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Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020?

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) Few states have changed politically with the head-snapping speed of Iowa.

In 2008, its voters propelled Barack Obama to the White House, an overwhelmingly white state validating the candidacy of the first black president. A year later, its Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage, adding a voice of Midwestern sensibility to a national shift in public sentiment. In 2012, Iowa backed Obama again.

All that change proved too much, too fast, and it came as the Great Recession punished agricultural areas, shook the foundations of rural life and stoked a roiling sense of grievance.

By 2016, Donald Trump easily defeated Hillary Clinton in Iowa. Republicans were in control of the governors mansion and state legislature and held all but one U.S. House seat. For the first time since 1980, both U.S. Senate seats were in GOP hands.

What happened? Voters were slow to embrace Obamas signature health care law. The recession depleted college-educated voters as a share of the rural population, and Republicans successfully painted Democrats as the party of coastal elites.

Those forces combined for a swift Republican resurgence and helped create a wide lane for Trump.

The self-proclaimed billionaire populist ended up carrying Iowa by a larger percentage of the vote than in Texas, winning 93 of Iowa's 99 counties, including places like working-class Dubuque and Wapello counties, where no Republican since Dwight D. Eisenhower had won.

But now, as Democrats turn their focus to Iowas kickoff caucuses that begin the process of selecting Trumps challenger, could the state be showing furtive signs of swinging back? Caucus turnout will provide some early measures of Democratic enthusiasm, and of what kind of candidate Iowas Democratic voters who have a good record of picking the Democratic nominee believe has the best chance against Trump.

If Iowas rightward swing has stalled, it could be a foreboding sign for Trump in other upper Midwestern states he carried by much smaller margins and would need to win again.

Theyve gone too far to the right and there is the slow movement back, Tom Vilsack, the only two-term Democratic governor in the past 50 years, said of Republicans. This is an actual correction."

Iowans unseated two Republican U.S. House members and nearly a third in 2018 during midterm elections where more Iowa voters in the aggregate chose a Democrat for federal office for the first time in a decade.

In doing so, Iowans sent the states first Democratic women to Congress: Cindy Axne, who dominated Des Moines and its suburbs, and Abby Finkenauer, who won in several working-class counties Trump carried.

Democrats won 14 of the 31 Iowa counties that Trump won in 2016 but Obama won in 2008, though Trump's return to the ballot in 2020 could change all that.

We won a number of legislative challenge races against incumbent Republicans, veteran Iowa Democratic campaign consultant Jeff Link said. I think that leaves little question Iowa is up for grabs next year.

Theres more going on in Iowa that simply a merely cyclical swing.

Iowas metropolitan areas, some of the fastest growing in the country over the past two decades, have given birth to a new political front where Democrats saw gains in 2018.

The once-GOP-leaning suburbs and exurbs, especially to the north and west of Des Moines and the corridor linking Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, swelled with college-educated adults in the past decade, giving rise to a new class of rising Democratic leaders.

I dont believe it was temporary, Iowa State University economist David Swenson said of Democrats' 2018 gains in suburban Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. I think it is the inexorable outcome of demographic and educational shifts that have been going on.

The Democratic caucuses will provide a test of how broad the change may be.

I think it would be folly to say Iowa is not a competitive state," said John Stineman, a veteran Iowa GOP campaign operative and political data analyst who is unaffiliated with the Trump campaign but has advised presidential and congressional campaigns over the past 25 years. I believe Iowa is a swing state in 2020.

For now, that is not a widely held view, as Iowa has shown signs of losing its swing state status.

In the 1980s, it gave rise to a populist movement in rural areas from the left, the ascent of the religious right as a political force and the start of an enduring rural-urban balance embodied by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

Now, after a decade-long Republican trend, there are signs of shifting alliances in people like Jenny OToole.

The 48-year-old insurance industry employee from suburban Cedar Rapids stood on the edge of the scrum surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden last spring, trying to get a glimpse as he shook hands and posed for pictures.

