Since late September, Iowa State University President Steven Leath has repeatedly asserted that his use of ISU’s two airplanes was consistent with university policies.

Multiple audits and perhaps a criminal investigation will shed light on whether Leath violated ISU policy (and state law) on personal use of university property. Questionable flights include several unexplained trips to the city where the Mayo Clinic is located, stops at a New York airport to pick up and drop off Leath’s relatives, a trip to Kansas City after ISU had been eliminated from the Big 12 basketball tournament, and numerous visits to the town where Leath owns a home. On one of those trips, ISU’s plane was on the ground in North Carolina for only 37 minutes before returning to Ames.

Whatever conclusion investigators reach regarding Leath’s use of the airplanes, one fact is clear: the president has not complied with university policy on transporting weapons when using ISU’s Flight Service for various hunting trips.

Thanks to the Rev. Cheryl R. Thomas for sharing her thoughts. -promoted by desmoinesdem

I hold three beloved values that have been put into conflict with each other in recent days.

Although the Republican takeover of the Iowa Senate was a bigger headline, the November 8 results were also devastating for Iowa House Democrats. Going into this campaign down 57 seats to 43, Democrats had realistic hopes of winning back the House majority, thanks to a half-dozen Republican retirements in the eastern half of the state, where Democrats have done well the last two presidential election years. With fewer open seats on the ballot in 2012, Democrats had a net gain of seven Iowa House seats and fell just a hair short in several other districts.

By October, an eight-seat gain looked out of reach, as Donald Trump had built a lead in state polling, and GOP candidates were outspending Democrats in most of the contested districts. Still, early vote totals looked promising for Democrats in some key legislative races shortly before election day. However, on Tuesday Democrats lost every race against a House Republican incumbent and every race in a GOP-held open House district. State Representative Patti Ruff was the only incumbent in the lower chamber to lose. The party lost one Democratic-held open House district as well, giving the GOP a net gain of two seats and a 59-41 majority for the next two years.

Despite the disappointing election, House Democrats re-elected Mark Smith as minority leader in Des Moines on Saturday. His four assistant minority leaders will be Bruce Bearinger, Liz Bennett, Brian Meyer, and Helen Miller. I was surprised to see Meyer’s name on the list, because one of the worst-kept secrets in Iowa Democratic circles is that he and Smith don’t get along. (Meyer was not a ranking member on any House committee during the last legislature.) All power to those who can put past grievances aside. The caucus can’t afford to be divided during what will likely be a distressing two years at the statehouse.

Not mentioned in the press release I enclose below: Miller challenged Smith for the leadership position, according to sources close to the legislature. I don’t have details on the vote count. Miller and Smith were both elected for the first time in 2002, Bearinger in 2012, Meyer in a 2013 special election, and Bennett in 2014.

None of the assistant minority leaders during the last legislative session (Ako Abdul-Samad, Mary Gaskill, Sharon Steckman, and Todd Prichard) are on the incoming leadership team. Abdul-Samad and Gaskill have had some health issues this past year. I don’t know whether Steckman and Prichard wanted to continue serving as assistant minority leaders.

All but one of the 29 Republicans who will serve in the Iowa Senate for the next two years elected their leaders on Friday, changing little from the group that led the minority caucus during the last legislative session.

Bill Dix moves from Senate minority leader to majority leader.

Jack Whitver moves from minority whip to Senate president.

Jerry Behn, who preceded Dix as minority leader but hasn’t been in leadership since 2012, will become Senate president pro tem. He’s the longest-serving current Republican senator.

My own state senator, Charles Schneider, moves from an assistant minority leader position to majority whip.

Dan Zumbach and Randy Feenstra will be assistant majority leaders, having been assistant minority leaders during the last legislative session. The other two assistant majority leaders are new to leadership: Michael Breitbach and Amy Sinclair, the only woman in the 29-member incoming GOP caucus.

After the caucus meeting, Dix spoke only in general terms about the new majority’s plans.

A frightening look at how a changed Supreme Court might strip LGBT Americans of marriage rights. You can find previous writing by Bill from White Plains here. -promoted by desmoinesdem

If there is one group whose rights may be most immediately at risk following the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States, it isn’t refugees, or Muslims, or Mexicans, or women. It is those who are wed to their gay partners. The reason for that has a lot to do with a really poorly written and poorly reasoned United States Supreme Court ruling finding restrictions on marriage to those of different genders unconstitutional.

The ruling, Obergefell v. Hodges, does a couple of really bad injustices to gay married couples.

Unofficial results from Tuesday’s election show Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson received 58,796 votes in Iowa, about 3.8 percent of ballots cast.

Before this year, the most successful Libertarian ticket in Iowa gained 1 percent of the vote, way back in 1980. Although Johnson wasn’t able to maintain his much higher polling numbers from the late summer, he more than quadrupled his 2012 raw vote total and share of the vote here.

The result gives the Libertarian Party full “political party status” in Iowa. What does that mean in practical terms?

