Now, to November
The first statewide poll of the U.S. Senate race in Iowa was released Saturday night, and despite the headlines you may have seen, it’s not a surprise.
The race between GOP incumbent Joni Ernst and Democrat challenger Theresa Greenfield is a dead heat. Given the fractured nature of the electorate, in Iowa and elsewhere, that’s hardly breaking news.
Greenfield leads Ernst by 3 percentage points, with the margin of error 3.8 percent…so again, statistically, a dead heat.
Many on the left understandably wanted to make hay about the numbers. But keeping in mind that Greenfield had huge current name recognition thanks to millions in outside spending on the primary she won earlier in the month…and the fact that she was consistently running TV ads post-primary, during the time of the poll…to some degree the surprise is not that she holds a slim lead, but that it’s not larger.
Ernst is facing her first campaign since being elected in 2014, and first-term incumbents are always the most vulnerable. She’ll have an incumbent president on the ballot this fall as well, something that was not the case in 2014…but we Iowans tend to vote on races regardless of any probably-limited coattail effect.
Sure, the GOP would have preferred to have Ernst leading in the poll, but the general election race has only just started and all things considered, no one on either side of the political aisle can claim to be surprised, or claim to hold great new insight, from the new numbers. It’s a close race and will go back and forth until November…breathless headlines from one side notwithstanding.
