Midwest proves unpredictable

DESMOINES, Iowa — No matter how long the nation’s unemployment rate hovered around 8 percent, the Northeast and theWest Coast were never in doubt for Barack Obama. No matter how far it might have fallen before Election Day, Mitt Romney was always sure to win the South and rural Great Plains.

Nothing was so certain in theMidwest.

Iowa and the states along the shores of the Great Lakes from Minnesota to Ohio put Obama in the White House in 2008. Two years later, with voters in a foul mood as the Great Recession lingered, the GOP went five- for- five in races for the U. S. Senate, took over governor’s mansions in four states and state legislatures in five.

Yet on Tuesday, Obama beat Romney by again winning every state in the region save one. Wisconsin voters— who had elected a tea party Republican to the Senate in 2010— picked a liberal Democrat to join him, while voters in Minnesota pushed Republicans in the statehouse from power and gave Democrats complete control of state government for the first time in two decades.

That back- and- forth hardly makes for the socalled “Midwest Firewall” that Democrats can supposedly count on to deliver in every election. Instead, Tuesday’s results reaffirmed the future of theMidwest as a political battleground where voters willing to look past party will decide the outcome of elections.

“Voters in this state are independent,” said Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.