I was a Republican. Not any more, OToole said. Im socially liberal, but economically conservative. Thats what Im looking for.

OToole is among those current and new former Republicans who dot Democratic presidential events, from Iowa farm hubs to working-class river towns to booming suburbs.

Janet Cosgrove, a 75-year-old Episcopal minister from Atlantic, in western Iowa, and Judy Hoakison, a 65-year-old farmer from rural southwest Iowa, are Republicans who caught Mayor Pete Buttigiegs recent trip.

If such voters are a quiet warning to Trump in Iowa, similar symptoms in Wisconsin and Michigan, where Democrats also made 2018 gains, could be even more problematic.

Vilsack has seen the stage change dramatically. After 30 years of Republican dominance in Iowas governors mansion, he was elected in 1998 as a former small-city mayor and pragmatic state senator.

An era of partisan balance in Iowa took hold, punctuated by Democratic presidential nominee Al Gores 4,144-vote victory in Iowa in 2000, and George W. Bushs 10,059-vote re-election in 2004.

After the 2006 national wave swept Democrats into total Statehouse control for the first time in 50 years, the stage was set for Obamas combination of generational change, his appeal to anti-Iraq War sentiment and the historic opportunity to elect the first African American president.

We were like a conquering army, prepared to negotiate terms of surrender, said Cedar Rapids Democrat Dale Todd, an early Obama supporter and adviser.

Todd was one of a collection of Iowa Democratic activists who gathered at a downtown Des Moines sports bar last year to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Obama's historic caucus campaign.

Just across the Des Moines River in the state Capitol, there was a reminder of how much the ground had shifted since those heady days.

Republicans control all of state government for the first time in 20 years. Part of their wholesale conservative agenda has included stripping public employee unions of nearly all bargaining rights, establishing new voter restrictions and outlawing abortion six weeks into a pregnancy.

It was in line with Republican takeovers in states such as Wisconsin that were completed earlier, but traced their beginnings to the same turbulent summer of 2009.

On a Wednesday in August that year, throngs flocked to Grassleys typically quiet annual county visits to protest his work with Democrats on health care legislation.

Thousands representing the emerging Tea Party forced Grassleys last event from a community center in the small town of Adel to the town park, where some booed the typically popular senator and held signs stating, Grassley, you're fired.

The events became a national symbol for uneasiness about the new president's signature policy goal.

The previous April, Iowa's nine-member Supreme Court Democratic and Republican appointees had unanimously declared same-sex marriage legal in the state. A year later, Christian conservatives successfully campaigned to oust the three Supreme Court justices facing retention, waving the marriage decision as their cause.

Four years later, Democrats had high expectations of holding the retiring Harkin's Senate seat. But Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley lacked Harkin's populist appeal, and was beaten by state Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iraq War veteran from rural Iowa who painted Braley as an elitist lawyer.

By 2016, Republicans had completed their long-sought statehouse takeover, in part by beating longtime Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal.

We tried in many cases to win suburbia, but we just couldn't lay a glove on it," Gronstal said. We just could not figure out how to crack it in Iowa."

The answer for Democrats in Iowa is much the same as the rest of the country: growing, vote-rich suburbs.

Dallas County, west of Des Moines, has grown by 121% since 2000, converting from a checkerboard of farms into miles of car dealerships, strip malls, megachurches and waves of similarly styled housing developments.

It had been a Republican county. However, last year, long-held Republican Iowa House districts in Des Moines western suburbs fell to Democrats.

It was the culmination of two decades of shifting educational attainment with political implications.

Since 2000, the number of Iowans with at least a college degree in urban and suburban areas grew by twice the rate of rural areas, according to U.S. Census data and an Iowa State University study.

Last year, a third of urban and suburban Iowans had a college diploma, up from 25% at the dawn of the metropolitan boom in 2000. Rural Iowans had inched up to just 20% from 16% during that period.

The more that occurs, the more you get voter participation leaning toward Democratic outcomes than has historically been in the past, Swenson said, noting the higher likelihood of college-educated voters to lean Democratic.

