Why Should I Vote for…?

What’s the point of a debate when the election is for all intents and purposes decided? When Deirdre DeJear and Kim Reynolds took the stage at Iowa Public Television for their only debate in the 2022 race for Iowa Governor, Reynolds had a 17 point lead in the latest Des Moines Register poll. Nor is anyone mistaking Iowa for the purple state it was ten years ago when Barack Obama narrowly won its six electoral votes.

For Reynolds it was a chance to lay the groundwork for her second full term: What can we expect from another Reynolds administration? For DeJear it was a chance to introduce herself and her party to the voters of Iowa: What do Democrats stand for, and how might they govern differently if they are ever given another chance? The subjects under discussion—mostly socio-economic-related, with a bit about abortion past the three-quarters post--were guided by three Iowa journalists, and the candidates for the most part stuck to the topics and didn’t talk over each other. One could learn a lot from the debate, if one knew where to look.

(That would not be news coverage. Outlets I followed the next day focused on abortion—surely a significant issue, but not the be all and end all of life nor a vision for the future of our state.)

A common theme in DeJear’s answers was spreading the economic benefits to all Iowans. Iowa has a budget surplus at this time, which Reynolds has targeted for another round of tax cuts. DeJear argued the tax cuts would have “no impact” on low to moderate income people. She discussed the need to improve access to education and health care, and later to housing, child care and mental health—“putting the tax dollars to work” to “invest” in the future instead of encouraging the well-off to “hoard” their resources. Reynolds derided these ideas as typical Democratic “tax and spend,” while touting her administration’s own pilot programs in mental health care and preschool. DeJear responded that “pilots make sense” but that much of the state is a child care desert; a better policy, she said, would enable providers with a workable business model and child care workers with a reasonable wage. (The current average income is $26,000 a year.)

Reynolds’s main themes were tribalism and tax cuts. The tax cuts were up front: She opened by celebrating her three tax cuts in five years, promising more cuts to come, saying she was helping businesses and retirees stay in the state. But the most common theme in her remarks had to do with protecting us from various thems, and using the power of her office to frustrate the schemes of all those others. She blamed Democrats for closing schools and businesses during the pandemic, as well as "failing" schools, crime, hordes of undocumented immigrants arriving from Mexico, abortions legal up to the instant of birth, and being generally “woke,” whatever any of that really means. She mentioned "parents," which I am not hearing as "people with young children" but as "people who don't want schools to face issues of transgender, homosexuality, or any sexuality." She criticized the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan as unfair because it funded one group of people at the expense of other people like truckers. At the same time, she touted state programs benefiting corn and soy producers, who are also not truckers. Neither are the businesses and retirees that benefit from her ongoing changes to the tax code. The bottom line is that the state’s policy benefits are okay for people like us but not okay for people not like us—a complement to the “libertarianism for me, authoritarianism for you” theme in a lot of our politics.

Reynolds can’t be faulted politically for rallying her existing base, since they’ve carried her to victory before and likely will again. But a state whose policy is driven by resentment and fear of the “not like us” is unlikely to thrive for long in the 21^st century. Iowa has a lot of assets, but if we’re putting “cheap and traditional” up front we’re going to squander them. Can DeJear and other Democrats sell fairness, inclusion, and preparation for the future when a majority of voting Iowans are either satisfied with the way things are and/or threatened by any kind of change?

Video and transcript of the governors' debate are here.

SEE ALSO: 

"Iowa Legislative Session 2022," 8 June 2022

"Condition of the State 2022," 11 January 2022