At Accumold in Ankeny, Iowa, revenue of almost $25 million is about a third higher than before the 2008 credit crisis. A year after doubling its factory’s size, the company tentatively plans to more than double it again.
“We’re literally looking to add dozens of people,” said chief executive Roger Hargens, 59, adding: “2010 was a record year. 2011 was a record year. And this year’s a record year.”
Accumold, a privately held maker of small components for medical devices and electronics, illustrates the comparative prosperity that makes Iowa an unusual battleground in a presidential election that’s focused on a weak national economy.
With its low unemployment and sound housing market, Iowa boasts the economy that President Barack Obama once promised the entire country. The jobless rate in August was 5.5 percent, well below that month’s national rate of 8.1 percent. Housing prices, which never soared as they did in other battleground states such as Nevada or Florida, hover above precrisis levels.
The state’s relative cheer is complicating Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s efforts to paint Obama as a failed economic steward.
“It’s not really possible to come here and talk about economic Armageddon,” said Sue Dvorsky, chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, who acknowledges that Obama isn’t replicating 2008’s voter enthusiasm. “Nobody feels that.”
At the same time, the president is struggling to dispatch his Republican rival as fissures have appeared in Iowa’s surface sheen. Since the U.S. recession’s June 2009 end, the state has created jobs at half the national average. Last month, the Iowa Business Council’s third-quarter business-confidence reading fell seven points to 61 on a 100-point scale.
An uptick in the jobless rate, from 5.1 percent in June, has dented Iowans’ optimism, partly because of uncertainty about the stalemate in Washington over tax and spending policies.
“It’s the kind of enthusiasm you get treading water, knowing that the next guy drowned,” says economist Peter Orazem of Iowa State University in Ames. “There’s still a lot of unease.”
Mike Mahaffey, a former state Republican chairman, says Romney hopes to capitalize on voters’ disquiet about the future. “They are concerned about the next four years, not as much about the last four years,” he said.
Obama led Romney by 49 percent to 45 percent among likely voters in a Sept. 23-26 Iowa Poll by Selzer & Co., a Des Moines- based pollster who also conducts surveys for Bloomberg News. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
That isn’t much of an advantage, especially with 54 percent of Iowans saying the country is on the wrong track.
Farmers are small businessmen, too, and the president has had trouble wooing that group. Howard Hill, who raises corn, soybeans and pure-bred Angus cows, is frustrated by uncertainty over future estate tax rates. He’s struggling to map out plans to pass on his 2,600-acre operation to his son.
