BY MAGGIE TROWE
DES MOINES, Iowa - Socialists here campaigned intensively the last week before the Des Moines municipal primary election. Candidates Thomas Alter and Ardella Blandford, who are running for Mayor and City Council At- Large respectively, campaigned with supporters at factory gates, high school and college campuses, the farmers market, and in working-class areas.

Alter, 23, a packinghouse worker at IBP in Perry, Iowa, and a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1149, won a four-day unpaid leave to campaign. The head personnel at the Perry IBP plant initially rejected the request for the leave, which was to begin Wednesday, October 1.

After receiving a letter from Alter's campaign committee, another from Iowa State University professor Mack Shelley, who had invited Alter to speak to his students, and a call from a Des Moines Register reporter, the Human Resources director at the IBP headquarters in Dakota City, Nebraska, reversed the decision and granted the leave.

The day after the leave was initially denied, a front page interview with Alter appeared in the Des Moines Register, featuring two photos of the socialist candidate and a headline that read, "Candidate calls himself a `revolutionary'." The Register interviewed not only Alter, but his father, who lives in Indiana, and one of his instructors from his student days at Indiana University.

The article stated that Alter is "trying to win votes in Des Moines while talking about defending the Cuban revolution and canceling the Third World debt, rather than focusing on local issues." In fact, Alter and Blandford also campaigned for a halt to deportations of immigrant workers, demanded affirmative action quotas for women, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in all-city hiring, and called for full civil and human rights for gays and lesbians.

During the week, Alter and his supporters campaigned at the John Deere agricultural implements factory in nearby Ankeny, at the IBP plant in Perry where Alter works, at Fawn Engineering, where Blandford works, and at the Bridgestone- Firestone tire plant. At the latter, several workers told Alter they had read about him in the paper and were going to vote for him. A worker who knew Blandford from her visits to the picket line during the 27-month Firestone strike greeted her warmly.

Alter spoke and fielded questions at a class on statistics taught by Shelley October 3. Alter and supporters also campaigned at Ankeny High School, where Young Socialist member Wade Eivens had organized a number of students to meet the candidates. The campaigners sold several pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press.

Campaign supporters spent a half day in Ames, Iowa, with activists of the September 29 movement. This student group is protesting racism at Iowa State University, particularly the administration's decision last year to name a building after Carrie Chapman Catt, who campaigned for women's suffrage in the early part of the century along the axis of using white women's votes as a counterweight to those of Blacks and immigrants.

More than 20 people attended a campaign meeting in Des Moines October 4, including an activists from the newly- formed Iowa Coalition Against Police Brutality, and students from Ankeny High School, Roosevelt High School, Lincoln High School, and Des Moines Area Community College. Two students Eivens and Isaac Christensen, spoke on the panel along with Alter, Blandford, and Jennifer Benton, Socialist Workers candidate for Mayor of Minneapolis. The meeting raised over $250 for the campaign.  
 
 
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