Randy Evans can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

I thought the often-repeated desire to weed out waste, fraud and abuse from government spending was something Republicans, Democrats, and independents could all agree on in Iowa.

Boy, am I naive.

A bit of recent Iowa government history illustrates this contradiction between our elected officials’ statements and their actions.

Joseph Howe is a political strategist and former Libertarian Party of Iowa state chair with experience working on campaigns as a state director such as Gary Johnson 2016 and Rick Stewart 2022. He also served as the Polk County co-chair for Rand Paul’s campaign in 2016. In addition to his political work, Joseph is a financial services operations manager and resides in Beaverdale with his wife Amanda and son John.

Iowa Republican legislators,

I am writing as a fellow proponent of limited government intervention and individual freedom, to express my concerns about House File 716, the bill aimed at regulating political parties’ caucuses, which was recently introduced in the Iowa House of Representatives.

It is important to remember that the true purpose of a caucus is to organize county parties. That can get lost in the media attention around presidential candidates and the money involved. The caucus process is the first step in organizing at the county and precinct level, which is critical to building strong and representative political parties. Would most Iowans who truly support limited government put money and prestige ahead of small “r” republican principles?

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

When I was a kid, Mom warned, “Make sure you keep a screen door between you and the Fuller Brush man. They won’t leave, and all they do is to sell, sell, sell.”

I remember that caution as I’m reading House File 654, the bill Iowa House Republicans recently approved. Among other things, the “firearms omnibus” would encourage public schools to implement age-appropriate gun safety instruction from grades K-12, “based on the eddie eagle gunsafe program developed by the National Rifle Association.”

It’s not the curriculum I question, it’s the messenger and what’s behind bringing the NRA into Iowa’s public schools.

Once in the door, they’ll “sell, sell, sell.” And the NRA is not just peddling brushes. 

They’re selling gun culture.

Dr. Thomas Laehn is the Greene County attorney and the only Libertarian to hold an elective partisan office in Iowa. The Des Moines Register published an earlier version of this commentary.

After virtually no meaningful debate and only a single, relatively inconsequential amendment, both chambers of our Republican-controlled legislature approved Governor Kim Reynolds’ massive state government reorganization plan (Senate File 514) within a two-week period. Reynolds signed the bill on April 4.

Unsurprisingly, the new law—which originated in the executive branch—will transfer significant power from the legislature to the governor. Sadly, in both Washington, DC and Des Moines, our legislators (regardless of their party affiliation) have regularly displayed far greater loyalty to their party than to the constitutional system of separated powers to which they swore their allegiance upon assuming office.

While I am thus entirely unsurprised by our Republican legislators’ abdication of their constitutional responsibilities, I am deeply disappointed at their willingness to subvert the local administration of justice in our state in the process. Ironically, the political party that has always claimed to defend local government against those who would otherwise centralize power is systematically stripping our local elected officials—including our county auditors, school boards, and county attorneys—of their discretion.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

Way back in 1996, Alanis Morrissette asked, “Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think?” She might have been thinking about a “black fly in your Chardonnay,” but today her question is relevant for Iowa Republican legislators.

Here’s a good definition of the term: “Irony occurs in literature and in life whenever a person says or does something that departs from what we expect them to say or do.”

Ronald Reagan hasn’t roamed the Oval Office for 34 years, yet even now, you’ll hear GOP candidates quote the Gipper: “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” 

They love to quote it. They just don’t love to do it.

Amy Adams is a mom of three and a former educator living in rural NE Iowa. Currently, Amy works as the Partnerships Director for Progress Iowa. 

Whether it’s at local school board meetings or in Congress, the words “parents’ rights” are everywhere. As a mom and as a former educator, I certainly have expectations about parents’ rights. Like many, I want my kids to go to quality, safe schools where each will have opportunities to grow and learn.

But looking closely at the legislation passed here in Iowa and the U.S. House of Representatives, these so-called parental rights bills are far from what most families want or need for their children and their schools.

