Iowans can expect to see plenty of Obama, Romney

 Florida settled the famous presidential election of 2000. Ohio decided it in 2004.

Could Iowa voters determine the results in 2012?

President Barack Obama comes to Iowa City today for his second visit of the year to Eastern Iowa, speaking to a student audience at the University of Iowa. It's billed as an official presidential visit, not a campaign event. But Iowans should get ready to see more of him very soon, as well as Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts.

That's because political scientists see a situation developing in Iowa that could make the state one of the most critical swing states of the 2012 election, meaning a plethora of advertising and attention is likely to be lavished on the state this summer and fall.

While the state only has six electoral votes up for grabs this year, down from seven because of congressional reapportionment, recent elections have shown how important only a few such votes can be. The 2000 presidential election came down to the recount in Florida, for example, and the 2004 election came down to the results in Ohio.

“When you're a swing state, it means it's not a safe state for either party - not reliably red or consistently blue, like you might say Wyoming or Texas would go for the GOP and Maryland or California would be Democratic,” said Tim Hagle, a political-science professor at the University of Iowa.

“Iowa fits into that category. The state's six votes could still make a difference.” Hagle said. “The last two elections came down to just a few states.”

Hagle noted that Vice President Al Gore won Iowa in 2000, but only by 4,400 votes. President George W. Bush won it in 2004, but only by 10,000 votes. Both years saw visits to the state by each candidate as well as their surrogates.

“It also matters that Iowa is a rural state where a campaign can be run fairly inexpensively and the candidate can still do well. Rick Santorum found that out this winter,” Hagle said, referring to the former GOP candidate's first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

The latest state polls in Iowa show Obama with a slim lead of three or four points over Romney. As measured by the political poll website RealClearPolitics, an average of polls since last October show the president with a lead of 45.3 to 42.3 percent. Out of nine polls taken since January 2011 in the state, only a Des Moines Register poll taken in February and a Mason-Dixon poll from last July have shown Romney with slight leads, both within the polling margin of error.

The state polls generally mirror the national picture - a RealClearPolitics average this week showed Obama with a lead of 47.8 to 44.1 percent, or a 3.7 percent edge.

Voter registration is extremely close to even in Iowa as well, lending the state the “politically purple” moniker. The most recent data from the Iowa Secretary of State's Office, for example, show there are 630,266 actively registered Democrats and 626,901 Republicans.

To David Peterson, interim director of the Harkin Institute on Public Policy at Iowa State University, those numbers and other trends cement Iowa's position as a critical state for Obama and Romney in 2012.

“It's definitely plausible. A lot of other states have to break a certain way, but we're certainly going to be one of the closest ones,” Peterson said. “Get ready to see more ads in the state. A lot more ads and a lot more visits.

“You're going to see, starting soon, every banner ad on every Web page will be political. That was the thing I really noticed during the caucuses. I'd go online to just check the weather and I'd see them all over the place.”

Through 2008, Peterson said, Iowa had been trending Democratic, a trend crowned by Obama's victory in the state in 2008. But since then, it has swung back to favor Republicans. There was a contested GOP primary for governor in 2010, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, handily won re-election that same year. Republicans have also generally done a more effective job than Democrats at organizing in the state, Peterson said.

He noted one exception: Obama's own team has spent considerable time and money to build its ground game in the state.

“Holy Cow, Obama has a lot of people here,” Peterson said. “I remember on caucus night in Ames there were a dozen people with Obama T-shirts and laptops, with all the voter registration information at their fingertips for the Democratic voters who came out. It was a trial run for them.”

In Washington, Curtis Gans has seen the situation before. Director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University, Gans said the polls in Iowa are the most indicative of the possibility that Iowa could possibly decide the election.

“Iowa probably won't get as much attention as Florida or Virginia or Ohio, but it will get more intensive notice than before. It's not in the bag for either party, and that makes the difference,” Gans said.