538: the Iowa paradox

[Recursion]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economy-is-better-why-dont-voters-believe-it/

But there is a key difference between Iowa and the rest of the country. The state’s unemployment rate, at 3.6 percent in September, is the lowest it has been in close to a decade, and household income has experienced a strong rebound. The Iowa economy isn’t “solid but not spectacular” or “surprisingly resilient” or any of the other carefully hedged euphemisms that journalists routinely apply to the national picture. The Iowa economy is strong.

...

I chose to visit Davenport because its economy, its demographics and its politics are representative of the rest of Iowa,1 which will hold its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses on Feb. 1. Scott County, of which Davenport is the county seat and largest city, had an unemployment rate of 4.3 percent in September, a bit worse than the state mark; its median household income, at about $53,000, is about the same. Scott County, like Iowa as a whole, twice backed Obama for president and then narrowly voted for Joni Ernst, a conservative Republican, for Senate in 2014.

Davenport, a city of about 100,000 people, sits on Iowa’s eastern edge, across the Mississippi River from Moline, Illinois. Together, the two communities anchor the Quad Cities, a two-state region of more than 400,000 people.2

Ask about the economy in Davenport and almost everyone immediately refers back to the 1980s, when crop prices collapsed and brought the local economy down with them. Compared to that experience, Davenport’s economy emerged from the most recent recession relatively unscathed. Agriculture thrived during the downturn because of high crop prices, and the Quad Cities also benefited from a strong agricultural manufacturing sector, led by Moline-based John Deere. Scott County’s unemployment rate never topped 8 percent — it hit 10 percent nationally — and it fell quickly once the national economy began to recover. Local leaders brag that they were able to complete the restoration of a historical downtown hotel during a period in which most such projects stalled because of a lack of financing.

[Fred Sanders]

1. The economy is better and Iowans do not believe it because of all the hate speech dominating the

airwaves and the hate speech dominating their churches, and the fact the mass media is determined to never let Americans crlebrate anything as long as a black man is in the White House in case someone accidently gives him any credit.

How else to explain the incredible deflections of the clear insanity of GOP policy....to turn America into Kansas seems to be the goal, which explains why the mass media never mentions how the God Theory of Economics, e.g. Magic, is working out for folks in Kansas.

How can you have a religious revolution and a Christian Nation subservient to only God and Wall Street if folks are celebrating?

So, Gloom and Doom it is!

[SharonAnn]

2. "Nothing has changed since they crashed the economy last time. They're going to do it again."

The closing line of this article really explains the unease that Iowans and all of this country have.

"They're going to do it again."

[frazzled]

3. Perhaps because voters do not vote on economic issues alone?

Or maybe even at all? Maybe anti-immigrant sentiment is driving them almost wholly. Maybe its personality. Maybe it's the "I'm all right jack but the rest of the country, which I've never even seen personally, is all screwed up." Maybe (and I say this because I've knocked on doors in another early primary state, NH, where these were the ACTUAL issues the people who came to the door stated) it's because their wife left them and won't let them see their kid enough, or because their high-school aged son is listening to too much rap music.

Voters are not rational animals. Which is why "focussing on the issues" is oftentimes a fool's errand.