Rachel Bruns is a volunteer advocate for quality maternal health care in Iowa. This essay was originally published in the Des Moines Business Record’s Fearless publication.

While we see regular news coverage about challenges accessing maternal health care in Iowa and the related racial disparities, I rarely see the mention of higher cesarean rates as a relevant factor in those disparities.

April is Cesarean Awareness Month, and April 11-17 is Black Maternal Health Week. The overlap of these initiatives is relevant given the higher cesarean rate for Black people across the country and Iowa. 

Iowa Republican lawmakers aren’t sticklers for tradition. They have used their trifecta to destroy a collective bargaining process that stood for more than four decades, and to overhaul a nearly 60-year-old judicial selection system on a partisan basis.

Iowa Senate Republicans have shattered norms in other ways. In 2021, they stopped participating in budget subcommittee meetings that had been a routine part of legislative work since at least the 1970s. Last year, they kicked all journalists off the chamber’s press bench, which had been designated for the news media for more than a century.

Senate Appropriations Committee members hit a new low for transparency last week. Led by chair Tim Kraayenbrink, Republicans advanced seven spending bills with blank spaces where dollar amounts and staffing numbers would normally be listed.

The unprecedented maneuver ensured that advocates, journalists, and Democratic senators will have no time to thoroughly scrutinize GOP spending plans before eventual votes on the Senate floor. Nor will members of the public have a chance to weigh in on how state funds will be spent during fiscal year 2024, which begins on July 1.

Bleeding Heartland was unable to find any former Iowa legislator, lobbyist, or staffer who could remember anything resembling this year’s Senate budget process.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

What started as Governor Kim Reynolds’ bad idea has become worse. Her “parents’ rights” bill, passed by Republicans in the Iowa House and Senate, is back to the Senate because the versions differ. A committee of both may take up the bills—keeping the worst, I’m sure.

Des Moines Register reporter Katie Akin correctly characterized the House-approved version of Senate File 496 as “a Frankenstein-like education bill.” It’s like saying a giraffe has a long neck, a pig has a full stomach, or a shark has sharp teeth.

This monster has bite, and it chews an arm and leg off public education, educators, and each local school’s historic purposes and practices.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

The overheated commentary in the aftermath of the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four has focused on race: the mostly-white Iowa women led by Caitlin Clark against the Black women from South Carolina and Louisiana State University.

Many saw racial overtones in the critiques of LSU player Angel Reese’s gestures toward Clark near the end of the championship game. Reese noted at the post-game press conference that all season, people have tried to “put her in a box” and said she’s “too hood” and “ghetto.” (Clark said in a later interview she didn’t “think Angel should be criticized at all,” adding that trash talk is part of the game.)

Race is always present in sports culture. But with today’s college athletes, a new factor has arisen that may be even bigger.

It’s money. The Iowa-LSU game coincided with a new era, where college athletes at long last are getting a share of what has been a rich marketing pie. Clark and Reese competed for their schools and states, to be sure, but it was also a battle of brands.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

As a teacher I joked, “I hope I die during teacher in-service, because the transition won’t be abrupt.” Those meetings were deadly dull, and about as relevant to teaching as Lawrence Welk to rock and roll. 

But there were exceptions.

During one of those deadly sessions, the principal wheeled in the Betamax, and we watched “The Road to Abilene.”  It’s a simple story, and it might help answer the question, what happened to Iowa?

Charles Bruner served in the Iowa legislature from 1978 to 1990 and was founding director of the Child and Family Policy Center from 1989 through 2016. For the last six years, he headed a Health Equity and Young Children initiative focusing on primary child health care for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Democrats prioritize investing in children but don’t stress the importance of parents in raising the next generation. Republicans do the opposite.

The electorate wants both.

Until we make children’s issues part of our political dialogue, we will not do either.

Scott Syroka is a former Johnston city council member.

