The Des Moines Register will publish its traditional pre-election Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll online on Saturday night and in the Des Moines Sunday Register and the Monday newspaper.

At 6 p.m. Saturday at DesMoinesRegister.com, the Register will publish poll results from the high-profile U.S. Senate race between Republican U.S. Sen. Joni Ernst and Democrat Theresa Greenfield, considered one of the contests that may determine whether Republicans hold their Senate majority or Democrats seize control.

At 6:30 p.m. Saturday, the Register will publish results from the closer-than-expected presidential race in Iowa between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden.

And at 7 p.m. Saturday, the Register will publish likely Iowa voters' party preferences in the state's four congressional district races.

https://www.facebook.com/bagniewski/videos/10101149338967631

He's the son of the Polk County Dems chair and a great volunteer.

This makes me happy!

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/30/1990949/-Twitter-sends-Peggy-Noonan-the-new-Biden-Harris-ad-chock-full-of-Black-folks-drumming-and-dancing?utm_campaign=trending

Nothing on the county or state party facebook pages.
No emails to volunteers or sustainers.
Des Moines Register published story at 9:39 (1 hour, 20 minutes) before the start of the rally.
I'm a volunteer and a sustainer for both groups and received no advanced information.

Were other Drive In Rallies this poorly announced?

From USAToday. . .

It was 34 degrees when President Donald Trump ended his campaign rally in Omaha, Nebraska’s Eppley Airfield Tuesday night and boarded Air Force One.

Over the course of the next four hours, thousands of Trump rally attendees were stranded outside of the event — waiting for buses that were delayed due to what the Trump administration told an Omaha reporter was a traffic jam. At least 25,000 were in attendance at the rally.

Aaron Sanderford, a reporter at the Omaha World-Herald, was told by Trump officials that buses were having difficulty traveling through the access road to the rally site — which was “limited to one direction.”

The report was corroborated by CNN correspondent Jeff Zeleny, who said that thousands continued to be stuck nearly an hour-and-a-half after Trump left Omaha and called the scene a "cluster."

“We need at least 30 more buses,” he quoted an Omaha officer as saying.

While the available buses were navigating the narrow, heavily-impacted roads, attendees were at risk of freezing in the cold. Officers in police cars drove some individuals back nearly four miles to the lot where their cars were parked, Sanderford reported.

City buses, per Omaha Police spokesman Officer Michael Pecha, were deployed to speed up the process of taking people back to parking lots. Many others, he added, walked back two or three miles to return to their cars — which contributed to traffic delays.

At least seven people, per Pecha, were transported to a nearby hospital. Others, officers allegedly said per Omaha Scanner, were showing signs of hypothermia, including fatigue and confusion. . . .

Sanderford reported that the crowd in Omaha was almost fully cleared out by 1 a.m. the next morning.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/28/omaha-trump-rally-thousands-attendees-stranded-cold-after-event/3760175001/

This is a powerfully worded article.

Donald Trump is blindingly cruel and stupid, and has done immense damage to America. This is our last chance
by BOB CESCA
OCTOBER 27, 2020 on Salon
. . .
Trump's blinding dumbness in the areas of history, the Constitution, the presidency and democratic institutions has infected him with an ugly, bastardized view of his job description, inflamed by his own biases and whatever he's picked up from watching cable news. He's a presidential dilettante, even now, nearly four years into the gig.

His wafer-thin understanding of presidential leadership contributes to his most self-defeating misapprehension: that he's only the president of the red states. Everyone else is the enemy, even more so than our actual overseas adversaries — surely more than Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, whom Trump praises more often than many of his fellow citizens and colleagues. The rest of us are only useful to him as punching bags and targets for his screechy, obscene, misspelled tweets and, more recently, his fascist police force. The upside of his deformed view of the presidency is that if he loses this election, it'll partly be because he refused to expand his support beyond his loyalists.
. . .

https://www.salon.com/2020/10/27/time-to-dump-the-presidential-dilettante--hes-a-cruel-and-incompetent-failure/

I’m so happy! This may turn Iowa blue!

Polk County appears to be following the trend elsewhere in the country regarding early voting.

