Twists in the River
DUBUQUE, IOWA—Like many natives of this Mississippi River city, Barbara Smeltzer needed no prompting when asked about the bad times, those not-so-long-ago days that gave rise to questions about whether Iowa's oldest community had a future.
It was the early 1980s, and thousands had been laid off by the city's major employers, including John Deere. Farmers working the rolling fields in Dubuque County struggled as a national recession deepened. And the once handsome downtown looked as if it were expecting a herd of tumbleweeds.
"It used to be a case of 'Will the last one out of Dubuque please turn off the lights?'" says Smeltzer, a prominent Republican activist, speaking last week from her office at the University of Dubuque, where she's a student adviser. "But that's just not the case anymore."
Indeed, this traditionally German Catholic enclave of about 58,000 has managed a striking two-decade turnaround using city-sponsored greyhound racing and riverboat gambling as the spark to bulk up city coffers. There's also been aggressive courting of high-tech and insurance businesses like Sedgwick Claims Management Services, which last year announced it would expand here with 100 new jobs. Along the way, Dubuque has set the pace for job growth in Iowa and rediscovered a long-ignored asset: the river, which runs wide and beautiful here. The National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium at the rejuvenated Port of Dubuque, also home to a casino and a conference center, has become one of the state's top tourist attractions.
Through good times or bad here in Iowa's First Congressional District, politics has always been a passion. By mid-August, Dubuque had been visited 17 times by nine different presidential candidates. Last year, for the first time in three decades, voters chose a Democrat, lawyer Bruce Braley, to represent them in Congress when incumbent Republican Jim Nussle decided to run, unsuccessfully, for governor.
Mix and match. But Republicans have hardly given up here, despite being outnumbered by registered Democrats 117,581 to 96,854. (Nearly 156,000 registered voters have not affiliated with a party.) Though Iowa's seven electoral votes went to Democrat Al Gore in 2000 by a slim 4,200-vote statewide margin, they flipped to President Bush in 2004 by about 10,000 votes. In the more rural parts of this district, voters have tended to choose Republicans. But candidates who have come to this district, which includes Waterloo to the west and the Quad Cities area south on the Mississippi, have found what many characterize as the "new Iowa," an increasingly urban state, says David Redlawsk of the University of Iowa, "with a lot of empty rural counties and a few densely packed urban areas." And in 2008, this "new Iowa" will be up for grabs.
While traveling through his district last week, Braley said the Iraq war remains at the top of voters' concerns. "They want us to end our military commitment in a responsible manner," he says. Nancy Van Milligan, who heads the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque and whose husband has been city manager since 1991, says many people have "tired of the Bush administration's attitude that they're all-powerful." With the healthcare crisis and the rising cost of education, they are also struggling to figure out, she says, how "to keep the American dream alive."
On a recent Saturday, brothers Tom and Bill Sanders huddled under a canopy during a downpour that soaked the weekly farmers' market, where pies, coffeecakes, apples, tomatoes, and corn—14 freshly picked ears for $4—were on soggy display. Fifth-generation fruit and vegetable farmers, both brothers have other full-time jobs to pay the bills and for health insurance coverage. They support the war—"you have to do something about terrorists," says Bill, who usually votes a straight Democratic ticket. But they are interested in the change promised by Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama. "He wants to straighten the government out," says Tom, a Republican. Though raised Catholic, the Sanders brothers have not been moved by the issues of abortion or same-sex marriage.
But the Roman Catholic Church still wields a powerful influence here. Republicans have been jockeying to appeal to these cultural conservatives who supported Nussle, an abortion opponent who became an early acolyte of then Speaker Newt Gingrich. (As head of the GOP Governors Association, presidential candidate Mitt Romney plowed $750,000 into Iowa during Nussle's tough gubernatorial race last year. But Nussle, now serving as Bush's budget director, has endorsed Rudy Giuliani.)
Organized labor has a strong voice in the district, and illegal immigration is less an issue here than in western Iowa. But Dubuque has struggled with race as its population has grown more diverse. Recently, after a white man was stabbed to death by a black man, city leaders worried that racial divisions of the past could resurface. An effort in the 1990s to encourage minority workers to settle in the city by offering them jobs led to a series of cross burnings.
Like many Iowa Republicans, Smeltzer considers herself a moderate in the mold of revered former Gov. Robert Ray. She says she rejects single-issue abortion politics of Republicans like Sam Brownback. "I sat down with him and thought, 'You're going to be the darling of some groups, but you don't have anything to offer beyond that,'" says Smeltzer, who chaired Nussle's county campaign and is now doing the same for Sen. John McCain.
For the record, Smeltzer says, her husband supports Giuliani, and her mom likes Romney. No doubt it will be an interesting year in Dubuque, and in the Smeltzer homeas well.
This story appears in the September 10, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.