Quinnipiac’s new swing-state poll paints a worrying picture of the 2016 general election for Iowa Democrats. If the poll is accurate, Hillary Clinton’s favorability has plummeted in recent months, and at least three Republican candidates lead Clinton and other prospective Democratic candidates head to head in Iowa.  

Former State Senator Kent Sorenson faces new criminal charges of domestic abuse assault and interference with official acts, KCCI-TV’s Cynthia Fodor reported today. Sorenson resigned his Iowa Senate seat in 2013 and pled guilty to federal crimes last year in connection with illegal payments he received during the 2012 presidential campaign. Prosecutors have agreed to delay sentencing in that case because Sorenson has been cooperating with the federal government on a “larger investigation.”

Fodor reported that Sorenson was arrested on July 17 after a fight with his wife, Shawnee Sorenson. She did not call the police; rather, someone called 911 after seeing her walking down the road near their home. Warren County Sheriff Brian Vos said Shawnee Sorenson “had redness around her eye and did admit she had been struck by Mr. Sorenson.” Two sheriff’s deputies then suffered unspecified injuries while arresting the former senator.

Sorenson’s attorney said his client will plead not guilty to the new charges, and that the whole family has been under stress while Sorenson awaits sentencing in the federal case. In a statement to KCCI, published in full on the television station’s website, Shawnee Sorenson said today that she started the fight on Friday after drinking some alcohol, “which I now realize was not the right thing to do.” By her account, her husband grabbed her because she was “throwing things” and “clawed him.” Shawnee Sorenson added that she did not want the police involved and “would not press charges,” because “Kent looked worse than I did.” Nor did she ask for the no-contact order that was filed after the arrest. She is “tired of the media portraying Kent in a negative light. He has done his best to be a good father, husband and provider for our family despite all the pressures he is facing.”

Linh Ta reported for the Des Moines Register that Sorenson “had $2,000 bond posted to avoid jail” and will have a preliminary hearing on the new criminal charges on July 28. He was acquitted on a domestic abuse assault charge in 1994 “when the witness testified that the allegations were false,” Jennifer Jacobs reported for the Des Moines Register in 2010.  

This evening I was a respondent for a lengthy poll testing messages about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. I assume the Clinton campaign commissioned this survey. If not her campaign, then some allied group. Most of the questions seemed geared toward determining what is driving Iowa Democrats toward or away from the front-runner and the senator from Vermont, who has claimed the progressive alternative niche in the presidential race. Several of the questions drew from rhetoric Clinton uses in her stump speech.

The caller identified herself as representing “National Data Collection.” She was calling from 586-200-0157, the same number used for a different message-testing phone poll I received in early March.

I almost feel sorry for these pollsters having to repeat so many questions when they call my house. My notes are after the jump. I’ve been a respondent for many polls over the years, but this one included a device that was new to me.

This morning, business owner Desmund Adams became the first Democratic candidate in Iowa’s third Congressional district. His campaign is on the web here as well as on Facebook and Twitter. State Representative Ako Abdul-Samad attended the event and confirmed to me that he will support Adams for Congress. Former State Senator and gubernatorial candidate Jack Hatch was there too and told me he is “encouraging” Adams to run.

I enclose below more background on Adams and five themes from his remarks today, along with details on first-term Representative David Young’s record in those areas.

Leaders in both parties expect IA-03 to be competitive in 2016. Young is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s target list and in the National Republican Congressional Committee’s incumbent protection program. The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office indicate that 150,925 active registered Democrats, 162,921 Republicans, and 162,161 no-party voters live in IA-03. The district covers sixteen counties in central and southwest Iowa. About two-thirds of the Democrats and more than half of all registered voters reside in Polk County, containing Des Moines and most of its suburbs.

I hope to see a competitive Democratic primary, which would help raise the eventual nominee’s profile and likely sharpen his or her skills on the stump. Other potential candidates include State Senator Matt McCoy, former Governor Chet Culver, and Jim Mowrer, the 2014 Democratic nominee against Steve King in IA-04. Since Young’s 2014 opponent Staci Appel ruled out a repeat Congressional bid, I have not heard of any Democratic women actively considering this race, but if one emerges, the EMILY’s List political action committee may get involved on her behalf.  

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

All five Democratic presidential candidates appeared at the Iowa Democratic Party’s Hall of Fame dinner in Cedar Rapids on Friday night. I’ve posted below my impressions from the speeches; you can watch the videos on C-SPAN. It’s a shame the venue couldn’t accommodate more people, because lots of interested Iowa Democrats were unable to get tickets for the event.

