Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
The 2018 election went pretty well for Democrats in Iowa, as I predicted. They took 2 of 3 Republican House seats. They won seats in the state legislature. Not enough for a majority, but better than last election. Democrats also did pretty well nationally, as we know. But it didn’t go so well for Fred Hubbell.
Fred Hubbell lost.
Why did he lose?
Source: https://www.deviantart.com/trish2/art/Crystal-Ball-2-48410126
Let’s predict tomorrow’s US election!
First, I’m not a pollster or scientist. I can only stand on the shoulders of giants.
And so this is really only for entertainment value. I’ll say a bit about where I think things are nationally, and then about where things are in Iowa.
College students turned out in droves to vote for Bernie Sanders. Among voters under the age of 30, Sanders won about as many primary votes as Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Ted Cruz combined.
‘Under 30’ and ‘college student’ aren’t the same group. Some college students are over 30, and many people under 30 aren’t college students. But there’s a lot of overlap. We also know that voters, as a group, have a higher socioeconomic status than non-voters. It stands to reason, then, that college students make up a healthy portion of the under 30 vote.
My own Iowa caucus site sits on a college campus. While the site covers both student and non-student neighborhoods, it overflowed with Sanders supporters. He won 77% to Clinton’s 23%. Nothing was more obvious than the age difference between the two camps. And, despite attempts to label Sanders a candidate for only white people, he carried the under 30 vote nationally across all racial groups.
Local elections are a different story. Turnout is low among basically all ages everywhere across the country. But it’s really low among young voters.
Given the facts about who votes, you’d expect turnout to be very low among young people who don’t go to college and relatively higher among those who do. And turnout is low among those who don’t go to college, in both national and local elections. College students, though, don’t behave quite as expected. They do often vote in national elections but don’t vote in local elections.
Why is that?
Bernie Sanders lost in 2016. Cathy Glasson lost in 2018. Glasson is a Sandersista. Sanders is, well, the Sandersista.
Sandersistas have pursued many strategies since Bernie’s loss, with Cathy Glasson representing an electoral route. Sanders looms large over this strategy, endorsing candidates and providing support through organizations like Our Revolution. Doing things like organizing tenants’ unions and organizing against ICE represents an alternative strategy.
My readers won’t be surprised to find that I think there’s more potential to build popular power in the latter than in the former. Readers also already know I don’t think highly of electoralism as a central component of leftist strategy.
But elections are not totally hopeless, and they may provide lessons.
The Cathy Glasson campaign provides me with a convenient point of departure. One, I’m an Iowan. I saw the campaign literature, followed the press coverage, and know people who volunteered with the campaign.
Two, Glasson’s campaign is representative of how this strategy has gone, particularly in the Midwest. Successful candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have gotten more national press, as winners tend to do. But, e.g., Cathy Glasson, Abdul El-Sayed, and Pete D’Alessandro are more typical. Sandersistas usually lose, and often lose badly.
What lessons can we learn from the Cathy Glasson campaign? That’s my topic here.
Into politics? Thinking about making a run for office? Let’s talk about this. The left needs serious discussions on whether and how to win power electorally.
I’ll get directly to the point. All things being equal, running for office is a bad idea. I’ll say a bit about why. Along the way, I’ll make some recommendations for what to do about this.
The background to this post is that there’s a special election for a vacant city council seat in Iowa City. I live in Iowa City, and I’ve spent some time evaluating whether running for office here might be a good use of time. The city council, in particular, appears like it might be an outlet one could use for positive results.
Despite the obvious localism, I’ll draw out broader implications.
© 2026 Base and Superstructure
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