There’s something missing in the debate over Iowa’s proposed carbon capture pipelines. Too often the discussion breaks down along familiar frames of the pipeline companies against landowners, or labor unions against environmentalists. When we stop the analysis here, we lose sight of what the fight is really about: the role of monopoly power in Iowans’ lives.

To date, no politician of either party is making this connection. Some have gotten close in their critiques of the pipeline companies, but none have highlighted the role of corporate monopolies in enabling these proposed schemes to exist in the first place. It’s strange because, as prominent politicians like U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar note, history is sitting right there in front of them.

Jim Chrisinger is a retired public servant living in Ankeny. He served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, in Iowa and elsewhere. 

When we retired back to Iowa from Seattle in 2018, Iowa was trending purple. The Des Moines metro was a hot destination for young professionals and families. No more.

MAGA has displaced the pragmatic and welcoming conservatism that Governor Bob Ray and U.S. Representative Jim Leach personified and so many of us admired.

How does this development sit with business Republicans now cohabiting with their new MAGA partners? It can’t be comfortable. MAGA folks aren’t even conservative, not at least the way most of us knew conservative.

Nate Willems served in the Iowa House from 2009 through 2012 and practices law with the Rush & Nicholson firm in Cedar Rapids. This essay previously appeared in the Prairie Progressive and the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

If you have never had to learn or appreciate what a non-competition agreement, or non-compete is, consider yourself lucky. These documents hold workers hostage to the whims of employers.

The idea that a non-compete is an “agreement” overstates things. Commonly, when a person gets a job, a non-compete is just another document the employer requires the employee to sign. The employer may or may not explain what it is. Whatever explanation an HR representative provides is not binding on the company. 

Pam Mackey Taylor is the Director of the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club.

In 2010, about 63 percent of Iowa voters approved a state constitutional amendment creating the Natural Resources and Outdoor Recreation Trust Fund. The amendment stipulated that revenue from the first three-eighths of a percent of any state sales tax increase would go to the trust fund.

Companion legislation established how those funds would be allocated: 23 percent for natural resources, such as natural areas, wildlife diversity, recreation, and water resources; 20 percent for soil and water conservation; 14 percent for watershed protection; 13 percent for the Resource Enhancement and Protection fund (commonly known as REAP); 13 percent for local conservation agencies; 10 percent for trails; and 7 percent for lake restoration.

The campaign to successfully get the constitutional amendment and the legislation was called the Iowa Water and Land Legacy, or I-WILL. During the first few years after adoption of the constitutional amendment, the I-WILL coalition attempted to persuade the legislature to raise the sales tax to fund the program. But the fund remains empty, because state lawmakers have not increased the sales tax.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

I read in the Cedar Rapids Gazette that Iowa Senate Education Committee chair Ken Rozenboom told his colleagues, “We want everyone to be clear about the role that parents have in their child’s education.”

Rozenboom was floor managing Senate File 496, the wide-ranging education bill that originally came from the governor’s office. The Senate approved the bill March 22 on a party-line vote of 34 to sixteen. It’s now pending in the House Education Committee.

Among many provisions, the bill bans books that include a sex act (emphasis added). Erin Murphy reported for the Gazette,

Randy Evans can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

On a late summer afternoon in Bloomfield 40 years ago, the people of Iowa learned about an unofficial government principle we have seen repeated in recent weeks.

Although this has played out in various ways through the years, it ultimately comes down to the same concept: If your problem is large enough, government will step in and lend you a helping hand. But if government decides yours is not a big problem, you probably will have to fend for yourself.

LATE UPDATE: Republican lawmakers kept this provision in the final version of Senate File 496, which Governor Reynolds signed in May. Original post follows.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

One state registered a significant increase in cancer incidence from 2015 to 2019, the most recent year for which data is available from all 50 states. That would be Iowa. The only one.

According to the Cancer in Iowa 2023 report, only Kentucky ranked ahead of Iowa in the rate of its residents’ cancer cases. But Kentucky’s rate has decreased recently, while Iowa’s grew.

