Medicine and politics

We were in Rochester a week ago. I had to have a little tuneup at Mayo Clinic.

We hadn’t been there for about a year, and we marveled at how much the city has grown since then, thanks to Mayo. More clinic buildings are going up in the center of the city that is now 120,000 population. Its population is growing about 20,000 every 10 years. Healthcare seems recession-proof.

There are certainly drawbacks to living in rural Midwest, but It’s amazing that the best medical center in the world is in rural Minnesota, just a few hours from Storm Lake.

SPEAKING OF MEDICINE, Dr. Elizabeth Dupic, who has been at Family Health Center  since 2019, is leaving Storm Lake for Waverly with her family.

BROTHER ART’S editorial last week suggested the wild idea that Iowa could be in play for Kamala Harris, if national Democrats exerted just a little effort here. Conventional wisdom was that Donald Trump had an invincible lead in Iowa.

The Iowa Poll released in Sunday’s Des Moines Register proved Art was right. Trump’s 18 point lead in the poll from just three months ago has shrunk to just four points, well within striking range.

Art knows what he’s talking about.

So does Ann Selzer, who conducts the Iowa Poll. She’s the gold standard among the nation’s pollsters. She’s been described as “the best pollster in politics,” so if she says it, it’s so.

THERE’S A PROFESSOR at American University in Washington, DC, named Allan Lichtman who has an uncanny record for picking the winners in U.S. presidential elections. He’s been right every election since starting his predictions in 1984.

The history professor’s model uses 13 criteria to predict whether the presidential candidate of the incumbent party will win or lose the next election. They don’t consider polls, just hard data. If you want to know what these 13 indicators to presidential success are, Google “13 keys to White House.”

Lichtman says that, based on his 13 keys, Kamala Harris will be elected president in November.

We’ll see if he maintains his perfect record.