Since 2016 alone, registered Democrats in Dallas County have increased 15%, to Republicans 2%. Republicans still outnumber Democrats in the county, but independent voters have leaped by 20% and for the first time outnumber Republicans.

There is now a third front, Gronstal said. We can fight in those toss-up rural areas, hold our urban base, but now compete in those quintessentially suburban districts.

Though Trumps return to the ballot in 2020 shakes up the calculus, his approval in Iowa has remained around 45% or lower. A sub-50 rating is typically problematic for an incumbent.

Another warning for Trump, GOP operative Stineman noted, is The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom Iowa Polls November finding that only 76% of self-identified Republicans said they would definitely vote to re-elect him next year.

With no challenger and 10 months until the election, a lot can change.

Still, thats one in four of your family thats not locked down, Stineman said.

There are also signs Iowa Democrats have shaken some of the apathy that helped Trump and hobbled Clinton in Iowa in 2016.

Democratic turnout in 2018 leaped from the previous midterm in 2014 from 57% to 68%, according to the Iowa Secretary of State. Republican turnout, which is typically higher, also rose, but by a smaller margin.

Overall turnout in Iowa, as in more reliably Democratic-voting presidential states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, was down in 2016, due mostly to a downturn in Democratic participation.

The trend was down, across the board," said Ann Selzer, who has conducted The Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll for more than 25 years. "So it doesnt take much to create a Democratic victory in these upper Midwestern states.

I think the success in the midterms kind of made people on the Democratic side believe that we can do it, Selzer said.

Perhaps, but Trump has his believers, too.

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Iowa swung fiercely to Trump. Will it swing back in 2020? - mySA

Why was there a five-year delay in passing the Caesar Act? What was stopping the US administration? Bilal Farouk, a member of the Syrian-American Council, says that after "Caesar" arrived at the United States, in an attempt to prepare the Act, "we knew the reasons preventing the Act from being passed in Congress and the person who had been disrupting the process."

Bilal adds that after Caesar left Syria and with the aid of jurists to permit him to share the documents he had attained, he was listened to in the beginning, in an attempt to figure out whether or not any Americans were among those who were murdered. This would have allowed for the issue to become one of the US public opinions. However, after seeing the images, it became apparent that the problem was much bigger than that. It became evident that the issue went beyond imposing sanctions to protect civilians.

When the Act was proposed at the beginning of 2016, Barack Obama was still the President of the United States. When the Act was drafted, the tone was different; it had humane objectives to protect civilians and prisoners. It did not include international sanctions on other countries and did not include the oil industry or the army. It was widely supported, and it was imagined that it would pass through the parliament.

At the end of his term, Obama was ready to celebrate the nuclear deal with Iran. He feared that passing this Act may affect the nuclear deal. He called the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, Nancy Pelosi, on Friday, only a few days before the Congress was supposed to vote on the Act. According to reliable sources from Pelosi's office, he asked her to withdraw the vote.

After that, civil organizations that followed up the issue tried, once again, in the hopes that it would be re-proposed for voting. In the beginning, the process of passing the legislation was that of independent Act, and it was supported by the vast majority of the Congress. This is what happened after Trump was elected, and the Republicans took over the Senate. The Republican Senator of Kentucky, Rand Paul, known for his relations with Russia and for supporting Bashar Assad, prevented it from being passed in the Senate because this type of Act cannot pass without getting the vote of the entire Senate.

Rand Paul disrupted the passing of the Act in the Senate for three years. He would bounce it back to Congress to vote on it and refer it to the Senate to no avail. Consequently, Syrian organizations decided to communicate with US attorneys and civil organizations to find a way to pass the Act. It was agreed that the Act would be included in the budget Act of the Department of Defense. That way, it would not need to be approved by the entire Senate. It received 74 votes.

