Ethanol might not be playing its conventional role as a major election issue for Hawkeye State voters, according to a new poll from Iowa.
A poll by FTI Consulting, commissioned by the American Council for Capital Formation, of 700 registered Iowa voters earlier this month showed 94 percent of those polls put the Renewable Fuel Standard outside their top three most important issues.
The American Council for Capital Formation is an anti-ethanol group that has run ads nationwide against increasing the Renewable Fuel Standard.
The Renewable Fuel Standard requires a certain amount of biofuel, the majority of it corn ethanol, to be in the nation’s gasoline supply. It has long been considered the “third rail” of Iowa politics, but the polling suggests that may no longer be the case.
“When asked to compare the RFS and corn ethanol mandates to other issues they may be following, Iowans ranked the RFS dead last among a list of 10 issues we surveyed,” the poll summary stated. “Some of the issues Iowans deemed to be more important than the RFS include: immigration, [the Islamic State], jobs, the national debt, welfare reform, Obamacare and gun rights.”
Of those polled, 19 percent said the Renewable Fuel Standard is very important to them. Forty-five percent said ethanol was somewhat important to them and 35 percent considered it not important at all.
Half of the respondents said they don’t care or don’t care much about ethanol and the Renewable Fuel Standard. That feeling was shared across party lines: 46 percent of Republicans, 49 percent of independents and 52 percent of Democrats agreed with that sentiment.
This year’s election has seen ethanol become less of a talking point in the home of the nation’s first presidential contest on Feb. 1. Just one-third of those polled knew any of the major presidential candidates’ position on the Renewable Fuel Standard.
David Banks, executive vice president of American Council for Capital Formation, said the upending of the conventional wisdom that ethanol is Iowa’s most important issue won’t be surprising to most Iowans.
“They forgot to ask actual Iowans what they thought about it,” he said. “As this polling makes clear, not only aren’t folks in the nation’s largest corn-producing state paying particularly close attention to the back-and-forth over the RFS, they’re definitely not using it as some sort of litmus test in determining who to vote for.”
The poll was done between Jan. 11 and Jan. 17 and has a margin of error of 3.7 percent.
