“My name is Noah Wasserman. I made a mistake that impacted your lives.”
A year after Theresa Greenfield failed to qualify for the Democratic primary ballot in Iowa’s third Congressional district, her former campaign manager apologized in an unprecedented full-page advertisement in the Sunday Des Moines Register.
Wasserman’s account of how he derailed a promising candidacy conveys valuable lessons not only for people working in politics, but for anyone who feels overwhelmed by tasks at hand.
An Iowa dark money group that popped up before the June 2018 primary has refused to comply with the Federal Election Commission’s request to disclose the names of its donors.
While traffic numbers are easy to measure, picking out my most labor-intensive posts from last year is a subjective call.
Twelfth in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2018 state and federal elections.
One of the hottest debates in Democratic activist circles relates to strategy for winning statewide and national elections. Does the party need to fix a base turnout problem by nominating contenders who will inspire passionate support among progressives? Or is the more urgent task appealing to voters who used to back Democrats, but lately have favored Republican candidates?
This post doesn’t claim to settle that argument, but searches for clues in the results and turnout rates from key Iowa counties where Fred Hubbell underperformed in his bid to unseat Governor Kim Reynolds.
Eleventh in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2018 state and federal elections.
David Wasserman, U.S. House editor for the Cook Political Report, planted the seed for this post when he observed last month,
If you’d told me before the election that Rs would win an average of 83% of Trump’s ’16 votes in contested House races, I would’ve told you they were probably on track to keep their majority.
But Dems are averaging 93% of Clinton’s totals & are on track for a 40-seat rout.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 21, 2018
Iowans Abby Finkenauer (IA-01) and Cindy Axne (IA-03) delivered two of those newly-Democratic House seats. I wondered: how did they and their opponents perform compared to their party’s last presidential nominee?
Tenth in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2018 state and federal elections.
Abby Finkenauer’s triumph over two-term U.S. Representative Rod Blum in the first Congressional district was one of this year’s most satisfying wins for Iowa Democrats.
The outcome wasn’t unexpected; leading forecasters saw IA-01 as a “lean Democratic” district for two months. Even so, the pick-up was hardly a given. Iowans tend to re-elect incumbents. Some of the 20 counties in IA-01 experienced the state’s biggest swings toward Republicans in 2016, and Blum ran about 5 points better than Donald Trump did in his district. Last month, Blum and his allies had claimed the incumbent was gaining on Finkenauer in internal polling.
But Blum’s campaign strategy–an aggressive mix of race-baiting television commercials, taxpayer-funded mailings that resembled electioneering, and Trump-like petty shots at journalists–couldn’t deliver the goods. Finkenauer received 170,342 votes to 153,442 for the incumbent (51.0 percent to 45.9 percent), according to official results.
Let’s take a closer look at how the second-youngest woman ever elected to Congress (after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York) assembled that margin of victory.