Last year, there was an attempt to include the Caesar Act in the budget, but it was challenged by problems that faced Trump in Congress after Democrats took over. This led to a shutting down of the US Government for 35 days as a result of Trump's insistence on including the infamous wall on the border of Mexico in the budget. This suspended the ability to pass any proposition or Act during that time, primarily that the budget cannot be referred to the President to be signed unless it received partisan agreement and the majority of both Congress and Senate members.

This year it was different; Syrian organizations succeeded in including the Caesar Act in the budget.

Bilal concludes by saying that "Caesar" was documenting the corpses and linking them to the victim's name and number, so the information he was gathering was dangerous. He confirmed that "Caesar" is not in the US and that he goes to Washington from time to time to meet with Congress members and US security agencies. However, he worries that if his identity was revealed, he would be murdered by the Russian, Syrian, or Iranian security agencies. This is what has happened and continues to happen to others.

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Obama Obstructed 'Caesar Act' to Save the Nuclear Deal With Iran - Asharq Al-awsat English

Listen in on a conversation with former First Lady Michelle Obama in Anaheim.

Tickets are now on sale for an April 2 visit by Obama to the Honda Center. The conversations moderator has yet to be announced.

Obama, a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School, started her career as a lawyer in Chicago before later working in the Chicago mayors office and at universities. As first lady from 2009 to 2017, she championed initiatives combating childhood obesity, supporting military families and veterans, encouraging higher education and pushing for more educational opportunities for girls around the world.

Last year she published her memoir, Becoming.

Before her stop in Anaheim, Obama will hold a similar appearance at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento on April 1.

Tickets start at $99; seating is in the lower bowl and on the floor. A limited meet and greet VIP package is available for $3,000.

See more here:
Tickets on sale for Michelle Obama in conversation at the Honda Center - OCRegister

President Barack Obama signs the the financial reform bill into law July 21, 2010.

Getty Images

To sum up the past decade, you could call it a tale of two presidents.

For evidence of that, look no further than the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The financial overhaul legislation was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama on July 21, 2010.

On the heels of the financial crisis, it was intended to help rein in banks. The law also paved the way for tougher consumer protections.

It ordered the SEC to evaluate how the industry provides investment advice to retail customers. In 2011, the agency released a study advocating for the creation of a uniform fiduciary standard for investment advisors and broker-dealers.

The measure also called for the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government body specifically devoted to serving as a consumer watchdog.

Fast forward: On May 24, 2018, President Donald Trump signed a rollback of a number of banking regulations that were included in that law.

After signing, U.S. President Donald Trump holds up an executive order rolling back regulations from the 2010 Dodd-Frank law on Wall Street reform at the White House in Washington February 3, 2017.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

And while that didn't affect the two big consumer protections, it is up for debate whether consumers are in a better position almost a decade later.

Aaron Klein, a fellow in economic studies at Brookings Institution who helped craft the Dodd-Frank Act, said the answer is a definitive no.

"The Trump administration took over," Klein said. "They told the police to take a break, and they stopped recording crime."

"Ultimately, consumers will lose billions of dollars as a result of purposeful neglect," he said.

One of the big misses this decade, investor advocates argue, is the failure to establish a fiduciary rule.

The regulation was aimed at getting brokers and investment advisors to adhere to a higher standard when providing advice for clients.

Many advocates consider the fiduciary standard to be better protection, because it requires financial professionals to put their clients' best interests ahead of their own.

Investment advisors, for example, have traditionally been held to that. Brokers, meanwhile, have answered to something known as the suitability rule, which means brokers were free to sell clients any investment as long as it was "suitable" for the client at the time, even if cheaper alternatives were available.

Efforts to put together a joint fiduciary rule created an ongoing saga over the past decade.

Despite the SEC's authority to issue a fiduciary rule, the panel mostly didn't take action following its 2011 report. It wasn't until this year that the agency began rolling out a rule called Regulation Best Interest.

While the SEC stalled, the Department of Labor and even some states moved to establish their own fiduciary rules. The Department of Labor's efforts were squashed when the Trump administration took over. But the DOL has said it plans to work on a new rule governing retirement accounts.

