Although Iowa’s unemployment rate is below the national average, and state government closed out the 2012 fiscal year with a record surplus, a growing number of Iowa children live in poverty and are hungry or malnourished at least some of the time. The Des Moines Register recently launched a series of reports on “unprecedented challenges for Iowa kids.” Follow me after the jump for some depressing highlights.

In a few minutes President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney will debate for the last time. Bob Schieffer of CBS News will moderate the final debate, which will focus on foreign-policy issues. I imagine the ratings will be much lower tonight than for the previous two debates, partly because foreign policy isn’t a priority for most voters, and partly because the debate is up against Monday Night Football and game 7 of the National League Championship Series in baseball.

Any comments about the debate or the presidential race in general are welcome in this thread. I will update later with some thoughts and news clips. Most national tracking polls show Romney and Obama within the margin of error for each other; Gallup continues to show Romney leading and above 50 percent. The candidates haven’t focused on foreign policy in many speeches or commercials, but the latest spot from the president’s re-election campaign highlights the drawdown of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

UPDATE: Added thoughts and links after the jump.  

The city of Windsor Heights will take the Iowa Department of Transportation to court over the denial of a request to place speed enforcement traffic cameras on Interstate 235.

Medicaid coverage of abortion has been a contentious issue in the Iowa legislature since 2011 and will be on lawmakers’ agenda during next year’s session. I was surprised to learn that Iowa is already more restrictive than most other states when it comes to Medicaid coverage of abortion in cases of rape.

Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan did his first campaign swing through western Iowa yesterday. Highlights from his speeches in Council Bluffs and Sioux City are after the jump.

In a striking contrast to the $16 trillion federal debt so frequently mentioned in political advertising, the state of Iowa “officially closed the fiscal 2012 ledger with a $688.1 million budget surplus after its cash reserve and economic emergency funds were filled to the statutory maximum of nearly $596 million.” That’s the largest surplus in state history, according to David Reynolds, a fiscal analyst with the Legislative Services Agency.

Governor Terry Branstad (who wrongly claimed Iowa could not afford to give public employees a 3 percent raise) is already using the surplus to justify deep income tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals, in addition to a major commercial property tax cut. An earned income tax credit that would benefit hundreds of thousands of low-income workers will be a bargaining chip again.

Meanwhile, children in thousands of Iowa public schools have been dealing with larger classroom sizes and program cuts, because the governor and Republican state legislators insisted the state couldn’t afford any allowable growth for K-12 budgets in the 2012 fiscal year, and just 2 percent allowable growth in the current year. (In past decades, Iowa legislators routinely agreed on 4 percent allowable growth for school district budgets.) For statehouse Democrats, the record surplus shows that Iowa doesn’t need to “starve” state programs, especially education and human services.

This is an open thread. All topics are welcome, particularly any comments on state budget priorities.

UPDATE: Rest in peace, George McGovern. After the jump I’ve enclosed a famous passage from his book, What It Means to Be A Democrat. John Deeth recalls meeting and interviewing McGovern in Iowa. SECOND UPDATE: Added statements from Senator Tom Harkin and Iowa Democratic Party Chair Sue Dvorsky below.

Republican Mitt Romney leads President Barack Obama in Public Policy Polling’s latest survey of likely voters in Iowa by 49 percent to 48 percent. For Romney, that’s a big improvement since PPP polled Iowa in late September and a much better finding than yesterday’s poll from NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist.

PPP’s new poll also suggests Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins might not be retained. More details are below.

UPDATE: On October 21, PPP released a different Iowa poll conducted during the same period, which showed Obama leading Romney by 49 percent to 48 percent. I’ve added excerpts from that polling memo at the end of this post.

The Iowa Department of Natural Resources has denied a request to extend the public comment period on the air permit for a large fertilizer plant to be constructed in southeast Iowa. Wallace Taylor, a Cedar Rapids attorney representing Lee County citizens who oppose the project, asked for a 60-day extension to the October 19 deadline for submitting comments. He cited the complexity of the Iowa Fertilizer Company’s permit application, which involves “unique processes, numerous sources and pollutants, and 23 separate draft permits.”

Taylor gave me permission to publish the relevant e-mail correspondence with DNR Director Chuck Gipp below. He added that he had “never seen the DNR deny a request to extend a comment period before, especially in a case like this.”

Governor Terry Branstad and state economic development officials offered the Egyptian firm Orascom the largest incentive package in Iowa history to build the fertilizer plant in Lee County. Iowa Senate Ways and Means Committee Chair Joe Bolkcom has argued that taxpayers “got taken to the cleaners” on the deal, since Orascom would have built its factory in Iowa even without incentives totaling more than $1 million per permanent job created. An Illinois economic development official told the Quad-City Times that the state of Illinois “never put an offer [to Orascom] on the table. We recognized early on that Iowa’s bid was excessive, and we were not going to engage in a bidding war.”

Forty years ago today, Congress enacted the Clean Water Act by overriding a presidential veto. Global Water Policy Project Director Sandra Postel is dead on: “As game-changing laws go, the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act ranks high.”

Though Iowa is still not in full compliance with this law (and may never be during my lifetime), there’s still some good news in the links I’ve enclosed below.

NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist released its latest Iowa poll today, which shows President Barack Obama ahead of Republican Mitt Romney by 51 percent to 43 percent among likely voters. It’s the best poll result for the president in Iowa this month. We Ask America conducted a one-day survey in Iowa on October 15 and found Obama ahead by 48.7 percent to 45.9 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 1.2 percent. American Research Group found Obama and Romney tied at 48 percent in its poll that was in the field between October 11 and 14. Rasmussen Reports found Obama leading 49 percent to 47 percent in a one-day poll taken October 7.

