The Notebook: Something Is Stirring In Iowa

Swan Lake State Park, Carroll County, Iowa—

About an hour-and-a-half outside Des Moines, you come suddenly upon this lovely park. It’s a welcome interruption to the mile after mile of (also beautiful) August corn, tasseling out now at well over six feet as far as the eye can see. The contrast is striking: In one of the most intensively altered agricultural landscapes in the world, Swan Lake is a reminder of the older tallgrass prairies, wetlands and woods that preceded European settlement here.

Last night, at Swan Lake Education Center, I felt like I was witnessing a different kind of change.

Rob Sand—the Democratic candidate for governor—drew a standing-room-only crowd of roughly 200 people.

Douglas Burns, the fourth-generation Carroll journalist who has been covering politics here for 35 years, said he had never seen a larger crowd in Carroll for a statewide Democratic candidate.

Longtime local Democrats told Burns—a leader of Iowa’s independent journalism community—that only Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had drawn anything comparable.

Something is happening here—and across Iowa.

Obama actually won Carroll County in 2008, with 51 percent of the vote. Four years later, Mitt Romney beat him here by six points.

Then came the transformation of rural Iowa. Donald Trump won nearly 63 percent here in 2016, 68 percent in 2020 and 70 percent last November. Kamala Harris got 28 percent. This is not a place where Democrats should be packing a room on a summer evening.

And yet there they were.

I spoke afterward with two people who may tell us more about Sand’s appeal than the crowd size itself. Neither of these Iowans were hardcore partisans….