are makin’ people drink about abortion.” Bob Dylan, 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, speaking to Rolling Stone in 1986

You wouldn’t know it if you listened to the second and final 2016 Presidential debates, abortion isn’t even in the top 10 of the most important Presidential election issues this year. According to the Pew Research Center’s survey results from the week, June 15-26, 2016, abortion comes in at #13 of the 14 most important issues, trailing, among others, gun policy (#5), immigration (#6), Social Security (#7), trade policy (#11) and the environment (#12). Likewise, what one might expect as a hot-button issue – marriage equality – is last on the list (#14), meaning (according to Pew, anyhow) that only 40% of potential voters believe this is a “very important” issue.

Of course, in that same poll, Supreme Court Justices come in at #9, meaning that 65% of those surveyed believe appointments to the most influential court in America, and elsewhere, are “very important.”

But the issue was brought to the forefront at the debates, anyhow.

During his long tenure, Governor Terry Branstad has typically been attentive to the concerns of for-profit corporations. So when the insurance companies picked to manage Medicaid for more than half a million Iowans reported in August that they were losing money on the deal, they got a favorable hearing.

A senior analyst from Iowa’s non-partisan Legislative Services Agency confirmed on Friday that the Branstad administration has agreed to pay an extra $33.2 million to the three Medicaid managed care providers for the contract period beginning on April 1 and continuing through June 2017. I enclose that e-mail below, along with reaction from several Democratic state senators.

Hardly a week goes by without my hearing yet another story about an Iowan hurt by Medicaid privatization. Thousands of people have been forced to change doctors or have lost access to therapy for loved ones. This summer, a survey of care providers for Iowans on Medicaid found that:

90% say their administrative costs have increased;
80% say more health care claims are being denied;
79% of providers say they are not getting paid on time;
66% say they are being reimbursed at rates lower than their contracted rates;
61% say the quality of services they can provide has been reduced;
46% have or plan to cut their services; and
28% have taken out loans while waiting to be paid.

Branstad refuses to adjust his Medicaid policy to help patients who are suffering or care providers struggling to keep the doors open. On the contrary, he keeps spinning tales (backed up by no evidence) about “protecting the interests of the taxpayers” and “stopping significant fraud and abuse.” His administration hasn’t followed up on supposed new benefits for patients and puts out impossible-to-verify accounts of “success stories.”

Critics warned that any money saved by privatizing Medicaid would come at the expense of health care for vulnerable patients. They warned that those apparent savings would evaporate once for-profit insurers demanded more money from the state, as had happened in Florida following that state’s rapid privatization of Medicaid.

Iowa enjoyed low administrative costs under the old Medicaid system. Thanks to our governor and his Republican enablers in the state legislature, taxpayers will now experience the “nightmare” scenario that has already unfolded for Medicaid patients and care providers. Connecticut saved money by moving away from managed care, back to the state-run, fee-for-service model.

Don’t expect anything that sensible from Branstad, who happily spends other people’s money when corporations come calling.

UPDATE: Branstad claimed at an October 31 press conference that the state budget will still save money thanks to efficiencies in the new Medicaid system. If those savings materialize (they didn’t in Connecticut), it will happen through companies denying health care services to Iowans.

SECOND UPDATE: Added below excerpts from an excellent post by Iowa Policy Project Executive Director Mike Owen.

A long and growing list of U.S. newspapers that normally support Republican candidates have refused to endorse Donald Trump for president.

Editorial boards at several large Iowa publications joined the crowd.

Not only that, some went so far as to endorse Hillary Clinton, including one newspaper that had not supported a Democrat for president in my lifetime.

I enclose below highlights from thirteen lead editorials endorsing either Clinton or neither major-party candidate. Earlier this year, I thought some conservative editorial boards might choose Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson as an alternative to Trump, but I am not aware of any Iowa newspapers to do so.

Speaking of endorsements, film-maker Michael Moore spoke to Rolling Stone magazine recently about his “forbidden love” for Clinton and his fear that Trump, whom he considers a “sociopath,” could win the election. Some of Moore’s comments surprised me, since he campaigned for Ralph Nader in 2000 and was a big Bernie Sanders backer in the primaries. His reasoning tracked closely to that of Iowa’s best-known Nader endorser, Ed Fallon. Speaking to Bleeding Heartland in August, Fallon discussed that choice and why he’s discouraging activists on the left from voting for third-party candidates this year.

Terri Rote of Des Moines announced on Facebook last month that she was registered to vote. Good for her! But she took it too far when she cast early ballots at both the Polk County Elections Office and a satellite location. She could go to prison if convicted of election misconduct, a Class D felony.

