John Deeth has a rather exhaustive rundown of what candidates have filed for state and federal office this year in Iowa but it’s worth noting two interesting trends that have emerged so far and what ramifications this might have for the 2008 election.
The first is that three Democratic candidates have filed in the primary for House District 13. This is an open seat consisting almost entirely of Mason City and is heavily Democratic leaning, although it is currently held by Republican State Representative Bill Schickel who is not seeking re-election. The prospect of a heated Democratic Primary for this seat should pump up turnout which will have a big effect on the competitive Democratic primary for Iowa’s 4th congressional district. In 2006, where there was a competitive statewide primary but no competitive local primaries, turnout in Cerro Gordo made up about 7.5% of Democratic voters in the 4th district. However, with the competitive State House primary this year as well, it should lead to a disproportionate increase in turnout in Cerro Gordo County. This means that Mason City, which is the second largest municipality that is entirely in the 4th Congressional District, becomes even more important in the primary. This probably benefits the candidacy of Kurt Meyer the most as he comes from neighboring Mitchell County and is already seen as one of the more credible candidates in the race.
The second is that Democratic challengers have already filed in two State House seats that weren’t contested in 2006 or 2004 for that matter. James Van Bruggen has filed in ultra-conservative House District 4 which consists of Lyon County and part of Sioux County. The district is currently represented by incumbent Republican Dwayne Alons. While the district represents what is perhaps one of the most Republican state legislative seats in the country, let alone Iowa, (Chet Culver lost the district by a margin of almost 6 to 1) two slim slivers of hope for Van Bruggen are that Alons may be complacent as he has never faced an opponent in a general election in ten years in the legislature and has made some terribly embarrassing statements in recent years as well. In fact, Iowa Progress has commented numerous times on Alons’s frequent inane statements. These include claiming that the ancient Maya were a race of giants due to warmer temperatures and that the invention of air conditioning means that global warming is not a problem.
The other challenger is Ron Rossman, an organic farmer from outside Harlan, Iowa, who is running against Jack Drake in House District 57 which consists of Shelby County, most of Cass County and a thin slice of Pottawatomie County. It is a much less one-sided district than House District 4, Culver only lost the district by a 60-40 in 2006. However, if the race is solely about local issues, Rossman has a chance. While Drake is from the small sliver of Pottawatomie County that is in the district, Rossman hails from Shelby County which makes up over 40% of the district. If Rossman has a strong local base to build from, he has the capacity to run a competitive race.
Although neither of these seats are likely Democratic gains, it shows that Democrats may have a chance at running a candidate in close to every seat this year. In 2006, 19 House Republicans went unopposed, although few were in competitive districts. One of those House Republicans who went unopposed was Mary Lou Freeman. Freeman was a long time incumbent Republican from a safe district in Northwest Iowa. However, Freeman died two months before Election Day. If there had been a Democrat who had filed, the Democrat would have won automatically. Instead, the seat was declared vacant and in the special election that followed, the Republican candidate won handily, easily defeating his Democratic opponent who was a 21 year old college student.
The other benefit of running candidates in every seat is that it builds up party organization in areas that had previous been ceded to Republicans and helps build a stronger base of Democratic activists and to turn out more Democratic voters. In a year that seems to be trending Democratic so far, this could yield a surprise or two on Election Day.
State Representative Dawn Pettengill left the Democratic caucus for the Republican caucus today. The Register has the story from Chris Rants’s press conference, which just happened:
The change cuts the Democratic majority in the House to 53 seats and gives minority Republicans 47 seats. It takes 51 votes to pass legislation.
Pettengill had battled publicly with the House Democratic caucus this year over issues such as labor union fees and the cigarette tax increase. She had indicated publicly she might consider leaving the caucus, although she had suggested she was more likely to become an independent.
“The House Democratic leadership pursued an agenda which veered far from the principles for which my constituents and I stand,” she said in a statement. “My decision gives me the best opportunity to represent the values of my constituents.”
This is going to make progressives — particularly the ones I know who knocked doors for her during the last campaign — pretty unhappy. Pettengill is known for her emotional outbursts, and my sense is that she perceives her district to be more conservative than it actually is.
