Carroll County 2008: An interesting case

Barack Obama speaks at Carroll High School just before the Iowa Caucuses.

Carroll County — which went for President-elect Barack Obama in the Iowa Caucuses nearly a year ago — was there for him again Tuesday.

After going for President George W. Bush in the last two elections, Carroll County went for Obama.  The Illionis Democrat earned 51 percent of the county’s votes, while GOP hopeful John McCain drew 47 percent.  In raw votes, that is 5,284 to 4,905. State Democratic officials said the county was one they paid attention to as something of a bellwether.

“We finally got a man who I think really showed some intelligence,” said Butch Heisterkamp, chairman of the Carroll County Democratic Party.

Iowa as a whole went was called early in the night for Obama — 54 percent to GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s 45 percent.

For his part, Heisterkamp was an early Obama supporter.

He introduced Obama at a Carroll rally just after Labor Day in 2007 and minutes later formally endorsed him, becoming one of the first county chairs to do so.

“I got on there a little bit early,” Heisterkamp said. “I just believed in the man.”

With a nearly 70 percent turnout among registered voters in Carroll County, Obama dominated the ground game with absentee ballots and early voting.

“We had a good organization,” Heisterkamp said. “We were here in January in the caucus times.”

State Rep Rod Roberts, R-Carroll, who himself won re-election, said the McCain campaign sailed into a furious Democratic headwind — and deserves credit for doing as well as it did against long odds.

“Regardless of the nominee the cycle and trends favored the Democrats this time around,” Roberts said.
Roberts said that ironically and with great unfairness, McCain’s position on the war in Iraq, his support for the surge, helped matters in that conflict and largely took the issue off the table for the election in favor of the economy.

“That (the economy) became the pre-eminent issue among voters,” Roberts said.

What’s more, Roberts — an early and consistent supporter of McCain even during the darkest days of the primary campaign and caucuses campaign — said he had several conversations with area farmers, generally conservative, who punished McCain at the polls for the Arizonan’s hostility to ethanol and agricultural subsidies — which McCain expressed during campaign stops and in two of the  highly watched presidential debates.

“There were some people who were concerned about his position on ethanol and renewable fuels,” Roberts said.

Those concerns, Roberts said, help explain a remarkable dynamic in which both Obama and U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, carried Carroll County.

Heisterkamp and other local Obama supporters said they received enthusiastic calls late Tuesday from young Obama staff people who spent months in Carroll before the caucuses, and then moved on to other states.

“We got that done,” Heisterkamp said. “We got Iowa for him.”

In terms of sheer logistics, boots-on-the-ground campaigning, Obama is overwhelmed McCain here.
Obama had an office in Carroll, and has had staff in place dating back well before the caucuses. Additionally, Obama campaigned in Carroll twice.

Obama, who pulled crowds of more than 600 people in each of the two visits here, turned that enthusiasm into living and breathing Iowa Caucuses support in capturing Carroll County with 35 percent of the delegates.

McCain never visited Carroll.

The nation’s first African-American president, Obama captured Carroll, a county that is 98.8 percent white, according to the 2006 U.S. Census.

“I think it’s wonderful,” said Mary Bruner, an Obama supporter from Carroll. “People are using the term transformational and I really think it was. I was talking to my kids who are in their 20s. They don’t see that color. I really hope that’s the way the world is going to be.”

Obama won Crawford and Audubon and Greene Counties, but lost in Sac and Calhoun counties.

With the exception of Monona County, which went for McCain, Obama won a stretch a counties along the U.S. Highway 30 Corridor running across the state from Crawford County to the Mississippi River.