Struggling Iowans Hold Out Hope -- and Votes

Teresa Scheitlan’s vote is up for grabs -- for anyone who can understand why she’s so mad about her toilet.

Scheitlan styles hair at the Cut Ups salon in this southeast Iowa town of 7,200. Her husband delivers milk. No matter how many hours they work, they never seem to get ahead. When their toilet broke, it took them weeks to scrape up $115 for the repair bill.

If she thought any of the presidential hopefuls understood how frustrating, embarrassing and infuriating that felt, that candidate would likely get her vote.

“Every single politician out there should be forced to spend one week in a real person’s shoes, living paycheck to paycheck, not knowing, if something breaks, how you’re going to find the money to fix it,” said Scheitlan, 42.

As Democratic candidates swarm Iowa in anticipation of the pivotal presidential caucus, they’re getting an earful about how tough it is to support a family in a stagnant economy. The Jan. 19 contest gives Iowans an early and important voice in determining the Democratic nominee -- and voters like Scheitlan make the most of it, sharing their concerns with all who seek their support.

A few prominent candidates have made a strategic decision to focus on other early contests; retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut have not visited Iowa much. But former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry are pouring resources into the state and scheduling countless trips to small-town diners.

Wherever they go, the candidates are met with an insistent, anxious plea: Fix the economy. Now.

“I ate better under Clinton,” Scheitlan said. “All I care about is how they’re going to improve my life.”

Most every issue in the campaign is linked to that central concern. When voters talk about Iraq, they ask why we’re spending so much money building a foreign nation’s economy when our own needs so much help. When they talk about health care, they ask why they’re working more hours than ever before, yet cannot afford insurance.

“Iraq is costing us billions of dollars, when we have all these people at home who are homeless, unemployed and don’t have health care,” said Beverly Schier, 49, a registered nurse. “I can’t see why we still have troops there when our children don’t get the health care they need.”

Iowa’s jobless rate is just 4.6%, considerably lower than the national average. “But that’s very misleading,” said David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University.

In rural Iowa, especially, most of the jobs are in the low-wage service or food-processing sectors. As it becomes tougher for farmers to turn a profit, their wives, teenage children and even their elderly parents are applying for jobs as clerks or meatpackers or hospital orderlies.

“More people are working per family, and more are working more than one job just to sustain household income,” Swenson said. “Everyone’s just working their hearts out.”

Many here clearly feel that they are falling behind.

“I’ve been in business for 10 years, and this is the worst year I’ve ever had,” said Joni Gillispie, 47, who owns a gift shop in nearby Burlington. “We struggle every day, but President Bush doesn’t see it.”

Iowa’s economy does have some notable bright spots. Million-dollar homes, unheard of in most farm states, ring the waterfronts of the “Great Lakes” region in northwest Iowa. RV manufacturer Winnebago Industries of Forest City has expanded four times in the last four years, adding 446 jobs carrying average salaries of $12.75 an hour plus benefits.

Iowa’s biggest city, Des Moines, is booming. A hub for the insurance and mortgage industries, the state capital (population 200,000) is home to about 60 corporate headquarters -- and was recently named “Hippest City in the USA” by Fast Company magazine.

The western half of Iowa, however, is suffering, as small towns wither. To find jobs, workers have to drive an hour to the Wal-Mart in the county seat; the mom-and-pop stores on hundreds of red-brick Main Streets have long since been boarded shut.

In an unsettling transition that’s been years in coming, most Iowans can no longer make a living off the land. Consolidation in the agricultural industry has created bigger and bigger farms. Family farmers cannot compete with corporate agribusiness unless they keep buying more land and more expensive equipment.

About 90% of Iowa’s land is farmed, but that land is concentrated in the hands of ever fewer farmers. The number of farmers in the state has been declining since 1935, and the trend has accelerated in recent decades. Across Iowa, roughly 1,000 farmers call it quits each year, leaving barely 1% of the population tied to the land.

The state’s top exports are still tractors and pork, but since the farm crisis of the 1980s, many towns have pushed to diversify by wooing small to midsize factories. That strategy worked for a while. But the national manufacturing slump of the last few years has hit hard.

