The Endorsement

When the Des Moines Register endorsed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama, it sent Democratic Iowans into a frenzy.

Not content to simply cancel their subscriptions, a group of Iowans took out a full-page ad in the Sunday Register a week after the endorsement and reprinted in full the Salt Lake City Tribune’s endorsement of Barack Obama.  

Iowa Democrats took up a collection to raise the $15,500 they needed to run the ad. “It was really kind of a caper,” said Susan Webster, who posted about the plan on her Facebook page and helped gather the money. “We drove around and collected money from people who were out of the town.” The planners used Cownie’s Fur, owned by Iowa Mayor Frank Cownie, as their base of operations, Susan said.

“We know a lot of the writers and we know their work,” Susan said. She wishes some of her favorites were part of the editorial board that issued the endorsement. “It was a giant blow to our trust.”

Further down on the page, the ad reproduced endorsements from other regional newspapers and listed the names of the people who contributed to its cost.

“People were just aghast and shocked,” said Marilyyn Wadden, She says she made a “minor little donation” when she heard of the “buzz all over town.”

Her husband Jerry called the endorsement a “corporate decision” and suspected that dollars and cents were influencing paper’s editorial judgment. “It was so inconsistent with the values  of the Des Moines Register,” he said. “I’ve read the Register for 64 years religiously, day and night for half of those years. That was not the paper I’ve read for 64 years. That was a different animal.”

The presidential candidate with the Register’s endorsement has won Iowa in almost every election, with the exception of George W. Bush’s win over John Kerry in 2004. It was the first time the broadsheet had endorsed a Republican since Nixon.