Before the Hall of Fame dinner, I spent some time with an old friend who’s a huge Hillary Clinton supporter. Huge, as in, she didn’t take down her Hillary yard sign until the grass was long enough to need mowing in the spring of 2008. She mentioned to me that she’s relieved to see Clinton working hard this year instead of “ignoring” Iowa like last time. When I told my friend that Hillary visited Iowa more than 30 times in 2007, spending all or part of 70 days in the state, she was surprised. I’m amazed by how many Iowans have bought into the media-constructed narrative that Clinton “bombed” in the caucuses because she took the state for granted.

Ten Republican presidential candidates came to Ames on Saturday for the Family Leadership Summit organized by Bob Vander Plaats’ FAMiLY Leader organization. C-SPAN posted all of those speeches here. As usual, Donald Trump sucked up most of the oxygen in the room by questioning whether Senator John McCain had been a hero during the Vietnam War. O.Kay Henderson posted the audio at Radio Iowa. Rival presidential candidates with the exception of Ted Cruz rushed to condemn Trump’s remarks. Some of the Family Leadership Summit attendees may have been more upset by Trump’s comments about his three marriages and his admission that when he’s done something wrong, “I don’t bring God into that picture.”

The best news in Iowa this week came out of a federal courtroom in Cedar Rapids. As Ryan Foley reported for the Associated Press, “Iowa’s second-largest power company agreed Wednesday to drastically cut pollution at several coal-fired power plants under a Clean Air Act settlement that’s expected to make the air safer and easier to breathe around the state.” You can read the full consent decree here and the complaint filed against the Alliant Energy subsidiary Interstate Power and Light here.

Huge credit for the victory goes to the Sierra Club Iowa chapter. Foley reports that this federal government enforcement action “started in 2011 when the Sierra Club filed a notice accusing the company [Interstate Power and Light] of violating the Clean Air Act.” The Sierra Club advocates for a range of policies to reduce air pollution and Iowa’s reliance on coal to generate electricity.

I enclose below highlights from Foley’s article and five reasons the changes at the affected power plants will save Iowans’ lives.

The agreement U.S. officials reached with Interstate Power and Light is also an encouraging sign that a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision against the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule on mercury emissions is at most a temporary setback for clean air. In some communities, the court’s ruling won’t even slow down efforts to convert coal-fired plants to other fuel sources.

If only Governor Terry Branstad, who has often spoken of his desire to make Iowa the “healthiest state,” could recognize the benefits of burning less coal. Although Branstad was happy to bask in the reflected glory of new pollution controls at one of the affected Interstate Power and Light power plants, he welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the mercury rule, which the governor’s office characterized as a “misguided” EPA regulation.  

Sanity has prevailed in an Iowa town where officials had been selling raffle tickets for the right to shoot a human being with a taser at a festival coming up this weekend.

Congressional candidates were required to file quarterly campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission by the end of July 15. Three of Iowa’s four incumbents have no declared challengers yet, so most of the action was in the first district, where Monica Vernon’s filing removed all doubt that Washington, DC Democrats want her to face first-term Representative Rod Blum, considered one of the most vulnerable Republicans in Congress.

Follow me after the jump for details from all of the Iowans’ FEC reports. As happened during the first quarter, one would-be Congressional challenger out-raised each of the four incumbents for the reporting period.

More plants in the aster family are now flowering across Iowa. I have trouble identifying asters, especially the ones with white ray flowers and yellow center disks. The website of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas took the pressure off by commenting, “The many small-flowered asters found in eastern North America are often difficult to distinguish from one another, as are many of the large-flowered species.” These descriptions of similar-looking white asters give you a sense of how complicated it can be to identify plants in this group, even for experts.

I enclose below pictures of three or four different aster species you may find blooming in Iowa this month. I believe at least two of them are native; one is an invasive plant from Europe. You don’t necessarily need to explore natural habitats to find these wildflowers. Some are opportunistic enough to grow on low-quality soil in vacant lots or along roadsides. I have a soft spot for the weedy aster species, because unlike, say, wild parsnip, they aren’t hurting anyone.

This post is also a mid-week open thread: all topics welcome.

Bleeding Heartland’s “Where are they now?” posts usually focus on new jobs for former elected officials, candidates for high office, or other prominent individuals in Iowa politics.

Todd Dorman’s latest commentary for the Cedar Rapids Gazette prompted me to follow up on a smear from the 2010 state legislative elections.

