Iowa = Too Rural? Too White?

This article made me chuckle.
Andrea Mitchell (Mrs. Alan Greenspan) and A.G. Sulzberger -- a Brown grad who started at the family paper in Feb. 2009 -- both assert that unnamed critics are criticizing the state as being unrepresentative of America's population.

Now, Mitchell wasn't making that charge herself, of course. She was merely citing unnamed "critics" who hold that view, she said.

As was the New York Times' A.G. Sulzberger, who in mid-December wrote this: "Iowa has long been criticized as too much of an outlier to be permanently endowed such an outsize influence in shaping the presidential field. Too small, critics say. Too rural. Too white."

The unnamed critic certainly is getting a lot of media coverage these days. But the issue isn't who the critics are - but whether the criticism itself is true.

Turns out, those Iowans are a pretty remarkable lot.

In fact, Iowa is the 12th-most representative state, say political scientists Michel Lewis-Beck of the University of Iowa and Peverill Squire of the University of Missouri. In 2009, they took 51 different indicators of social, cultural, political, and policy activities and measured how Iowa compared with the rest of the US, including such things as state average income, consumption of alcoholic beverages, percentage of vanity license plates, and voter turnout. Their report concluded that while Iowa is whiter and older than other states, on most everything else, it was among the more average states in the US.

But let's let the critics win this one - let's have the media declare Iowa to be too this or that to accurately represent the views of the American people as a whole. Let them instead report on how Barack Obama is doing by camping out in the state that is the most-representative state, at least according to political scientists Lewis-Beck and Squire.

That would be Kansas.

Where, according to the latest SurveyUSA poll, Romney leads Obama by 9.