Without having seen any recent internal polling of the six-way GOP primary in Iowa’s third Congressional district, I nevertheless feel confident in predicting that no candidate will gain the 35 percent of the vote needed to win the primary outright on June 3. All of the campaigns had better be prepared to take their case to a district nominating convention. Here’s why.  

State Senator Brad Zaun won the seven-way 2010 primary for the GOP nomination in IA-03, but that was a very different race. Only three of the pack were running real district-wide campaigns: Zaun, former Iowa State wrestling star Jim Gibbons (favored by some big-money donors and parts of the GOP establishment), and Polk County activist Dave Funk, who raised little money but had strong support among tea party activists.

Zaun won the 2010 primary with about 40 percent of the vote, to roughly 28 percent for Gibbons and just under 20 percent for Dave Funk. But the county-level returns (pdf) tell the most important story: all of Zaun’s winning margin came from Polk County, where he dominated the competition and won nearly half of all votes cast.

No candidate is in a position to dominate Polk County this year. Robert Cramer, Monte Shaw, Matt Schultz, and David Young have all raised more money for this campaign than Zaun has. Those four candidates have been running television commercials for weeks, and all four have a yard sign presence at least equal to Zaun’s in Des Moines and the suburbs, from what I’ve seen. Even though Joe Grandanette is a marginal candidate, with little money raised or campaign presence, he should scare up a few votes in Des Moines, where he has long been a teacher and business owner.

I have predicted that recent scandals would cook Schultz’s goose, but some conservative groups are sticking with him. Freedom Works backed Schultz in January and is now sending e-mails and running online ads in support of Schultz. The Tea Party Express just endorsed him earlier this month.

Roughly half of all the registered Republicans in IA-03 live in Polk County. (As of May 1, 79,359 active Republicans live in Polk County, compared to 160,230 across the whole Congressional district.) So if no one finishes way ahead of the pack in Polk County, it’s hard to see any candidate winning the other counties by a large enough margin to win 35 percent across the district. No doubt Schultz is counting on a huge margin in Pottawattamie County, where he used to serve on the Council Bluffs City Council. But longtime GOP activist Shaw has plenty of connections in Pottawattamie too, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Cramer does as well, thanks to the network of Bob Vander Plaats’ FAMiLY Leader organization.

Mathematically, I can’t see how any candidate will surge to win more than 35 percent of the vote in this field.

What happens at a post-primary third district convention is anyone’s guess. Right now I would guess the nomination will go to Shaw; I’ll flesh out that argument in a future post.

Any comments about the race in IA-03 are welcome in this thread.