While many establishment Democrats favor Cedar Rapids City Council member Monica Vernon to take on Representative Rod Blum, the 2014 Democratic nominee Pat Murphy has revealed one reason he is said to be leaning toward running for Congress again. Erin Murphy reported yesterday,

Murphy outpolled Vernon, 43 percent to 34 percent, in a survey of 350 likely Democratic primary voters conducted last week in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District and released Tuesday by Murphy. Gary Kroeger was chosen by 12 percent of respondents.

The poll was conducted by Myers Research, a Washington, D.C.-based polling firm that Murphy also solicited during his 2014 campaign.

I wouldn’t read too much into partial results from an internal poll taken nearly a year before the Democratic primary, but as a general rule, I think competitive primaries help eventual nominees more than they hurt. If Murphy believes he can make a strong case for a second chance against Blum, let the Democratic voters in the first district decide, rather than leaving the choice to elected officials in Iowa or Washington.

Any comments related to the IA-01 race are welcome in this thread.

UPDATE: Added below a Murphy for Iowa press release about this poll. The July 15 statement says Murphy will “make a final decision about a 2016 campaign next week.” The attached polling memo says Murphy’s advantage over Vernon grows to 51 percent to 40 percent in a two-candidate race, and that Murphy leads among women as well as men in the sample.

President Barack Obama announced this morning a deal aimed at preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Negotiators representing the U.S., Russian Federation, United Kingdom, France, China and Germany were involved in the talks. You can read the full text of the deal on the Washington Post’s website. The United Nations will drop its sanctions on Iran, provided that country complies with the agreement, including granting international inspectors access to all nuclear sites.

Most of Iowa’s Congressional delegation has already reacted to the news. I’ve enclosed their comments below and will update this post as needed. This spring, all four Iowans in the U.S. House and both of our U.S. senators voted for a bill Obama signed into law, which allows Congress to vote to approve or disapprove any deal with Iran. Speaking to reporters today, the president said, “I welcome scrutiny of the details of this agreement,” adding “that he would veto any legislation that tried to prevent its implementation.” Opponents of the deal would need to override that veto with a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress; so far, just under half the U.S. senate appears inclined to block the deal.  

Anti-abortion activists suffered a setback last month when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously ruled unconstitutional the state ban on using telemedicine for medical abortions. But the health and human services budget for the fiscal year that began on July 1 contained two provisions sought by those who want to reduce the number of abortions performed in Iowa.

The first part of this post examines new language in the Iowa Code related to ultrasounds for women seeking abortions. Who was closer to the mark: Iowa Right to Life, which hailed the “HUGE life-saving victory” as the anti-choice movement’s biggest legislative success in two decades? Or Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, which countered that the ultrasound language would neither change the standard of care at their clinics nor “directly impact a woman’s access to abortion”?

Next, the post addresses language lawmakers first adopted in 2013 and renewed in the just-passed human services budget, which allows the Iowa governor to determine whether Medicaid should reimburse for abortion services. No other state has a similar provision.

Finally, I offer some thoughts on an odd feature of anti-abortion activism in the Iowa legislature. State Senate Republicans advocate more for restrictions on abortion rights and access than do GOP representatives in the House, even though “pro-choice” Democrats control the upper chamber, while all 57 members of the House majority caucus are nominally “pro-life.” Iowa House leaders have not been eager to put abortion bills on the agenda. This year, rank-and-file House Republicans didn’t even introduce, let alone make a serious attempt to pass, companion bills to most of the abortion-related legislation their counterparts filed in the state Senate.

Iowa’s largest public employee union and 20 Democratic state legislators filed a lawsuit today challenging the closure of mental health institutes in Mount Pleasant and Clarinda. I enclose below a press release from AFSCME Council 61, which lists the six state senators and fourteen state representatives who joined the lawsuit naming Governor Terry Branstad and Department of Human Services Director Chuck Palmer.

The Branstad administration announced plans in January to close two of Iowa’s four in-patient mental health facilities. State legislators were neither consulted nor notified in advance. The Department of Human Services started winding down operations well before the end of the 2015 fiscal year. Democrats fought to include funding for the Clarinda and Mount Pleasant institutes in the budget for the current fiscal year, but Branstad item-vetoed the appropriation. The lawsuit contends that closing the facilities violates Iowa Code, which holds that the state “shall operate” mental health institutes in Mount Pleasant and Clarinda. The governor’s communications director told KCCI that AFSCME’s leader in Iowa “is resistant to change” and that the closed “centers were not suited to offer modern mental health care.”