I posted a while back about why I didn’t think Pettengill was going to defect. It turns out I was wrong. This kind of transition, from the majority to the minority (particularly when it looks like the Republicans will likely remain in the minority through next campaign cycle) is surprising, but Pettengill planted the seed for a defection months ago.
As an aside, this comes as a double-disappointment for many progressives, who were hoping that Rants planned to announce his resignation today. Rumors that he will resign have been circulating for months, and there is no word yet on whether Pettengill’s switch will influence his decision on that one way or the other.
Today was a big day in the Iowa House, where Representatives voted 59-37 to pass Senate File 427, which updates Iowa’s civil rights law to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and perceived sexual orientation).
Until yesterday, few people expected the bill to make it to the floor of the House at all, even though it passed the Iowa Senate last month. Without a guarantee that the bill would pass (or even a guarantee that all of the Democrats would sign on), the leadership was reluctant to force its members to make a vote that could hurt them in their reelection campaigns. Ex-Speaker and current Minority Leader Chris Rants was doing everything he possibly could to prevent any Republican members from supporting the bill (even though some Republicans were definitely interested), and it looked like he might succeed in forcing a stalemate through the end of the legislative session.
In the end, though, the Democratic leadership put civil rights ahead of political concerns, and put the bill up to a vote. The result was a resounding victory. And, although Murphy and McCarthy have been getting a lot of grief about VOICE and a few other issues that have worked up our blogging community, this should earn them back some street cred.
More from Mark’s diary over at BleedingHeartland (partially cross-posted with permission):
Senate File 427 updates Iowa’s Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination in employment, public accommodation, housing, education, or credit practices based on age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
The discussion on various blogs throughout the state over the past few months has focused on what the Iowa Legislature has FAILED to accomplish - rather than the victories. This bill is truly a victory for progressives and for everyone who would like to call Iowa home. Leadership in both chambers made this bill a priority throughout the session - and now we can separate ourselves from the 33 other states where it’s OK to dismiss employees because of their real or perceived sexual orientation.
In particular, it was leadership from Democrats in cooperation with Iowa businesses and civil rights leaders who pushed this bill through to final passage. Corporate America is rapidly realizing that creating a tolerant atmosphere for everyone to work is an important part of growing a business - and a state. According to an article in Fortune Magazine:
So it’s clear where big business is going. What’s interesting is to watch it pull the rest of the country along. It turns out that the most important factor shaping people’s feelings about gay issues is not their age or even their religion - although those do matter - but whether they have relatives, friends or co-workers who are gay.
“The more out and open people are, the more changed the straight people are all around them,” says Joe Solmonese, the Human Rights Campaign president. HRC began organizing workplaces to secure benefits for gay employees. This has inadvertently become a shrewd political strategy as well. “To move the mindset of the American people, we need to find the places where they congregate,” Solmonese says. “Priority one is corporate America.”
A few days ago, The Register wrote an article documenting State Representative Dawn Pettengill’s dissatisfaction with the Democratic leadership in the State House. Here’s a snippet:
“I’m just trying to get through this term as a Democrat,” said Pettengill, the former mayor of her hometown of Mount Auburn who is now in her third year in the Iowa House. “People elected me as a Democrat, and I would not change during a term, that’s for sure.”
Her indecision leaves Democratic leaders questioning whether they should recruit a replacement candidate for the 2008 primary, and Republican leaders wondering if she might be on their team by the general election.
Will she defect? Well, she says she won’t during this term. In general, though, I’m not too worried about it. Pettengill has always seemed concerned with her ability to get elected in a district that she perceives as leaning more Republican than Democrat. She has developed a reputation (partly, but not wholly, deserved) for being emotionally volatile. Although she has condemned other legislators’ pet projects and voted against them, she is somewhat famous for her own pet projects: last year, she sponsored legislation to ban stores from selling sex toys to minors, and this year, she was the main proponent of the bill that recently passed preventing Iowa from having any business dealings with businesses supporting the genocide in Darfur. (I don’t mean to claim that either of these bills is bad policy, but neither is exactly in the front of most Iowans’ minds.)
The Register notes a few key places where Pettengill differs from the Democratic leadership in the House, but none of them are cut and dry reasons for a defection to the Republicans (or even to the Independent ticket):
But the strain of the last month has taken a serious toll as she struggled with her dislike of bills dear to many Democrats — raising the minimum wage (she voted yes after some reluctance), upping the cigarette tax (she voted no), campaign finance reform (she may vote no), and allowing public employee unions to charge nonunion members a “fair share” fee (she firmly intends to vote no).