The reasons for those facts remain a mystery. University of Iowa researchers are trying to figure it out.

Scott Syroka is a former Johnston city council member. This essay first appeared in the Sunday Des Moines Register.

Chuck Magro. John May. Donnie King. Cory Harris. Charles Scharf.

These are the CEOs of five of the most powerful corporations operating in Iowa: Corteva. John Deere. Tyson. Wellmark. Wells Fargo.

Where are they? Should we request a wellness check to make sure they’re OK?

These CEOs lead corporate monopolies making billions every year off the bodies and brains of Iowans, including LGBTQ Iowans, yet they’ve been missing in action as Iowa Republicans advance the largest number of anti-LGBTQ bills ever in a single legislative session.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Given the travesties and tragedies Governor Kim Reynolds has already visited upon Iowans, with the help of a GOP-controlled legislature that rubber-stamps her agenda, it is long past time to retire the phrase “Iowa nice.”

Let’s also give a rest to the most famous line from the movie “Field of Dreams”: “Is this Heaven? No, it’s Iowa!”

What’s worse than signing bills that will torment transgender children and could drive many to harm themselves?

Pretending you’re doing it reluctantly, because you care about their “best interest.”

Al Charlson is a north central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

The Iowa legislature’s 2023 session has been a dismaying mix of noise and fireworks, combining “debate” over divisive social and cultural issues with fundamental changes in our governing structure that slide through without adequate review and examination. 

Senate File 478, a bill designed to “hog-tie” our state auditor, is a strange combination of both.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

On that first day of school in 1979, I oozed anxiety. After all, there were 30 sets of unknown eyes waiting for the show to begin. I was the show. Am I going to be the tough guy not smiling until Halloween or the open arms teacher? Will my deodorant hold so I don’t pit-out before first period?

That was then. Now, Iowa teachers have much more to worry about than pit stains

Deb VanderGaast is a registered nurse and child care advocate seeking to advance state and national child care and disability policy, inclusive child care practices and improve access to quality, affordable child care for working parents. She was the 2022 Democratic nominee in Iowa Senate district 41.

Municipal, county and state governments have a lot in common with private businesses, especially non-profits. They have to raise revenue to support the workforce and resources needed to produce services or products that will attract and retain customers. That’s how they maintain and grow their revenue. That revenue flow makes a business viable and financially stable.

For the state of Iowa, our “customers” are the people and businesses choosing to locate here. They create economic activity that generates tax revenue.

Our “products” are the services, infrastructure, and laws that make it desirable for businesses and individuals to move to Iowa or remain here. If residents and businesses leave, Iowa loses tax revenue and workers, so will have less of the human and financial resources needed to produce quality products and services to attract and retain others.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

Former President Donald Trump came to Iowa on March 13 and was supposed to give a talk on education policy. That proved to be false advertising. 

A glowing Governor Kim Reynolds was there to do the welcome. When the man finally appeared from behind the curtain, he looked a bit like a grizzly bear just coming out of hibernation. The governor was rewarded with a hug and a smooch, quite a trick for a 76-year-old orange hulk—one who’s waving his hand, trying to appear athletic and still stay erect. Give the man credit where due.

I listened to his whole (and I mean 90-minutes whole) speech on C-SPAN, waiting to hear how he’d make every kid an Einstein, but with no luck. Not even close — except (as per all red states) to put education in the hands of parents and ban any sexual, race-based or political content from being taught in schools. 

Randy Evans can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. 

Every few months, someone is killed or injured by police somewhere in the United States under circumstances that lead to inevitable questions about what exactly occurred.

Typically, answers come when video from the law officers’ squad car cameras or their uniform cameras is made public. Each time this occurs, there are two inescapable conclusions:

First, police in most states realize it is their obligation to release this video. They know that public faith and respect for law officers will suffer if citizens and journalists are prevented from viewing the footage, especially when an incident results in death or injury, most notably when the person was not armed.