The Iowa legislature’s decision next year on whether to fund the Clarinda and Mount Pleasant facilities will be critically important. The Iowa Supreme Court recently dismissed the lawsuit challenging the closure of the Iowa Juvenile Home in 2014, without considering the merits of that case, on the grounds that the legislature made the issue “moot” by no longer appropriating state money to operate that facility. By refusing to include funding for the two closed mental health institutes in the budget for fiscal year 2017, Iowa House Republicans could bolster the Branstad administration’s efforts to defeat the lawsuit filed today.

UPDATE: Added more speculation about this lawsuit’s prospects below.

The apparent attempt to bury Governor Terry Branstad’s large batch of budget cuts before the July 4 holiday weekend isn’t working. Fallout from the governor’s line-item vetoes continues to make news on a daily basis. Today, Iowa Senate Democratic leaders announced that they have formally asked colleagues to request a special legislative session to override the highest-profile and largest vetoes, which affected education and mental health funding.

Meanwhile, the latest article by the Des Moines Register’s “Reader’s Watchdog” Lee Rood called attention to an item veto that flew below the radar last week: $100,000 from the health and human services budget, intended for a pilot project to serve refugees in Polk County. The amount of money was so small–far less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the $7 billion state budget–that Branstad couldn’t fall back on misleading statements about “fiscal health” to justify this item veto. Instead, he cited an equally weak pretext.

What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

Jason Cherkis’s investigative piece for the Huffington Post, “The Lost Girls,” went viral instantly and has struck a chord with many women I know. Cherkis tells the story of Jackie Fox (real name Jackie Fuchs), the bass player for the all-girl band The Runaways. I literally knew nothing about the group before reading this piece, not even that it launched Joan Jett’s career. The focus of “The Lost Girls” is manager Kim Fowley’s horrific rape of a drugged Fox, then 16 years old, in front of her bandmates and others associated with The Runaways. Cherkis spoke with Jessica Hopper about the challenges of researching and writing Jackie’s story. Evelyn McDonnell, author of a book about The Runaways, assesses the journalist’s conduct critically here.

A thread running through “The Lost Girls” is current understanding of the “bystander effect.” Why do multiple witnesses to a crime sometimes do nothing, and how do they process the event later? If Cherkis’ reporting is accurate, some people who witnessed Jackie’s rape were shattered by what happened in that room. But according to the woman who later played bass in the group, other band members had a “running joke” about what Fowley had done to Jackie. This open letter to Jett from Hether Fortune of Wax Idols echoed a lot of my feelings after reading the article. It’s easy to understand why no one in the band spoke up for Jackie at the time. Fowley had near-total control over their future careers. The way he brutalized Jackie sent a strong message to the other Runaways: you could be next in line, and no one will protect you. But how disappointing, nearly 40 years later, for Jett to pretend (through a representative) that she didn’t know about the rape. How much would it cost her to express regret for what Jackie went through and remorse about her bystander role?

Judging by numerous threads I’ve read on social media, “The Lost Girls” has prompted many women to reflect on disturbing events we experienced or observed as teenagers–not only crimes, but also consensual relationships that now stand out as an abuse of power by an authority figure.  

Sources in northeast Iowa continue to report that former Iowa House Speaker Pat Murphy plans to announce a new campaign in the first Congressional district soon, despite signals that prominent Democrats in Iowa and Washington want Cedar Rapids City Council member Monica Vernon to be the 2016 nominee against first-term Republican Rod Blum.

State Senator Jason Schultz weighed in last night on the controversy over Confederate flag displays: “I’m now convinced the whole Confederate flag issue is simply about progressives teaching the establishment R’s how to jump through hoops.”

During our ensuing dialogue, Schultz revealed the level of nuanced thinking and temperate choice of words one would expect from a Ted Cruz endorser.  

Having tried unsuccessfully to prevent federal courts from hearing cases about marriage rights, Representative Steve King (IA-04) introduced a resolution today that would express the U.S. House’s disagreement with last month’s U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges.

King’s effort surely qualifies as the “strong message” he promised to send to the Supreme Court immediately after the Obergefell decision. But it is strikingly different from his response to the Iowa Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in 2009.

Waterloo high school teacher Vaughn Gross e-mailed 23 Iowa Republican state senators this week, urging them to “help call a special [legislative] session to fund our schools.” State Senator David Johnson sent back a dismissive reply, telling Gross to “Quit whining” and complaining that Democrats had cost him money by sending the Iowa legislative session into overtime.

I’m surprised an experienced politician would respond in that tone to Gross’s respectful, heartfelt appeal. But Johnson outdid himself later in the day, after his message to the teacher went viral. Far from seeking a graceful way out of the situation, Johnson defended his choice of words and indicated that he sees GOP legislators as the victims of a “concerted attack” on their votes. In his view, Republicans should not be criticized for education funding levels.

Really?