Like many politically active teenagers, I was excited to be old enough to vote for the first time, in 1988. I’d volunteered and caucused for Paul Simon earlier in the year, but I had no trouble coming around to support our party’s nominee, Michael Dukakis. I was fortunate to attend part of the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where most people were confident we were going to win back the White House. By the time I filled out my absentee ballot in the fall, I was worried, because a disastrous debate moment and a brutal attack ad from George H.W. Bush’s campaign had turned things around.

Indeed, Dukakis was wiped out, gaining 7 million fewer votes and losing the electoral college 426 to 111.

As a college student on the east coast for most of Bush’s presidency, I felt proud that Iowa had been among the ten states to reject him. In fact, my favorite comeback to rude comments about “flyover country” was, “As least we voted for Dukakis.” It was more than people from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, Illinois, or even California could say.

This week I looked up the Iowa returns from 1988 and realized that Dukakis carried this state much more convincingly than I remembered: 670,557 votes to 545,355 (54.7 percent to 44.5 percent). Dukakis outpolled Bush here by roughly as large a margin as Donald Trump’s advantage over Hillary Clinton this week.

When I looked at the county map of results, I was stunned to see that Dukakis carried 75 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Bush carried only 24.

For many election cycles, either Senator Tom Harkin or the Democratic governor of Iowa would choose the Iowa Democratic Party chair, and the State Central Committee would rubber-stamp that decision. But in January 2015, the state party had its first competitive leadership election since I’ve been following Iowa politics. Andy McGuire edged out Kurt Meyer on the third ballot, largely because of strong support from establishment figures.

Iowa Democrats were trounced up and down the ballot on Tuesday. In my lifetime, we’ve never been beaten so badly in a presidential year. When President Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by nearly 100,000 votes here in 1984, Democrats held on to their majorities in both legislative chambers, and Harkin beat incumbent U.S. Senator Roger Jepsen. This week, the party lost six Senate seats, mostly by large margins, and lost ground in the state House.

State Central Committee members will choose a new party leader in December January. At least seven people are either running or seriously thinking about seeking the position. UPDATE: Added a few more names below.

Representative Steve King would consider leaving Congress if offered the right job in Donald Trump’s administration, O.Kay Henderson reported yesterday for Radio Iowa.

When I planned to feature these wildflowers the day after the presidential election, I was hoping the country–if not Iowa–would have something to celebrate today. Prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) is a spectacular plant and seemed fitting for the occasion of Americans electing the first woman president.

I stuck with the plan because beautiful things will continue to exist, even after a narcissist with ugly impulses becomes the world’s most powerful man.

Prairie blazing star is native to a bunch of states that voted for Donald Trump yesterday and a few that voted for Hillary Clinton.

The non-partisan organization 50/50 in 2020 has set a goal of electing 25 women to the Iowa Senate and 50 women to the Iowa House by 2020. Yesterday’s elections will bring a lot of new voices to the state capital. However, chambers that were already less diverse than most other state legislatures will become even less representative of the state’s population.

LATE UPDATE: The new Iowa House will in fact have one more female member than the chamber did in 2015 and 2016, following Monica Kurth’s victory in the special election to represent House district 89.

I expected to be writing a different post today, about Iowa being out of step with other swing states and ending up on the “wrong” side of a national landslide. Everyone saw it coming, even people inside the Republican National Committee and Donald Trump’s “inner circle.” Instead, Trump outperformed his polling numbers across the board, winning many states Barack Obama carried twice. On the strength of white voters, he picked up states that hadn’t voted for a Republican president since Ronald Reagan. Along the way, he won Iowa by a larger margin than any presidential candidate has done since 1984.

The national and global consequences of a Trump presidency are too numerous to list here. For a start, we’re headed for a recession, worsened when the Republican-controlled Congress enacts the Kansas formula of tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everyone else. Millions of Americans will lose their health care. Some will die prematurely as a result, while others will will “only” become uninsurable and one medical problem away from financial ruin. Congress will dismantle safety net programs, block grant Medicaid and Medicare, and maybe hand Social Security over to Wall Street. All government efforts to combat climate change will cease, replaced by policies that increase greenhouse gas emissions. If the Environmental Protection Agency survives, it will lose any ability to enforce pollution regulations. Other federal agencies won’t enforce anti-discrimination laws or labor standards. A conservative Supreme Court will spend a generation expanding corporate power and rolling back civil rights and reproductive rights. A narcissist drawn to revenge fantasies will have the power to sic the Justice Department and FBI on his enemies. A man with no impulse control or foreign policy experience will be commander in chief, and his possible connections to the Russian government are still unknown.

The Iowa results were far worse than the worst-case scenarios Democrats imagined.

Polls just closed in Iowa. Considered a heavy favorite to win the electoral college, Hillary Clinton is in serious danger of losing the presidency. Results from swing states to the east suggest that Donald Trump is outperforming Mitt Romney in heavily white working-class and rural areas. That doesn’t bode well for our state, even if early vote numbers suggested Clinton might have a chance.