And second, each time such video is released somewhere in the United States, it becomes obvious Iowa is out of step with most other states — because in Iowa, law enforcement agencies and government attorneys insist the video must forever remain off-limits because it is part of a confidential investigative file.

Wally Taylor is the Legal Chair of the Sierra Club Iowa chapter.

Sierra Club has been opposed to the carbon dioxide pipelines that several corporations are trying to build across Iowa since the projects were first announced. The pipeline companies claim the capturing of carbon dioxide from ethanol plants will address climate change, save the ethanol industry, and provide economic benefits. There is no merit to any of these claims.

One thing we learned from the Dakota Access pipeline fight several years ago is that the crucial strategy to oppose the pipelines is to organize the impacted landowners into a unified opposition. Through the fantastic work of Sierra Club’s Conservation Program Coordinator, Jessica Mazour, the landowners have created a groundswell of opposition. Their efforts helped persuade Republican legislators to introduce bills that would restrict or prohibit the use of eminent domain for the pipelines.

State Representative Steven Holt introduced one of those bills. Initially numbered House File 368, it was renumbered House File 565 following approval by the House Judiciary Committee.

William R. Staplin shares another cartoon and explains his artistic choices.

The Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual (LGTBQIA+) community has lived on the margins of cis-gendered societal acceptance throughout recorded history. Mainstream societies have repressed the community in myriad ways: from self-righteous and pious condemnations and public humiliation to the destruction of careers (whether through hiring and firing discrimination or ”Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”), to brutal assaults in farmyards, playgrounds, and towns squares, all the way to targeted murders and lynching.

When the U.S. Supreme Court cleared a path for marriage equality across the country in June 2015, this brutalized community achieved a small portion of equity. Same-sex couples were able to legally wed and include their life partners for medical insurance, hospital visitation, and estate planning, providing some peace of mind for bereaved loved ones at difficult times.

But equality was in some way a mirage for members of the transgender community.

Don Ray grew up in Fort Madison and has lived in Ringgold County since 1993. 

“Can you imagine rural Iowa or our state in general with reduced ethanol plants and 60% of the demand for corn gone? It would be truly devastating to our schools, hospitals and roads, just from a tax perspective.”

So spoke pipeline lobbyist Jake Ketzner (Summit Carbon Solutions) at a legislative hearing last month. He was arguing that the carbon dioxide pipelines are needed to keep the ethanol industry afloat which would support corn profitability and, in the process, save rural Iowa. 

The ever-increasing production of corn seems to have been Iowa’s foremost agricultural goal for many decades. And how has that worked out?  

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

Lately I’ve been thinking about why Iowa GOP politicians seem committed to shouting at the rain instead of solving real problems.

I think the answer might be in a quote from the 1995 movie The American President. Fictional President Andrew Shepard says, “We’re a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.”

Kay Pence is vice president of the Iowa Alliance for Retired Americans.

Refusing to raise the debt ceiling is like running up your credit card and punishing yourself by refusing to pay the bill.  It ruins your credit score and costs more in the long run. Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize new spending, it authorizes borrowing to pay bills already incurred. Paying bills are obligations not negotiations.

MAGA Republicans want to use the debt ceiling fight to force cuts in future unnamed programs. What they want to cut isn’t exactly secret; we have seen and rejected, most of their proposals before.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column.

Americans, as is our wont, continually focus on “the questions of the day.” Some of those issues change over time, but sometimes it takes a long time. And sometimes it’s a puzzlement why they were relevant in the first place.

A few examples:

LATE UPDATE: Republican lawmakers kept this provision in the final version of Senate File 496, which Governor Reynolds signed in May. Original post follows.

Iowa’s leading cancer researchers released sobering numbers last week. Data from the Iowa Cancer Registry indicates that Iowa has “the second-highest overall cancer incidence of all U.S. states” and is “the only state with a significant increase in cancer incidence from 2015 to 2019.”

