'Continuing unease about the economy and disappointment in the president remain the strongest head winds for Democrats across the country in Tuesday's election...'

It's an article on Iowa, but this is how it is all over the place.

At LAT, "Unease over economy, Obama may turn Iowans redder — if they vote at all":

Hillary Rodham Clinton had been to town the night before to energize voters, and just that morning another good report on the economy had been released in Washington. But as Jay Johnson emptied cardboard boxes into a trash bin outside Ace Hardware — he's the guy you see about tools — he had little to say about either one.

He'll vote Tuesday. Probably. But if he does, this two-time Obama voter, a Democrat, says he's leaning toward Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst, not her Democratic opponent, Bruce Braley, because "being from here, you can kind of relate to Joni." Beyond that, he doesn't think that anything that occurs Tuesday in the national midterm elections will affect what still matters most to him, six years after the crash: the economy.

"They say it's good — that it has turned around," Johnson said, as he shifted one flattened box after another from a shopping cart into the bin. "I guess most people just don't feel it."

Johnson, 37, recently lost his second job as a carpenter at a nonprofit that helps rehabilitate houses for first-time buyers. Things were good for a while; they were doing 10 to 15 houses a month, but then the group's money dried up. His wife, a foreclosure counselor, is swamped: "She has a lot of job security."

Continuing unease about the economy and disappointment in the president remain the strongest head winds for Democrats across the country in Tuesday's election. Sentiments like Johnson's are why Republicans are within reach of taking over the Senate, possibly even picking up a seat here in the state with an increasingly blue tinge that launched Barack Obama on his path to the White House in 2008, and voted to elect him twice.

Voters in Iowa and other closely contested states like Colorado and Louisiana say trauma from the nation's economic decline is foremost in mind as the election nears. Prosperity has returned for some, but not all, and many live in fear that any gains they achieve will vanish. Undergirding their uncertainty is the discomfiting sense that no one — not the president nor members of Congress — has much control over events around the world.

Each week leading up to the election seemed to bring a new crisis: Islamic militants beheading Americans, a dreaded virus finding its way to American shores, a troubled man scrambling into the White House before being stopped. And there is a palpable distrust of government's ability to handle those situations and keep Americans secure.

But that unease is playing out differently among different groups of voters. Some plan to sit out the election despite the get-out-the-vote armies from the two parties and outside groups deploying across the swing states to coax sporadic voters to the polls.

Crush the bastards!