Most of the battleground state House and Senate districts are overwhelmingly white. Republicans have been able to outspend Democrats in almost all of the targeted races. We could be looking at a GOP trifecta in Iowa for the first time since 1998.

I’ll be updating this post regularly as Iowa results come in. The Secretary of State will post results here.

No surprise: the U.S. Senate race was called for Chuck Grassley immediately. He led all the late opinion polls by comfortable double-digit margins.

The rest of the updates are after the jump.

Every Iowan’s vote counts the same in determining whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will win our state’s six electoral votes.

I’ll be watching the returns from some of our 99 counties more closely than others.

Most election forecasters see Iowa likely to go to Donald Trump, based on the preponderance of opinion polls taken here in the past month.

However, Michael McDonald, who closely tracks early voting for the U.S. Elections Project, concluded that Iowa leans to Hillary Clinton, based on the ballots cast before election day.

How can that be, given that the current Democratic lead in ballots returned to county auditors is significantly smaller than what President Barack Obama carried into election day 2012?

Pop quiz: Who is best positioned to investigate a possible violation of Iowa law by a state university president?

A. The top prosecutor in the county where the university is located

B. Officials in the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation

C. Attorneys in the Iowa Attorney General’s Office

D. A guy who reports to a guy who reports to the university president

If you picked “D,” you have something in common with Story County Attorney Jessica Reynolds.

Some Iowa statehouse Republicans are more extreme, more ignorant, more unhinged, more dishonest, or more mean-spirited than Peter Cownie.

But few lawmakers make less effort than Cownie to demonstrate that they deserve to be in a position of power.

A television commercial in heavy rotation on Des Moines stations doesn’t name even one legislative accomplishment from Cownie’s eight years in the Iowa House, including two years leading the State Government Committee and two as Commerce Committee chair. Cownie has rarely if ever knocked doors to talk to his constituents in West Des Moines. He doesn’t show up at many local public forums. He doesn’t consistently answer e-mails. He doesn’t follow through on some of his promises.

Recent campaign disclosure forms show the Iowa GOP has spent more than $300,000 on tv ads promoting Cownie or trashing his Democratic challenger, my friend Claire Celsi. Tens of thousands more went toward direct mail to benefit Cownie’s campaign.

Why did Republicans hit the panic button?

Tanya Keith has volunteered for many Democratic campaigns in Des Moines and was a precinct captain for Barack Obama before the 2008 Iowa caucuses. -promoted by desmoinesdem

We’re into the last two days of this campaign and as Hillary released her “Story of the Campaign” video, I began to think about my journey through this campaign. The lead up to the Iowa Caucus was a turning point in my life. My third and likely final child, a daughter, was born in April of 2015, just as my oldest was becoming a teenager. I realized that this was the last Presidential election that my oldest will not vote in, and I decided to push myself to show her how to engage in politics, even through the fog of early motherhood. My first venture on this mission was a trip to Newton, Iowa when the baby was 12 weeks old.

When my first was born, I was starting my own company, and with my second my company was going strong and I barely took any time off. My third born gave me the opportunity to indulge in staying home with her without the immediate pressure of working. Reaching 12 weeks, when American families who qualify for FMLA must return to work after unpaid leave was taking an emotional toll on me. My daughter was still so small, and I felt a personal responsibility to take advantage of the Iowa Caucus stage to shine a light on the absurdity of United States being the only industrialized nation to not offer paid family leave.

As Clinton wrapped up her speech and began taking questions, I stood up with my baby girl in my arms.

The Republican Party has spent more than $400,000 defending Iowa House Majority Leader Chris Hagenow’s seat in the Des Moines suburbs, which he held by only 23 votes in the last presidential election cycle. Most of the money has bought television commercials, beginning six weeks ago and continuing in heavy rotation to the end.

Hagenow led with a ludicrous spot portraying himself as some kind of champion for education funding and the preschool program he voted to eliminate. He moved to a deceptive hit piece against Democratic challenger Jennifer Konfrst, followed by an ad touting his role in making EpiPens more widely available for kids. A second negative spot was a narrowly-focused attack on a tax lien Konfrst resolved many years ago–the height of hypocrisy, since Republican leaders were simultaneously funding the campaign of a House candidate with a much larger, still unpaid federal tax liability. In the last few days, local television stations have been running Hagenow’s initial positive ad, which misrepresents his record on education funding.

Hagenow is running scared, for good reason.

Dan Charleston’s second campaign to become chief law enforcement officer in Iowa’s largest county hasn’t received enough attention. Thanks to guest author Siouxsie for giving the Republican the scrutiny he deserves. -promoted by desmoinesdem

Dan Charleston is running for Polk County Sheriff. He’s getting a lot of support because of his popular “no speed cameras” platform. He’s also publicly stated that he’d remove Des Moines’s status as a “Sanctuary City,” fight the rampant gang infestation in our city, and be the “Constitutional Sheriff” this county needs. Recently he’s been chiming in with a call to “Drain the Swamp”, the slogan for the Trump campaign’s last minute effort to try to find an issue that doesn’t turn the stomach of more moderate voters.

There are some problems with these positions.