Details on the NBC/WSJ/Marist poll are after the jump. Early voting and the gender gap are the key components of Obama’s advantage in Iowa.

Twenty days before the general election, 463,219 Iowans had requested absentee ballots–more than the number of Iowans who cast early votes in the 2004 general election (460,059).

Also as of October 17, Iowa county auditors had received 284,569 completed absentee ballots, more than the number of Iowans who cast early votes in the 2000 general election (276,836).

Iowa Democrats have requested about 70,000 more absentee ballots than Republicans and lead in ballot requests in all four Congressional districts (though only barely in IA-04, where Republicans have a large voter registration advantage).

After the jump I’ve posted early voting numbers from the last three presidential elections in Iowa, along with the latest tables showing absentee ballots requested by voters and returned to county auditors statewide and in the four Congressional districts. I’m updating the absentee ballot totals every weekday here, using data posted on the Iowa Secretary of State’s website.

P.S.- There are three ways to vote early in Iowa. Voting in person at a county auditor’s office or satellite station has a lower error rate than mailing your absentee ballot.

“No Wiggins” campaign materials on display at two churches in Burlington have stirred up a local debate over whether such advocacy is an abuse of tax-exempt status or an exercise of free speech.

Almost all the Iowa wildflowers have finished blooming for the year, so this weekly series will go into hibernation until next spring. After the jump I’ve enclosed photos of asters, among the last native flowers you may see during an Iowa autumn. The last picture is of a frost aster, so named because it may continue blooming even after the first frost.

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

President Barack Obama again pushed early voting and poked a little fun at Mitt Romney during a rally on the Cornell College campus in Mount Vernon today.

Yesterday the State Environmental Protection Commission opted not to ban the practice of spreading manure on soybeans. It was another sign that Governor Terry Branstad’s mission to reorient that commission toward agricultural interests has succeeded.

President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney face off in a town-hall meeting style debate tonight, starting at 8 pm central. I’ll update this post later, possibly after the replay on CNN. Meanwhile, any comments about tonight’s debate or the presidential campaign in general are welcome in this thread.

Iowa politics watchers may want to tune in to Iowa Public Television at 7 pm tonight for the first debate between Representative Dave Loebsack and John Archer, his GOP challenger in the second Congressional district. That event will wrap up just before the presidential town hall begins.

UPDATE: I caught fragments of the debate and will have to watch the whole replay later. Sounds like “binders full of women” will be the sound bite of the night; don’t wave good-bye to the gender gap just yet. I thought Obama handled the immigration question far better than Romney did too. Some clips and post-debate polls are after the jump.

Last time Bleeding Heartland discussed the Iowa Senate district 30 race, two-term Democratic incumbent Jeff Danielson and his Republican challenger Matt Reisetter had just launched their first television commercials in the Waterloo/Cedar Falls area. Both candidates have followed up with advertising that I’ve enclosed after the jump.

I applaud the openness of both campaigns in Senate district 30. Most of the Iowa House and Senate radio and television commercials from last cycle were never uploaded to YouTube, and I expect the same lack of transparency this year.

As for content, Reisetter’s third tv ad includes one of the most ludicrous interpretations of an Iowa legislative vote since the infamous “heated sidewalks” of 2010.

The latest Federal Election Commission disclosure reports are out, covering money raised and spent by Congressional candidates between July 1 and September 30. Details from Iowa’s four races are after the jump, along with information on groups that have made independent expenditures in each of the districts. The latest voter registration totals in the Congressional districts are here, and I’m updating absentee ballot totals for each district on weekdays here.

Any comments about these campaigns are welcome in this thread. I’d be particularly grateful if some Bleeding Heartland reader could explain what Tom Latham has been saving his money for, and why the PAC of the Credit Union National Association is supporting both Latham in IA-03 and Christie Vilsack in IA-04.

Last week’s thread on Congressional races anywhere in the country generated some interesting discussion, so here’s a new thread on any campaigns for the U.S. House or Senate. A few links that caught my eye are after the jump.

State Senator Pat Ward passed away this morning, having battled breast cancer since 2009. After the jump I’ve posted statements released by Iowa elected officials who worked with her. She was a Senate Republican staffer before running for office for the first time in 2004. Most recently, Ward served as an assistant Republican minority leader and ranking member of the Senate Labor and Business Committee.

Many of Ward’s yard signs around the district feature pink ribbons symbolizing the fight against breast cancer. I had heard that Ward missed a recent candidate forum in Waukee for health reasons, but I did not realize that her condition was so grave. Condolences to her loved ones.

In June, Ward beat back a strong primary challenge from social conservative Jeff Mullen in Iowa Senate district 22. Her name remains on the ballot for the general election. If she receives the most votes, a special election will be held later this year to fill the Senate seat, as happened in 2006 when an unopposed Iowa House candidate died before election day. If Ward’s Democratic challenger Desmund Adams wins Senate district 22, no special election will be necessary. CORRECTION: There will be a special election in Senate district 22. Under Iowa Code 49.58, the “vote cast at the general election for that office shall not be canvassed […] Instead, a special election shall be held on the first Tuesday after the second Monday in December, for the purpose of electing a person to fill that office.” Republicans will choose a candidate to run against Desmund Adams.