Since the last presidential caucus, Iowa has lost 10% of its factory workforce, or 25,000 jobs.

In this remote corner of the state, a three-hour drive from Des Moines, plants that made car batteries, truck trailers, school buses, switch gear, backhoes and components for police radios have all shut down or laid off scores of workers in the last two years. The unemployment rate in some counties hovers close to 9%.

For the candidates, the economic unease is both an opportunity and a danger.

On the plus side, the Democrats can tap into a deep anger at President Bush.

“I don’t like everything Clinton did, but at least I was making money. Then Bush comes in and everything turns to disaster,” said Steve Morrison, 38, a self-employed trucker from the town of Danville.

Morrison isn’t sure yet which Democrat he’ll back -- and he almost doesn’t care.

“All I know,” he said over an afternoon beer, “is that I can’t survive another term of Bush.”

In the 2000 caucuses, Al Gore and Bush each got their party’s nod; in the general election, Gore carried the state by a narrow margin. And while the Iowa caucuses have not always predicted who will win a party’s nomination, they have served to narrow the field of contenders.

The trouble, for candidates straining to distinguish themselves from a pack of nine, is that despair often breeds disgust. Just a few of the 45 voters recently interviewed around here were paying attention to the Democratic contenders. Even among Democrats, a solid majority in this region, most voters said they were not following the contest because they didn’t think any of the candidates cared enough -- or could do enough -- to make a difference in their lives.

“There’s really not a whole lot they can do to change things,” said Jackie Klein, 54, who owns the Cut Ups salon.

“I listen to them mostly to try to figure out who’s not lying too much,” said Rich Hankins, 55, a local bar owner.

The top candidates are spending heavily on TV ads, mailings and door-knocking campaigns to win over the undecided and the uninspired. In the end, though, “what matters in a caucus is not winning support from a broad coalition, but getting your own people to turn out,” said Dennis Goldford, chairman of the department of politics and international relations at Drake University in Des Moines. And, at least in years past, the key to turnout has been organized labor.

Typically, less than 15% of registered Democrats -- or 70,000 voters -- participate. Those who drag themselves out to a two- to three-hour caucus on a cold winter’s night tend to be older, better-educated and more zealous about politics than the party mainstream.

About 40% come from households with family incomes topping $50,000. (The median family income in Iowa is $48,000.) Close to half of the caucus voters describe themselves as “liberals” or “strong liberals,” according to surveys conducted by the University of Northern Iowa.

Unions have always done an effective job of motivating their members to caucus. They were behind Gephardt’s Iowa victory in his 1988 presidential bid. He has been courting them assiduously this time around, too, earning endorsements from more than a dozen blue-collar unions, representing bricklayers, boilermakers, cement masons, steelworkers and other Iowa laborers.

But in the last several years, with factory jobs on the decline, white-collar unions have gained increasing clout -- especially the teachers union.

The Iowa State Education Assn. boasts 32,000 members and “plays a very big role” in motivating caucus turnout, said Hugh Winebrenner, a veteran caucus historian at Drake University. “And the teachers may be very different voters from John Deere workers,” he said.

This year, the fledgling nurses union is also making a bid for influence.

In attention-grabbing purple shirts, 600 nurses from the Service Employees International Union have fanned out to campaign events across the state, joined by hundreds of nonunion nurses. At every opportunity, they press the candidates for detailed plans to expand health coverage -- and then dissect each proposal on their Web site.

“We hope they’re getting the message that this issue has to be a priority,” said Stephanie Mueller, a spokeswoman for a union spinoff group called Iowans for Health Care.

So far, neither the teachers nor the nurses have endorsed a candidate.

They are, however, planning campaigns to urge their members to turn out for the January caucuses. So are a host of other interest groups, from AARP (representing people 50 and older) to Americans for Democratic Action (representing environmental and labor interests).

Given such activism, Jean Hessburg, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party, predicts a record turnout for the January caucus, perhaps 100,000 voters. The economy may be the top policy issue for most voters. But even higher on the agenda is their shared political goal: ousting President Bush.

“The anti-Bush sentiment is huge,” Hessburg said, “so there’s a huge impetus to get people out so Iowans can have a voice in shaping the Democratic nominee.”