While Regulation Best Interest is legally in force, financial firms have until June to comply.

Comedian John Oliver takes a shot at non-fiduciary financial advisors and their spiraling 401(k) fees on a recent segment of "Last Week Tonight."

Source: Last Week Tonight | HBO | YouTube

The rule, called Reg BI for short, requires brokers to keep retail customers' best interests in mind when recommending securities. It also requires broker-dealers and investment advisors to provide clients with a new form that summarizes the relationship.

Critics say the rule falls short of providing investors with full fiduciary coverage.

"It, to some degree, made the area more complex and harmful for consumers," said Jamie Hopkins, director of retirement research at Carson Group and professor at Creighton University Heider College of Business.

"They've expanded the use of the language 'best interest,' when in my belief that's really 'suitability' plus additional disclosures," Hopkins said.

Yet many in the financial industry have embraced the rule.

Earlier this month, Kenneth Bentsen Jr., president and CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group that represents securities firms, called Reg BI a "robust and strict standard."

"It is not a disclosure-only based rule," Bentsen said. "It is much stricter than that."

Hopkins argues that the change puts the burden on the consumer to ask financial advisors if they are fiduciaries and to clarify how they get paid and what services they provide.

"If that's something you want, have the advisor put that in writing that they are a fiduciary," Hopkins said.

As with the fiduciary rule, efforts to develop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into a robust watchdog have also taken different turns amid the change in administrations.

For evidence, look no further than to the CFPB's own shifting leadership.

When Richard Cordray, the first director of the CFPB, announced in November 2017 that he was stepping down, both he and President Trump named a replacement.

Cordray promoted chief of staff Leandra English to the role of deputy director and said she would serve as acting director until the Senate confirmed a successor.

Instead, Trump named his own acting director, Mick Mulvaney.

Consumer advocates complained that the CFPB's authority was watered down under Mulvaney's leadership, citing an April New York Times Magazine article, "Mick Mulvaney's Master Class in Destroying a Bureaucracy from Within."

Last December, Kathy Kraninger was confirmed by the Senate as the new director. To cap off her one-year anniversary, the CFPB recently put out a release boasting of its accomplishments.

On that list is an item payday loans that has sparked criticism. These short-term loans often saddle consumers with high interest rates as they try to cover their cash needs between paychecks.

In 2017, the CFPB issued a rule that would establish stricter regulations for payday lenders. But this year, the agency has proposed delaying compliance and rescinding tougher underwriting requirements that lenders would face.

"The biggest concerns that we see with the CFPB today is they are holding the hands of the payday lenders," said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform.

"That means that the debt trap will continue and people will continue to lose their cars and their bank accounts as a result of the continued destruction of payday loans," she said.

Klein also criticized the agency for "rewarding the naughty list."

"They have stuffed the stockings of payday lenders and the people who were convicted or pleaded guilty to financial malfeasance by reducing fines," he said.

The good news is that Congress has left the CFPB intact, which means a new administration could re-energize it, Klein said.

A woman enters an All American Check Cashing location in Brandon, Miss., May 12, 2017.

Rogelio V. Solis | AP

"A new director would have substantial authority to revive the agency, and elections have consequences," Klein said. "The CFPB day to day, month to month, needs to be independent."

However, not everyone agrees that having a separate agency dedicated to consumer protection is necessary.

The Federal Trade Commission already protects consumers against fraud, said Norbert Michel, director for the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"All you did was give this new agency this vague new power and said we're going to figure it out later on, which isn't doing anything to protect anyone against fraud," Michel said.

The CFPB's evolution has helped to do one thing: raise public awareness of consumer protection issues, Jun said.

But as with the fiduciary rule, the onus is on the consumer to ask the right questions and speak up if they are wronged.

Individuals should still turn to the CFPB's public complaint database to make their voices heard, Jun said. They should also consider talking to a lawyer or reporting egregious practices to their state attorneys general, she said.

