Biden Is the Favorite

4. Iowa

What to learn from Steve King’s loss.

Iowa is in the same boat as Ohio, albeit for cheaper: Democrats probably don’t need it, but it would be neat to have anyway. As with Ohio and Arizona, the Trump campaign is fretting about the state and dumping advertising money into shoring it up. The big news out of Iowa this week, though, was that longtime Rep. Steve King, the leading openly racist member of Congress, lost his Republican primary. He did not lose because he was racist, and plenty of ex-King supporters had said during the primary campaign that they thought controversies around his various comments were overblown. They kicked him out, though, because his vitriol had made him an ineffective member of Congress, especially after his comments had lost him his prized seat on the House Agriculture Committee. We don’t want to extrapolate too much from how the result of a Republican congressional primary in northwest Iowa foreshadows the result of a national general election. But with Trump’s polling sliding to new lows, we could see a trend where voters don’t leave Trump because they have a moral problem with his many insane daily outbursts. They leave because they recognize that the many insane daily outbursts make him incapable of governing, a flaw that’s sharply exposed when there are two concurrent national crises. Trump led by 2 percentage points in the latest poll, in early May.

from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/370MO6c
via IFTTT