On raising the minimum wage, she did end up voting yes, and the political realities in her district meant that “some reluctance” on the vote was smart. On voting against the cigarette tax, she justifies her decision for liberal (dare I say Democratic) reasons:
During a caucus meeting on the cigarette tax two weeks ago, Pettengill wept as she explained that when she was 19 years old, she found herself living on her own with a baby, balancing college classes and a job. She couldn’t afford cigarettes, but they were such a critical source of comfort that she sacrificed food to buy them.
She objects to a cigarette tax because it is increcibly regressive — it takes money disproportionately from the poor, and, because it is a flat fee, it takes a greater percentage of the disposable income of a poor person than it does a rich person. Yes, it internalizes an externality, yadda yadda yadda; but there is a principled, liberal argument to be made against it. Frankly, I was surprised more members didn’t express that opinion. Maybe only a small minority of the party holds this view, but it isn’t because they are the more conservative members of the party.
On campaign finance reform, it really isn’t clear that all of the Democratic leadership are fully supporting the VOICE bill. Good liberals generally like it (despite the short-term strategic disadvantages it may present to parties currently in the majority of the legislature), but this isn’t exactly an issue that everyone is closely aligned over.
And finally, on FairShare, it disappoints many labor activists that Pettengill does not support it, but again, there is a fair amount of diversity among Democrats on this subject. Some have more union shops in their districts than others, and some have different opinions of labor unions than others. Our Democratic State Senator, Tom Reilly, voted against FairShare, and he isn’t leaving the party anytime soon. Again, it’s an issue where some people within the labor movement are doubting policies like this, so it isn’t’ only conservatives who oppose it.
So is it really just the House leadership’s fault that Pettengill is disgruntled, as others have claimed? No. The House leadership is doing its job. Their job is to push a Democratic agenda in the legislature, and they have to keep their members in line whenever they can. They’re getting results, and, unless Pettengill does end up defecting, no one will even remember this story in six months.
There has been quite a hullabaloo about Alberto Gonzalez and the US Justice Dept. of late. If you haven’t heard about it, check here for a good primer. Here in Iowa, we are dealing with a different scandal involving our US Attorney, but David Yepsen thinks it might be connected to the national scandal.
When (gay) Democratic State Senator Matt McCoy was indicted for allegedly using his elected position to “extort” a $2,000 consulting fee from a company he was working for, it made us look pretty bad. But Yepsen digs deeper and actually comes up with something interesting: it turns out that Matt Whitaker, the US Attorney prosecuting McCoy, is a homophobic Republican crony. Quoth Yepsen:
Whitaker is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a socially conservative one who ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 2002 and could well be a candidate for office again.
He recently was in the news when he was scheduled to emcee an event for the Iowa Christian Alliance, a successor group to the Iowa Christian Coalition.
After first granting him permission to host the event, Whitaker said the Justice Department revoked it after objections from liberal groups. Instead, he just attended the meeting.
So he’s a Republican with ties to the Christian Coalition, which is basically the group that controls the Republican Party of Iowa. US Attorneys are, in a sense, political appointees, so that isn’t surprising. But Whittaker’s partisanship is unusual. Continuing:
Active involvement in ideological political action groups like that is rare for U.S. attorneys in Iowa — and even the Justice Department higher-ups seemed to think better of it. For good reason. McCoy is a Democrat. And not just any Democrat but an openly gay one.
So we now have the specter of a politically ambitious, evangelical Republican with ties to the religious right going after a gay Democrat.
Well, good. If anyone wants an example of the politically charged ‘duties’ of a US Attorney in the Bush administration, this should serve well.
I have to admit something right up top: I am a reluctant subscriber to the Atlantic (Monthly). It came free as some credit card rewards program, so I get it. I’m not always proud of it, but whatever.
So when a fellow IowaProgress team member told me that I should check out the March issue for a mention of the local State House race here last year (between Democrat Eric Palmer and ousted Republican Danny Carroll), I was pleased to find it already sitting on my coffee table. Then I started reading it (online version here), and even before I finished the second sentence, I knew I wasn’t going to be happy. Here’s how writer Joshua Green begins:
A tough loss can be hard to swallow, and plenty of defeated politicians have been known to grumble about sinister conspiracies. When they are rising stars like Danny Carroll, the Republican speaker pro tempore of Iowa’s House of Representatives, and the loss is unexpected, the urge to blame unseen forces can be even stronger—and in Carroll’s case, it would have the additional distinction of being justified.