Rote caucused for Donald Trump in February, and a quick look at her Facebook feed makes it easy to guess why the GOP presidential nominee appeals to her. I enclose below a selection of racist or conspiracy-minded posts by Rote in recent months. In some of the threads, she advocated violence against Black Lives Matter protesters or “liked” racist remarks made by commenters. She apparently lost her job at McDonald’s a few years back for infractions including using a racist slur against a co-worker. UPDATE: Her front door features a Confederate flag along with a bumper sticker showing an adapted Hillary Clinton campaign logo next to the slogan “LOCK HER UP!”

Speaking to Iowa Public Radio, Rote said, “I wasn’t planning on doing it twice, it was spur of the moment […] The polls are rigged.” IPR paraphrased her as saying “she was afraid her first ballot for Trump would be changed to a vote for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.” Rote likewise told the Washington Post that voting at the satellite site was “a spur-of-the-moment thing”: “I don’t know what came over me.”

Authorities in Polk County have not named two other people, not yet arrested but suspected of voting twice, by mail and in person. We don’t know which candidates they favored. UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: According to KCCI’s Tommie Clark, “The other two cases involved confusion over ballots and ballot requests, which experts say is not a rare occurrence.” Clark’s story noted that Rote’s first vote will count.

Meanwhile, Trump is still laying the groundwork for political unrest after November 8, telling his supporters the election is being fixed. Most recently, he claimed at a Colorado rally Saturday afternoon that postal service or election workers are throwing out ballots marked for him. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate spoke out forcefully against the idea that the election could be “rigged” against Trump. But Governor Terry Branstad bent over backwards to find a kernel of truth in voter fraud allegations.

I’ve never been more concerned about violence following an American election. Sorry, Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds: Trump’s outrageous comments and conspiracy-mongering are much more than “clutter” and “distractions.”

Quinnipiac’s latest Iowa survey found U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley increased his lead over Democratic challenger Patty Judge over the past month. He’s now ahead by 56 percent to 38 percent, “compared to a 55 – 43 percent Grassley lead” in Quinnipiac’s September Iowa poll. More findings from the polling memo:

Judge leads 53 – 38 percent among Iowa likely voters who have cast ballots.

Men back Grassley 63 – 33 percent and women go Republican 50 – 43 percent. Grassley leads 95 – 4 percent among Republicans and 60 – 34 percent among independent voters. Judge takes Democrats 80 – 13 percent.

The same survey of 791 “likely Iowa voters” from October 20 through 26 showed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gaining ground against Donald Trump since September and leading by 61 percent to 27 percent among Iowns who had already voted. Scroll down to view the cross-tabs for the question about the Senate race.

Grassley’s ability to blanket every major Iowa media market with television commercials has presumably helped him among likely voters. Judge was on the air in late August and early September, but with a much smaller ad buy. Since then, her campaign has been dark. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee never committed any serious resources to this race. The Iowa Democratic Party paid for two new commercials supporting Judge, on the grounds that Grassley “has changed.” I enclose those below, along with the three most recent ads from Grassley’s campaign (two positive, one negative).

Not only has Judge been massively outspent on paid media, her opportunities for generating free media coverage were limited when Grassley ducked out of what would have been the only Senate debate broadcast on statewide television. The senator agreed to debate Judge on October 19, but that event was not broadcast statewide and was overshadowed by the third debate between Trump and Clinton later the same evening. Grassley and Judge have one more debate scheduled, hosted by WHO Radio and WHO-TV on November 4.

Any comments about the Senate race are welcome in this thread.

Austin Frerick, an Iowa native and economist who has worked at the Institute for Research on Poverty and the Congressional Research Service, makes the case for job-protected paid leave. You can read his past writing at Bleeding Heartland here. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Kristen Corey of Ankeny remembers the moment clearly. The moment she realized that things were different for women in the working world than for men.

Twenty-five and newly married, she just started a new job and asked her human resource professional about the company’s maternity policy. The HR person looked at her and with a short laugh answered, “Well, you just use your accrued sick and vacation time.” Kristen responded, but “what if I get pregnant in the next few months?”

To that the HR person quipped, “Don’t get pregnant.”

Hillary Clinton has gained ground in Iowa since before the presidential debates, according to Quinnipiac’s new survey of 791 likely Iowa voters (margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points). In a four-way race, Clinton and Donald Trump are tied at 44 percent each, with 4 percent of respondents supporting Libertarian Gary Johnson and 1 percent for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Trump leads Clinton by 47 percent to 46 percent in a head to head matchup. A month ago, Quinnipiac found Trump ahead 44-37 in the four-way race and 50-44 against Clinton alone.

Quinnipiac’s polling memo highlighted a few findings from the cross-tabs. The most heartening for Democrats: “Clinton leads 61 – 27 percent among Iowa likely voters who have cast ballots.” That’s surprising, considering that only 27 percent of respondents identified themselves as Democrats, 30 percent as Republicans, and 37 percent as independents.

