The Notebook: The Trip You're Helping to Build

Members: the itinerary, the reporting plan, and how to help me get in the room are below the line. The top is for everyone.

Last week, I asked for your help in planning our first road trip of the midterm year, to Iowa, and one of the most closely watched races of the cycle: Democratic State Rep. Josh Turek v Republican Congresswoman Ashley Hinson.

Well, you came through—in spades (as my mom, a lifelong bridge player, used to say).

You sent me all kinds of leads and contacts and insights. You sent farmers and EMTs, pastors and professors, a Pulitzer Prize winner and an 80-year-old leader of the Des Moines arts world.

You pointed me in the direction of towns I'd never have found, questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask. Some of you sent really helpful essays.

It’s thrilling to me, and just what I have imagined this place might become: A civic newsroom, where we do the work together, where your experiences and insights inform the coverage, where my own reporting is sharpened and deepened.

This is what independent, reader-supported journalism is supposed to feel like, and I am grateful for every reply. Keep them coming.

But one message cut straight to the heart of it. A reader named Kelly, who grew up in Iowa, moved away, and moved back, wrote a single line that I'll carry with me.

That’s it. That’s the trip.

Iowa introduced Barack Obama to the country in 2008 and then, sixteen years later, handed Donald Trump the state by thirteen points. Between those two epochal political moments lies the story of the American heartland.

I’m proud of my Midwestern origins—Chicago-born, college in Appleton, Wisconsin, back every summer to northern Michigan and to Door County in the Badger State—and I’ve sensed it, over the years. The slow sense of a place losing ground.

I'm going to Iowa because I want to look for an answer to Kelly's question.

A new Emerson College/Nexstar poll has Ashley Hinson leading Josh Turek in the U.S. Senate race, 48 percent to 45 percent—a close race. The same poll has Democrat Rob Sand leading Republican Zach Lahn for governor, 48–43.

One poll is one poll. But it reinforces something I’ve been wondering about. Is something shifting again beneath the surface in Iowa?

How would I know? I can listen.

Below, for members, is the plan: Where we're going, who else I'm trying to reach, and how you can help me get in the room.