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Iowa’s Battleground Status Remains Key

With the 2016 presidential race picking up speed, Iowa continues to play a major role in the strategies of many candidates vying for nomination.

On this Politics Day edition of River to River, host Ben Kieffer sits down with Donna Hoffman and Chris Larimer, Associate Professors of Political Science at the University of Northern Iowa. The pair discussed a book chapter they are working on that breaks down Iowa's historic swing state status.

A central part of the chapter looks into how counties around the state identify politically.

“The imbalance in Iowa ends up working out to Iowa being this purple state, but there’s a lot of moving parts in Iowa that I don’t think people really pick up on just by labeling the state as ‘purple,’” Larimer says. “The counties in Iowa are not purple at all. Geographically Iowa is very divided.”

Larimer and Hoffman also weigh in on the recent candidate announcements of Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Bernie Sanders.