He should have quit while he was behind, but Mitt Romney stepped in it again this week during a conference call with major Republican donors.

Senator Tom Harkin and several other Congressional Democrats spoke out today against cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits as part of any broad deficit-reduction agreement.

After another disappointing election cycle, Iowa Senate Republicans chose Bill Dix to be the new leader of their caucus yesterday.

Democratic candidate John Beard will ask for a recount in Iowa Senate district 28, where he trails Republican Mike Breitbach by 36 votes after the official canvass this week.

Senator Tom Harkin has recommended federal public defender Jane Kelly and Iowa Court of Appeals Judge Mary Tabor to President Barack Obama as he considers a successor to Judge Michael Melloy on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Melloy plans to retire, effective January 30.

Background on Kelly and Tabor are after the jump. Harkin also included Tabor on the short list of candidates to fill the last vacancy on the federal bench from Iowa. Obama nominated Stephanie Rose for that judgeship in the Southern District. Rose formally began her service yesterday.

The Polk County supervisors canvassed election results from Iowa House district 43 today and found Republican incumbent Chris Hagenow leading Susan Judkins by 22 votes: 8,741 to 8,719 with 17 write-ins. Judkins has until 5 pm on Monday, November 19 to request a recount. She would be crazy not to do so, in my opinion. Although recounts have rarely changed the outcome in Iowa legislative races, optical scanner machines do make mistakes when reading ballots, and Judkins trails by approximately 0.1 percent of all votes cast.

Iowa House Republicans are confident that Hagenow’s lead will hold–so confident that they elected Hagenow House majority whip today. He replaces Erik Helland, who was defeated in this year’s GOP primary to represent Iowa House district 39. The rest of the House leadership team includes Speaker Kraig Paulsen, Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer, Speaker Pro Tem Steve Olson, and assistant majority leaders Walt Rogers, Jeff Smith, Matt Windschitl, and Joel Fry. Republicans will have a 53-47 majority if Hagenow wins, and a 52-48 majority if a recount shows Judkins the winner.

Incidentally, the number of residents who voted for one of the candidates in House district 43 this year was substantially higher than the votes cast for Hagenow or his Democratic opponent in 2008. That year Hagenow defeated Jerry Sullivan in the old House district 59 by 8,240 votes to 8,147.

Former U.S. Attorney Stephanie Rose was sworn in yesterday as a federal judge. She is the youngest federal judge currently serving as well as the first woman on the bench in the Southern District of Iowa. The Senate confirmed Rose in September by 89 votes to 1.

In remarks prepared for Rose’s investiture, Senator Tom Harkin predicted her “legal skills and knowledge” and “great sense of justice and fairness” would make her a “superb judge.” He recommended Rose for U.S. attorney and later put her on the short list for the federal judgeship.

I was struck by Harkin’s comments about the retired Judge Robert Pratt, whom Rose replaces. I enclose those comments below, along with links on some of Pratt’s most influential decisions.

Catching up on some news from last week, Iowa House Speaker Kraig Paulsen hired Carmine Boal to be chief clerk in the Iowa House. She replaces Charlie Smithson, who will be the new legal counsel for Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz.

Public Policy Polling’s last Iowa survey before the general election suggests that both Governor Terry Branstad and Senator Tom Harkin are favored looking ahead to possible re-election campaigns in 2014.  

Republican State Senator Bill Dix will chair the Iowa branch of Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles’ new nationwide “Campaign to Fix the Debt.”  

Days after winning a sixth term in the U.S. House, Representative Steve King is ready to battle fellow Republicans in the House and Senate who are ready to deal on comprehensive immigration reform. He also confirmed that he will follow through on a lawsuit challenging President Barack Obama’s executive order to block deportations of some undocumented immigrants, who were brought to this country as children.

Longtime Pottawattamie County Auditor Marilyn Jo Drake disclosed last week that an unknown group attempted “voter caging” in her county for the first time ever, to her knowledge.

Now that we’ve all had a few days to take in the election results, candidates and political activists in both parties can reflect on how our time and money could have been better spent during the campaign. After the jump I’ve posted links about Republican and Democratic regrets.

This is an open thread: all topics welcome.

What surprised you most about the 2012 general election results? Please share your thoughts in this thread. My top five surprises are below.

Iowa conservative talk radio host Steve Deace blames Mitt Romney for how residents of Maine, Maryland, Washington, and Minnesota just voted on marriage equality.

He [Romney] killed us all over the country. Look at [same-sex] marriage. We’ve never lost the issue before, until it shared a ballot with Romney then we lost it four times on one day. Heck, we even won marriage in California on Election Day 2008 for goodness sake.

Someone never learned the difference between correlation and causation. For the last decade, opinion polls across the country have shown steady gains in support for same-sex marriage rights. The window for conservatives to pass more discriminatory ballot initiatives is closing fast.

Six years ago, Wisconsin voters in all but one county approved a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual couples. This year, Wisconsin voters elected an out lesbian to the U.S. Senate. Romney’s fault?

West Des Moines City Council member Charles Schneider will face Democrat Desmund Adams in the December 11 special election to fill Iowa Senate district 22. Six Republicans sought the nomination at a special district convention last night: Schneider, former West Des Moines School Board president John Ward (the widower of Senator Pat Ward), Clive Mayor Scott Cirksena, longtime GOP activist Connie Schmett, high school teacher Greg Hudson, and former Waukee City Council member Isaiah McGee, who now works for the Iowa Department of Education. About 60 Republican delegates from the district elected Schneider on the second ballot using a convoluted procedure for allocating votes to each candidate. McGee placed second, Ward third.

Senate district 22 covers the Des Moines suburbs of Clive, Windsor Heights, Waukee, and parts of West Des Moines. The latest figures from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office indicate that 12,633 registered Democrats, 17,184 Republicans, and 15,097 no-party voters live in the district. Those totals do not include any voters who registered on election day.

It’s never too early to start speculating about the next Iowa caucuses.  

Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins kept his job Tuesday by a surprisingly large margin of 670,013 votes to 556,782. The percentage of yes and no votes on Wiggins (54.61 percent to 45.39 percent) was a mirror image of the 2010 votes on Chief Justice Marsha Ternus (55 percent no), Justice Michael Streit (54.4 percent no), and Justice David Baker (54.2 percent no). Whereas only ten of Iowa’s 99 counties voted to retain three Supreme Court justices in 2010, 36 counties recorded more “yes” than “no” votes this year.

Maps are after the jump, along with some clips on the retention vote. I also list which pro-retention counties produced a plurality of votes for President Barack Obama, which “yes” counties went for Mitt Romney, and which “no Wiggins” counties went for Obama.

Americans elected record numbers of women to Congress on Tuesday. Beginning in January, 20 women will serve in the U.S. Senate, and 78 women will serve in the U.S. House. During the past two years, seventeen U.S. senators and 73 U.S. representatives were women.

Although Iowans continued our streak of not sending women to Congress, we did elect some new women to the state legislature, producing a slight gain in the total number of female lawmakers.  

Preliminary results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s website show that President Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in Iowa by 807,146 votes to 720,323 (51.89 percent to 46.31 percent) amid record participation of 1,555,570 voters statewide.

As expected, the president won a plurality of the vote in fewer Iowa counties this year than in 2008, but he did pick up one county that was a big surprise for me. Some thoughts about the presidential vote in Iowa are after the jump, along with maps showing which counties Obama, Romney, and John McCain carried. You can find vote totals for every county on the Iowa Secretary of State’s website.