Yes, Danny Carroll was a rising star, victimized by “unseen forces” at work in House District 75. Perhaps had Carroll simply leaned on this leading consulting firm a little more, he would’ve won. But these “unseen forces” at work weren’t ghosts, ghouls, or the powerful anti-pumpkin lobby, it was something of a gay political stealth force (led by this man), out to get good little homophobes like Danny.
Yes, it is true that Eric Palmer got money from out-of-state donors, and perhaps some of them are gay. Some of them are also probably straight. Many out-of-state donors give money to one person hoping that their opponent will lose, and many of them do so on the basis of the different candidates’ political positions. Danny Carroll got money from such donors (although much of it was channeled through Christopher Rants’s PAC), as did Eric Palmer. This is not news.
It seems that even Danny himself didn’t think there was anything to this story at first. In fact, Danny probably had the right idea before the reporter tried to change his interview subject’s mind mid-interview. This paragraph is the kicker:
Carroll was just sitting down to dinner but agreed to talk about his loss, which he attributed to the activism of Grinnell College students. A suggestion that he’d been targeted by a nationwide network of wealthy gay activists was met with polite midwestern skepticism.
Yup, that’s right: Danny’s pretty sure it was us. We’re pretty sure it was us. And the number of college students who voted for Eric Palmer is remarkably close to the number of votes Danny lost by. But Joshua Green still blames the gays. Green convinces Danny to look at the IECDB reports from the 2006 race, and here’s where things go from there:
Scrolling through the thirty-two-page roster of campaign contributors revealed plenty of $25 and $50 donations from nearby towns like Oskaloosa and New Sharon. But a $1,000 donation from California stood out on page 2, and, several pages later, so did another $1,000 from New York City. “I’ll be darned,” said Carroll. “That doesn’t make any sense.” As we kept scrolling, Carroll began reading aloud with mounting disbelief as the evidence passed before his eyes. “Denver … Dallas … Los Angeles … Malibu … there’s New York again … San Francisco! I can’t—I just cannot believe this,” he said, finally. “Who is this guy again?”
Eric Palmer got $1,000 from New York?!?!?! And more donations from Dallas and Denver?!?!?! Shucks! I guess that means Eric won because of the gay agenda then.
Seriously, though, how is this puff piece journalism? People with certain interests donate to political campaigns across the country all the time, on both sides. Not everyone knows why every donor donates, and in many cases the candidates don’t even know what a donor’s agenda might be. It isn’t like Eric had a huge resource advantage over Danny, either. It may be sensational because a few of Palmer’s donors were gay, but it is certainly nothing new.
If this was our 15 minutes of national media fame, I’m going to be very disappointed.
I suppose the “hearts Huckabee” line is going to catch on soon and then become very, very uncool, so I’m sorry about that.
Today, though, Republican Presidential Candidate and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee announced endorsements from Blue Bunny Bob Vanderplaats, best known for losing a statewide election a few months back, and Danny Carroll, former President Pro Tem of the Iowa House representing Grinnell. He lost last November, too.
But more importantly, recall the story we broke last October, detailing how Danny Carroll is implicated in a scandal that made its way to the Iowa Supreme Court and resulted in the suspension of a lawyer’s license to practice. Basically, he helped the lawyer steal over $40,000 (and a free trip to Vegas) from a struggling old lady in Grinnell.
Well, I guess we can always trust Danny Carroll to “stick to his principles,” eh? We can if you believe Mike Huckabee himself:
Danny Carroll earned great respect during 12 years in the General Assembly as a conservative leader who always held true and firm true to his principles yet worked so successfully with people from across the political spectrum to accomplish meaningful results in health care, tax policy, education and economic development. Iowa ’s social conservatives know that Danny Carroll has always been a clear, strong voice on the issues that matter most to them.
It sounds like, not only is Mike Huckabee talking out of the side of his mouth, but Crooked Danny Carroll might be positioning himself to run for something again. We will be watching him.