"If something doesn't seem right to you, look into it," Jun said.

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This was supposed to be the decade of tougher consumer protections. That didn't happen - CNBC

Former President Barack Obama recently made comments that have been interpreted as a warning that Democrats must not veer too far to the left for instance, by supporting presidential candidates like Senators Bernie Sander or Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

Specifically, Obama said that his party must recognize that the average American doesnt think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.

Considering that he headlined a recent Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiseron Nov. 21 in Silicon Valley, where ticket prices ranged from $10,000 to $355,000, one has to wonder just how many average Americans the former President crosses paths with.

In trying to tip the party towards moderation, Obama said Democrats ultimate goal is to defeat a president and a party that hastaken a sharp turn away from a lot of the core traditions and values and institutional commitments that built this country.

The problem with that analysis is that it fails to appreciate how that established order the one that former President Obama is so nostalgic for made Donald Trump possible. Under Obamas leadership and both Bushes, and Clintons, and Reagans the elites became disconnected from the circumstances of the vast majority of a country that was, and still is, in decline.

Obama also fails to account for the convergence of several troubling socio-economic and ecological trend lines that have grown even more problematic since he left the White House.

President Obamas decision to bail out Wall Street at the expense of the poor- and working-class had generational consequences. The destruction of trillions of dollars in family wealth accumulated over decades coincided with an ever-accelerating concentration of wealththat has only worsened under Trump.

Hence, some of the Rust Belt states that voted for President Obama twice flipped for Donald Trump. Likewise, Recession-era foreclosures resulted in a catastrophic loss of African American household wealth, meaning hundreds of thousands of Obama voters sat out 2016.

In a bitter irony, the historic victory of the first African American president to win the White House coincided with hundreds of thousands of African Americans losing theirs.

To this day, foreclosure continues to wreak havoc on families, particularly in communities of color like Newark, New Jersey, where activist Fredrica Bey has been working for years to get a foreclosure moratorium and hold banks like Wells Fargo accountable.

President Obama, whom I voted for twice, did more damage bailing out the banks and leaving us in the lurch, damage that will most likely hold for decades unless we elect someone like Elizabeth [Warren] or Bernie [Sanders], she told Salon over email.Thank God they are both in the top five, if not the top four.

She continued: Elizabeth Warren, [recently deceased Rep.] Elijah Cummings (God bless him), and [Rep.] Maxine Waters [D.-Calif.] are the only ones in the last two administrations that have done everything in their power to give much needed assistance and hold banks accountable.

Since the 1970s, American wage earners have been losing ground regardless of which party was in control. In place of gains in earnings, we were given access to ever-increasing levels of household debt.

Our citizens are shackled by $1.5 trillion in student debt, most of it held by the youngest two generations. The life experience of these young people is bookended by 9/11 and the Great Recession.

The level of wealth inequality has so stratified American society that no less an establishment figure than Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warns that it is the nations most pressing economic challenge.

Hardly a Marxist, Powell has said that the United States is no longer the worlds leader in upward mobility providing the opportunity for those in poverty to raise themselves up into a better circumstance for themselves and their families. Thats certainly true statistically: studies have found that a number of nations, including Britain, France, Sweden, and even Italy,score far higher on indices of social mobility.

From our declining life expectancy to the spike in youth and teen suicides, weve been a nation on gradual decline badly in need of some kind of unifying social cohesion that might help us face big challenges.

Despite spending more on health care than any other country,the United States has seen increasing mortality and falling life expectancy for people age 25 to 64, who should be in the prime of their lives, reported the Washington Post. In contrast, other wealthy nations have generally experienced continued progress in extending longevity.

The planet is in full blown ecological crisis; prophetically, there is intense competition for firefighting planes that can dump water on wildfires.

Sorry to report, Mr. Obama, but 2020 just cant be another down-the-middle fence straddle. Politics as usual is how we got here.

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Obama pines for the political era that created Trump in the first place - Salon