Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Blain’s Farm & Fleet was one of the first retail developments at the corner of IA 58 and Viking Road, opening in 1999. Beside it sprung up a Wal-Mart. Then, about a decade or so ago, the retail boom there crushed College Square and made the Viking Road intersection one of the most congested in the state.

While Blain’s may be a one-stop-shop for the rural life (and…toys?), there’s an equally strong and almost equally named competitor, Mills Fleet Farm. And in the near future, there’s going to be a Mills Fleet Farm on IA 58, just to the south, at Ridgeway Avenue.

What I’m trying to say is, confusion ahoy! Farm and Fleet, or Fleet Farm?

The more interesting issue at hand is Cedar Falls giving a go-ahead for construction at the 58/Ridgeway intersection when that is going to be an issue if the state ever tries to fix the woefully underpowered diamond interchange with US 20 just to the south. The Avenue of the Saints has been a massive success, but 58 and 20 is the one place you have to make a left turn. The Courier story says right-of-way will be preserved for an interchange, but the Ridgeway intersection is another issue.

But it’s the last sentence of the story, and a line in the P&Z agenda, that drops the really big news: Cedar Falls is getting a Raising Cane’s!

Enough cheese for every man, woman, and child in town. Probably.

While there will be many women voting the democratic ticket, there is no question that that in the northern states the republican party will be largely the gainer and if there was any hope of the sporting candidate, “Wet Jim”, being elected, it has gone a-glimmering. This in spite of the fact that Tennessee, the state to put suffrage across, is normally democratic. The fact remains that nearly two-thirds of the states voting for suffrage are republican and that the democrats only espoused the cause when it became a case of necessity, as they feared to anger the women in those states where they had already obtained the ballot.
— “Women Are Now Voters,” Chariton Herald-Patriot, August 19, 1920. Note, with the reference to Democratic presidential candidate James Cox, how the issue of women’s suffrage was intertwined with Prohibition.

Up through and including the 2012 election, Iowa was hounded for never having elected a woman to Congress or the governorship. But when it’s time to celebrate the 1920 centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women across the nation the right to vote, Iowa will have checked every one of those boxes. (Your move, Vermont.)

Iowa’s congressional delegation is going to be equally split by gender for both the House and Senate, and not only is there a female governor, we have our first elected female governor in Kim Reynolds. The election of Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne to the U.S. House breaks the glass ceiling on that side of Congress, following Joni Ernst on the Senate side. Depending on how you classify Tuesday’s nationwide results, 2018 is the first time since 1978 that an Iowa incumbent in the House — two, in fact — lost to a new opponent in a non-wave election.

So, barring surprises, in 2020 Iowa will have Republican women in three top positions — Reynolds, Ernst, and Speaker of the House Linda Upmeyer — and Democratic women in two more, Axne and Finkenauer. Finkenauer was on track to be the youngest person ever elected to Congress — enough to get written up in the Atlantic — until an earthquake primary in New York City you might have heard about.

In another marker of change, the Iowa Legislature will have its first Jennifer (Konfrst, in a suburban Polk County seat) and the U.S. House its second (Wexton, who picked off Barbara Comstock in the only near-DC Beltway legislative seat Republicans controlled).

One note of cross-party Iowa-ness: Both Reynolds and Axne played 6-on-6 basketball. How many states have two high-profile female politicians who played high school sports? (Of course, it’s not nearly as consequential as being the first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, like Arizona’s Martha McSally, just interesting.)