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By Al Neal
DES MOINES, Iowa—Iowa is small. Iowa is 90 percent white. It has no professional sports team, only four major college teams, and supplies seven percent of our nation’s food. And yet, the land of the Rolling Prairie plays an outsized role when it comes to national politics—in particular, the race for president every four years.
Iowa represents the heartland of America. A place where time, for the most part, seems to have slowed down. It’s a place where you’d go for a taste of midwestern kindness, cold cheap beer, and to experience the now questionable old-timey social and political values.
It’s our parents’ memory of what America was when they were young, and blissfully ignorant of the underlying racism and prejudice in their parents’, our grandparents’, ever so polite nature.
Of course, time waits for no one, and the face of Iowa is changing rapidly.
As the countdown to election day, 2020 began—in reality, the countdown to Iowa Caucus 2020—Democratic presidential hopefuls began courting Iowa voters often. Last year in August, candidates had a microphone in one hand, the other stretched out as far as possible towards the throng of Iowans, and stood on varying soapbox alternatives, making their case for the White House....
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