In addition, Iowa ranks first for “rates of new cases of oral cavity and pharyngeal cancer,” often known as head and neck or mouth and throat cancers. Iowa also has the country’s second-highest rate for leukemia and ranks fifth and sixth for melanoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, respectively.

Meanwhile, Governor Kim Reynolds is forging ahead with efforts to stop requiring Iowa schools to teach junior high and high school students that a vaccine is available to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV). That virus can cause cancer in several areas of the body, including the mouth and throat.

Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

A bill that would bring back the death penalty for those who abduct, rape, and kill minors in Iowa is not likely to become law this year, but that does not mean the concept of capital punishment is off the legislature’s agenda.

Quite the contrary. Capitol punishment—the “ol” refers to the building in which lawmakers meet—is the theme of the 2023 legislative session and state government in general. Republicans are all but certain to inflict it upon us again a year from now.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring

Everyone probably remembers the junior high or high school bully.  The one who terrorized vulnerable kids, who dressed a little differently or didn’t say the right things. The ones who didn’t fit in. Those perceived as “other.”

Every school had a bully.

The only thing worse than a lone bully is a group of them trying to outdo each other. Then it becomes a competition to see who can punch down harder on their victims. When bullying escalates, the environment deteriorates. 

Tyler Mills is a writer in Lee County and a former member of the Lee County Democratic Central Committee.

Note: This post is not implying that former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Jim Webb is still aligned with the Democratic Party. I am simply questioning whether the party is really a big tent any longer, if an honorable individual like Jim Webb cannot gain traction.

Are Democrats who hold views similar to Jim Webb’s still welcome in the party? President Barack Obama missed many opportunities to unite the country during his eight years in office. However, in my opinion, he was still a far better leader than Presidents Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

I wrote this piece because I am worried about the lack of diversity of thought within the Iowa Democratic Party.

Brian Bruening chairs the Clayton County Democrats. The following is an expanded version of a speech he gave to campaign donors and volunteers at a Thank You reception on February 19, 2023.

In August 2022, I decided to run as a Democratic candidate for Iowa House district 64, which covers all of Allamakee and Clayton counties, plus the Holy Cross precinct in Dubuque county. The current representative Anne Osmundson, a far-right radical, was running unopposed.

As a county party leader, I knew the impossibility of getting people to volunteer and vote when there are no actual choices on the ballot. Why turn out to vote when none of the races would be contested? Indeed, through strong encouragement, our county party managed to get Democrats on the ballot for most of the partisan contests that November.

Steve Corbin is emeritus professor of marketing at the University of Northern Iowa and a freelance writer who receives no remuneration, funding, or endorsement from any for-profit business, nonprofit organization, political action committee, or political party.      

“Just the facts, ma’am,” was the infamous introductory phrase Sgt. Joe Friday would use when interrogating a witness in the whodunit TV series Dragnet. Jack Webb (1920-1982) played Sgt. Friday during Dragnet’s lifespan from 1951 to 1959.

Dragnet’s civil servant show often dealt with complex social issues. Let’s apply Sgt. Friday’s flat and concise “just the facts, ma’am” line to the current book banning craze before offering an opinion.

Porter McNeil is an Illinois-based political consultant. He was Illinois communications director for the Kerry-Edwards 2004 presidential campaign and worked for Axelrod & Associates. He assisted with the 2021 “factory town” report referenced in this column. He’s currently a member of the Rock Island County Board. Follow him on Twitter @PorterMcNeil.

Looking to 2024, Democrats have a path to winning back the U.S. House that involves an all-of-the-above strategy, reaching urban, suburban, rural, and progressive working-class voters in forgotten areas. 

For a lesson in knitting together a diverse coalition of working-class, urban, suburban and even rural voters, review Senator Raphael Warnock’s re-election bid in Georgia. For a master class in reaching the working class, look at last year’s campaigns of Senator John Fetterman in Pennsylvania and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. For a blueprint in blue-collar outreach, review Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s race in Washington’s third Congressional district.

All of those campaigns successfully energized the Democratic base and employed the politics of persuasion.