Iowa Democrats celebrate Obama victory in Des Moines
President Obama won several key battleground states Tuesday, including Iowa, to claim another four years in the White House.
“To be able to deliver Iowa for President Obama…knowing that it’s his favorite battleground, words can’t describe how it feels right now,” Brad Anderson, Obama’s Iowa campaign manager, told Radio Iowa last night. “It’s a huge thrill.”
Obama’s final campaign stop on Monday night was in downtown Des Moines. “There is no battleground state in the country that knows Barack Obama better than Iowa,” Anderson said. “Iowans know where his heart is and they know his convictions. They know where he stands on the issues. Rightly or wrongly, they know where he stands.”
Iowa Democratic Party chair Sue Dvorsky said Democrats in the Hawkeye State worked hard to register new voters. “We registered 17,000 new Democrats inside of two months,” Dvorsky said. “We virtually erased gains the Republicans made in registration that took them three cycles.”
Brian Kennedy, Mitt Romney’s Iowa campaign manager, said the hurricane that hit the East Coast stalled his candidate’s momentum. “Governor Romney clearly had the momentum coming out of the debates from early October through the month of October. And what we saw was that momentum was broken last week during the hurricane,” Kennedy told Radio Iowa last night. “The news coverage shifted from the campaign to the coverage of the disaster in the east.”
Kennedy said the president took a break from the campaign and presided over the hurricane recovery and that allowed him to break free in Iowa and the other swing states — and Romney couldn’t counter the hurricane coverage.
“There’s not much you can do about it, I mean it’s a natural disaster, the president did what he’s supposed to do, which is to preside over it,” Kennedy said.
He added Romney couldn’t attack the president at that time and the focus shifted to the hurricane coverage from the economy.
(Additional reporting by Radio Iowa’s Dar Danielson)