David Yepsen’s column today makes the argument that Democrats in the state legislature should avoid changing anything to do with Iowa’s right to work law or risk losing control in 2008. He asserts that “Polls show overwhelming support for such worker freedom.”
A few weeks ago, I started getting strange calls on my Blackberry from a number I didn’t recognize. I didn’t answer the first few times the number popped up. Finally, after it was clear that this person wanted to talk to me and would not leave a message, I answered the next call I got, and it turned out to be someone in a call center in Missouri (I think it was Missouri) taking a poll. It was clear from the first question (something to do with protections for “the right to life,” without saying what the “right to life” was) that the poll of Iowa voters was being conducted by some conservative operation.
Question three, word for word, was “Do you support Iowa’s Right To Work Law?”
All of the survey questions were slanted to create a pattern of “Yes” answers (that is, when they wanted someone to say they did not support a particular law, they would ask “Do you disagree with X?” instead of “Do you agree with X?”), and the callers seemed to have been instructed to sound happier when someone answered “Yes” rather than “No.” In a survey like that, of course the vast majority of Iowa voters are going to say “Yes.”
But if you asked them, instead, “Do you think it is important that Iowa workers are able to engage in collective bargaining with their employers?” it seems plausible that an equal number would have said “Yes.” I’m not sure what polls Yepsen has seen on the issue, but I thought at least mentioning how slanted and disingenuous the survey I got was might help get us beyond the discussion of poll numbers.
Chet Culver announced a major initiative yesterday to provide $12.5 million in state funds for embryonic stem cell research. Stem cell research was a major talking point of Chet’s during the campaign and it’s not at all a surprise that he’s following through with it. Although Iowa will still be far behind other states like California, which has allocated up to $3 billion over the next ten years for embryonic stem cell research and our neighbors in Illinois who have allocated $15 million, it’s still a good start. Hopefully, with Democratic majorities in both Houses, legislation to make state funding of embryonic stem cell research legal will breeze through the legislature along with the necessary appropriations.
However, Chet did draw some criticism. Betty DeBoef, the Danny Carroll clone with spelling issues, doesn’t see the need for stem cell research. In fact, she thinks “it’s more about abortion rights than it is about finding cures for people.” This is reassuring to know. I always thought that Michael J. Fox was merely motivated by self interest. Frankly, Betty DeBoef wasn’t much good at smearing Eric Palmer during the election and she’s even worse at trying to attack Chet Culver’s attempt to make sure that the hundreds of thousands of Iowans suffering dieases and ailments ranging from paralysis to Parkinson’s might one day be cured. In fact, maybe stem cell research might even help Betty one day, provided that it could help doctors find a cure for Foot In Mouth Disease.
Election day was over a month ago, but we haven’t posted, because it’s hard to write a summary of something that speaks so well for itself. Across the country, people reacted well to the progressive agenda put forward by Democratic candidates on all levels. Here in Iowa, we won both legislative chambers and Terrace Hill. We held onto Boswell’s Congressional seat and picked up two more (one quite unexpectedly).
All of us here worked very hard, whether it looked that way on this web site or not. I had to stop blogging because of my job with the party, but I wouldn’t have had the time to write even if I had wanted to, and I think the rest of the Grinnell College Campus Democrats felt the same way.
Personally, I want to thank all of the volunteers I dealt with on our campus and in Poweshiek County. The amount of work people were willing to do was at once staggering and inspiring. Locally, we helped Eric Palmer defeat Danny Carroll for State Representative and helped elect an all-Democratic County Board of Supervisors. Even though it was stressful and trying and kind of sucky at times for all of us, winning the way we did makes everything worth it.
I remember in the weeks after election day, cable news heads and columnists talked about whether the election was more an acceptance of the Democratic agenda or a rejection of the Republican one. For some reason, conventional wisdom seems to claim that it was more the latter than the former, but I’m skeptical.
When I went door-to-door as a canvasser or dealt with folks in our office, I sensed a renewed interest in Democratic positions. Maybe we did a better job of communicating our agenda this election, but I think a lot of it was just that people were more interested in hearing what we had to say. People finally decided that they’d had enough, and they changed their minds.
And, I cannot emphasize this enough, WE WON. Look for more blogging from us here, as more of us finish recouperating and gloating and decide to start writing again.