Let’s start with the numbers here in Polk County. The deadline for absentee ballot requests was this past Saturday at 5:00 PM. When all was said and done, here’s where we ended up:
• 142,018 total absentee ballot requests
• 81,257 Democrats (57%)
• 32,262 Republicans (23%) 27,719 No Party (19.5%) / 780 Other Party (.5%)
And the rate of return on absentee ballots was:
• Countywide: 79%
• Democrats: 84%
• Republicans: 75% / No Party: 69% / Other Party: 70%

...As of Thursday afternoon, the number of Democrats in Polk County that voted early in the 2020 cycle had already exceeded the total number of early votes President Obama won in Polk County in 2012. When that happened last Thursday, there were still 12 days to go until the election.

But the numbers are showing that a higher rate of early voting is actually getting some of our infrequent, harder to reach, Democratic voters to vote. As Bleeding Heartland noted, "TargetSmart’s analysis of early voting shows that of the Iowans who had cast ballots through October 20, an estimated 16.2 percent (92,003 people) did not vote in the 2016 election. About 26,012 of those were first-time voters. The rest were infrequent voters."

source: Polk County Democrats Weekly Update

Powerful article and interesting refresher on how SS came about.

The chief actuary of the Social Security Administration wrote that Trump’s plan would destroy Social Security disability insurance in less than a year, and the entire system in another two.
Des Moines Register 10/25/20 by Henry Scott Wallace and June Hopkins

President Dwight Eisenhower once warned, if there was ever a political party that tried to destroy Social Security, “you would not hear of that party again in our political history.” And though there may be “occasional politicians” thinking that way, “their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Well.

That’s exactly what President Donald Trump and supporters like Sen. Joni Ernst plan to do. If re-elected, Trump says he wants to permanently terminate the key funding source for both Social Security and Medicare — the payroll tax — a trust fund funded equally by workers and employers.

This is not some minor political gaffe. It’s premeditated attempted murder — of programs that American workers love, on which they depend, and into which they dutifully pay each week. This is their retirement security, which they’ve earned, not some kind of socialist welfare “entitlements.”

Our grandfathers, both famous Iowans, played lead roles in helping Franklin D. Roosevelt design Social Security during the New Deal. Henry A. Wallace was FDR’s secretary of agriculture and later vice president, a product of Adair County and Iowa State College, who settled in Des Moines. Harry Hopkins was FDR’s closest adviser and later secretary of commerce, raised in Grinnell and a graduate of Grinnell College. Both served on the committee that labored mightily to create Social Security, chaired by Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, and the legislation they produced was unanimously supported by every senator and congressman from Iowa, Republican and Democrat.

more at link...
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/columnists/iowa-view/2020/10/25/social-security-our-grandparents-work-targeted-murder-plot/3732595001/

Register editorial board endorses Abby Finkenauer for U.S. House
Finkenauer is engaged in her district and passionate about things that matter to regular folks. Iowans should be thrilled to reelect her.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/endorsement/2020/10/17/abby-finkenauer-democrat-iowa-house-ia-01-editorial/3698065001/

Register editorial board endorses Rita Hart for U.S. House
Hart is smart, thoughtful and well-spoken. If elected, she would focus on healing divisions and governing.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/endorsement/2020/10/17/rita-hart-democrat-iowa-house-ia-02-editorial/3698067001/

Register editorial board endorses J.D. Scholten for U.S. House
Scholten has an impressive understanding of farming, agricultural markets and the role of antitrust laws in the industry, all vital issues for the district.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/endorsement/2020/10/17/jd-scholten-democrat-iowa-house-ia-04-editorial/3698081001/

Register editorial board endorses Cindy Axne for U.S. House
Axne jumped right into working on issues. She is accessible to her constituents and sees taking care of people as a calling.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/endorsement/2020/10/17/cindy-axne-democrat-iowa-house-ia-03-editorial/3698069001/

Register editorial board endorses Theresa Greenfield for U.S. Senate
Greenfield should be given an opportunity to refocus the junior senator’s office on working Iowans.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/editorials/endorsement/2020/10/17/theresa-greenfield-iasen-democrat-iowa-senate-editorial/3698062001/

Bring America together again: The United States needs an experienced, compassionate president. That's Joe Biden.
Our divided nation needs an experienced, compassionate, respectful president. Joe Biden has proven he can be that leader. Trump has proven he cannot.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/2020/10/03/des-moines-register-endorses-experienced-respectful-leader-joe-biden/3581278001/