Romney Isn’t Spending As Much Time in Iowa As You’d Think

This got past me, because Gov. Mitt Romney had worked so hard to cultivate his image as the one GOP front-runner who is spending time in Iowa. But according to the Washington Post’s candidate tracker, Romney has spent only three days in Iowa (all in mid-September) over the past two months. At some point (perhaps at this point), people will start to notice.

In contrast, Romney has spent five days in Michigan, perhaps the largest threat to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status, in the past two months, and he has made more public appearances in that state on each of the days that he was there than he made in Iowa. He is also scheduled to be back in Michigan tomorrow. Meanwhile, Romney fights jihadists on our airwaves.

As an editor of a web site that covers a lot of campaign events, it has become a lot harder to find Republican events to cover than it has been to find Democratic events. Democrats jumped to take their names off the Michigan ballot earlier this week, while Republicans appear to have no qualms about running full-fledged campaign operations there. The importance of Iowa may have been overstated by Democratic staffers and surrogates, but Republicans are generally quiet on our state’s importance. Why isn’t the Iowa GOP fighting for their constituency’s interests like the Iowa Democrats are?