The Iowa Democratic early vote lead is smaller than it was at the same point in the 2012 campaign. As of October 27, Democrats had requested 45,684 more ballots and had cast 40,681 more ballots than Republicans. For Clinton to be 30-plus points ahead among early voters, as Quinnipiac’s data indicate, she would have to be winning a large share of early votes cast by Iowans affiliated with neither party. No-party voters had requested 116,737 absentee ballots as of October 27; 75,819 of those ballots had already arrived at county auditors’ offices. President Barack Obama’s campaign did a much better job of mobilizing no-party supporters here in 2012; Iowa Democrats hope to repeat that performance.

More from the polling memo:

In Iowa, Clinton is less disliked by likely voters, with a negative 40 – 55 percent favorability rating, compared to Trump’s negative 36 – 59 percent.

Iowa men back Trump 51 – 35 percent, while women back Clinton 52 – 37 percent. Republicans go to Trump 88 – 6 percent, while Democrats back Clinton 88 – 9 percent. Independent voters are split 40 – 40 percent, with 6 percent for Johnson.

White college-educated respondents narrowly favored Clinton, 47-43, while whites without a college degree split 48-38 for Trump.

Dan Guild pointed out last month that third-party candidates tend to lose ground after the presidential debates. The Q-poll suggests that pattern is repeating this year; in last month’s survey, 10 percent of respondents supported Johnson and 2 percent Stein.

Fighting for his political life in a district that’s trending away from him, Iowa House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow has approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign spending on television commercials. Two spots have trashed his Democratic challenger Jennifer Konfrst over accounting errors that led to some overdue taxes. The first Hagenow hit piece was blatantly false. The second ad, now in heavy rotation on Des Moines stations, is more narrowly focused on a tax lien put on Konfrst’s home more than a decade ago.

Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann portrayed Konfrst as unfit to serve because she made a mistake calculating child care expenses. After hiding from early media inquiries about his commercial, Hagenow defended the ad last week, telling the Des Moines Register, “One of the biggest jobs we deal with (in the Legislature) is spending taxpayers’ dollars […] And our focus has always been to handle that as responsibly as possible.”

So why did House Republican leaders give their blessing for the Iowa GOP to spend more than $93,000 promoting Shannon Lundgren, a House candidate with a much larger federal tax liability that “remains unpaid”?

United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia during a January 28, 2013 book promotion at Southern Methodist University

Thanks to Bill from White Plains for another close look at the U.S. Supreme Court. His first post in this series is here. -promoted by desmoinesdem

At the end of the second Presidential debate, held on October 9, 2016 in St. Louis, Missouri, and at the outset of the third (and final) Presidential debate, held October 19, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada, both candidates – New York Republican Businessman Donald John Trump and former Democratic New York senator – and former United States Secretary of State – Hillary Clinton provided their “litmus tests” for their nominees to the United States Supreme Court.

Long after most woodland or prairie wildflowers have gone to seed, many aster species are blooming well into the autumn across Iowa. One of the prettiest is blue wood aster (Symphyotrichum cordifolium), also known as heart-leaved aster, common blue wood aster, or broad-leaved aster.

This plant is native to most of North America east of the Rocky Mountains and thrives in “moist to dry deciduous woodlands, woodland borders, areas adjacent to woodland paths, thinly wooded bluffs, shaded areas along streambanks, and rocky wooded slopes.” I took the enclosed pictures in mid-October along the driveway that leads from 45th Street to the Bergman Academy (old Science Center of Iowa building) in Des Moines.

Iowa’s leading civil rights advocacy groups have joined forces, fighting for changes that would allow thousands of Iowans who have completed felony sentences to “be full members of society and exercise their right to vote.” The seventeen groups in the new Restore Fair Voting Rights in Iowa coalition include the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa, the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP, and the League of Women Voters of Iowa.

Their efforts are badly needed, because even after two “streamlinings” of the process Governor Terry Branstad established on his first day back in office, an embarrassingly small number of Iowans have regained the right to vote.

Approximately 20 percent of the Iowans who will participate in this year’s general election had already cast ballots two weeks before election day.

Iowa’s 99 county auditors had received 311,007 absentee ballots as of October 25.

In the last presidential election, 1,589,899 Iowans voted–a record number in absolute terms. Two weeks before the 2012 general election, Iowa county auditors had received 376,065 ballots, which turned out to be about 23.6 percent of total votes cast. I expect this year’s turnout to be a bit lower than the 2012 level, because this year’s major-party presidential nominees are unusually unpopular.

As of yesterday, 487,370 Iowans had requested absentee ballots. At the same point in the 2012 campaign, 542,096 Iowans (more than a third of the number who eventually participated) had done so.

Follow me after the jump for more on how this year’s early vote numbers compare to the last presidential election.