Ever since Senator Tom Harkin retired after five terms in 2015, his fellow Democrats in Iowa have fared poorly. Republicans took control of what had been a divided state government and a divided congressional delegation, and Donald Trump won Iowa three times, most recently by more than 13 points. Now a bit hard of hearing and frail at 86, Mr Harkin is back on the stump, to support Democratic candidates who are mounting surprisingly strong challenges up and down the ticket.
It is a contest between competing theories of how to make progress. Mr Harkin is not surrendering the progressive label. Mr Harkin does not note that Senator Sanders cannot point to any legislative achievement on the scale of the ADA. The candidates in Michigan and Iowa have important policy differences, though even those can blur. Dr El-Sayed wants to end military aid to Israel; Mr Turek would impose strict restrictions on such aid. But their differences of style are stark. Dr El-Sayed has a combative, impatient approach, including to Democrats. Mr Turek recoils from fighting even with Republicans. That is not so. Like Mr Turek, Dr El-Sayed is in a close race and may lose. But Michigan, where Democrats hold the governor’s office and both Senate seats, should have been less of a challenge. Republicans who are running scared this year are learning their version of that lesson. She barely mentioned Mr Trump at a rally in Manchester on October 25th. The healthiest outcome of this refreshingly competitive election season across America would be a bipartisan awakening to the obvious: that most voters want less partisanship, more progress.
And that observation illuminates something else: that the struggle under way within the Democratic Party, which will probably grow more heated after the midterm elections, is not just a fight over policy between “progressives” and “moderates”. He sees many of his differences with “my good friend” Bernie Sanders, the fiery leftist leader, as matters of style, even word-choice, not principle. He praises Mr Turek not only for having “a progressive agenda” but also for knowing “how to move it forward”. Dr El-Sayed has not taken a position, saying such decisions should be left to sports leagues While Mr Turek says he opposes biological males competing in female sports. Unlike Mr Turek, Dr El-Sayed wants to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, yet he also says he supports applying immigration laws and securing the borders. Dr El-Sayed wants Medicare for All but says he would also back incremental expansions of public-health coverage favoured by Mr Turek. He told donors he could intimidate Democrats who differ with him by putting “one ogre on a pike”, a reference to Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. Dr El-Sayed has said Mr Trump should be impeached. Mr Turek has “no interest” in that. “We gotta get back to country over party,” he has said. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mr Sanders’s likeliest heir, recently said a win by Dr El-Sayed would prove “anybody can win anywhere”. Mr Turek’s opponent, Representative Ashley Hinson, is calling herself a “bipartisan fighter for Iowa”. Americans, she said, were “feeling priced out of the American dream” because “a lot of people on, frankly, both sides of the aisle” have “forgotten how hard Iowans work”.
