Lost Opportunities and the Iowa Democratic Party
And 799 votes...
Dining area at Liberty High School, North Liberty, Iowa.
On May 4 of this year, the Iowa Democratic Party held its First District Convention at Liberty High School in North Liberty.
I arrived early because I always do, and a few people were there preparing for the event. My reaction upon entering the beautiful high school building surprised me.
I was sick at heart at the wrongness of it all.
As I looked around I wondered why the Liberty public school system had state-of-the-art facilities while kids I knew at home were going to public schools that had been built when I was in elementary school 60 years ago and still had no air conditioning.
The Liberty school district kids were in a palace. Some of our kids in rural Iowa are in buildings near condemnation.
The mansions in the cafeteria windows above were the answer as to why. Wealth.
That Iowa’s public school funding system is such that kids in poorer communities often have much worse educational facilities is a problem—and a lost opportunity for equal access to education.
At the event, I spoke to a man who is a substitute teacher at several schools in Johnson County, and he shared that the inequities are great across schools even within the county.
More lost opportunities.
While the city mouse Democrats were comfortable in Liberty High School, this country mouse thought the symbolism inherent in the setting didn’t reflect the party that purports to be the party of the working class.
We didn’t need to be in North Liberty. The photo above illustrates that any high school auditorium would work. Sure, North Liberty is convenient for Johnson County Dems, but we need to be holding our meetings somewhere else. Perhaps in one of the Mississippi River cities that have been crushed by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Or show the people of, say, Sigourney, Newton, or Oskaloosa that we care about rural places. Perhaps some visiting dems will get hotel rooms, go out to eat, have catering for the event be local, and stimulate the economy. Locals in small towns will notice.
Another lost opportunity.
The Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, Rita Hart, sang the national anthem. It was beautiful. But as she sang I kept thinking of how much better it would be if a young person had been given a chance to sing. Even a choir. A band to play, whatever—and to pay them. Young people who would have brought other young people with them as well as their families. These young people would have seen that the Democratic Party of Iowa cared about them and offered them opportunities. We could have been planting seeds that might grow for generations.
Another lost opportunity.
The people on the stage in North Liberty in the photo above are about to make their pitches as to why they should be delegates to the National Convention. I was impressed that there were several young people with diverse backgrounds who wanted to learn more and be part of the process and change the world. Impressed probably isn’t the right word. I was thrilled. Young people attract more young people and bring fresh ideas. The future is theirs.
I have nothing against old people. I am one. But I was disappointed in all of the older people wanting to go to the national convention who, if selected, would mean a younger person would be denied the opportunity.
One older woman stood up and said something like, “I’ve been a delegate to many national conventions and experience matters so pick me.”
She has apparently forgotten that many years ago an older person stepped aside to give her younger self a chance to be a delegate.
More lost opportunities.
In 2022 a young man from rural Iowa with a military background liked some Republican ideas and some Democratic ones. He thought he would run as a Republican for a House seat and change the party from within.
He told me that when he went to the Republicans, they told him what resources and training they would provide. It sounded fantastic to him. He just had to agree to support the Republican platform. He was excited, but when he told them that he couldn’t support everything in the platform, they told him they couldn’t support him as a candidate.
He told me that when he later went to the Democrats, they told him “good luck”. No mention of support, or training. And later, he told me they were honest. He was provided little if anything. He lost.
Rural Democratic candidates I’ve talked to this year told me they received little or no support while their Republican opponents did. They started their campaigns with great ideas and energy. It was wonderful to listen and talk with them. But it didn’t last long. They didn’t get the support from the party they had hoped for. And they were fantastic candidates. When the Democratic party and the media made a big deal about the seven “spotlight” candidates and the support they would get from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, it was like a punch in the gut to some of them. That they didn’t matter. That only seven Democratic candidates mattered. The announcement and the publicity was tone-deaf.
Democratic leadership and their consultants didn’t fully get behind Deidre DeJear when she ran for governor in 2022. I wrote an over-the-top column about it for the Des Moines Register that drew some attention.
After the 2022 election, one losing candidate told me that she never got a “thank you” from the party, and no one was interested in what she had learned during her campaign, which was a lot. It appears that once these promising Democrats lose, they are tossed to the wind. It seems that Republicans don’t do that. They often invest in and nurture those they believe to be good candidates and bring them back after losses.
At a dinner party around Thanksgiving this year, one Democratic candidate who won and one who lost told me the marketing materials they received from what I presumed to be from somewhere in the labyrinth of the national party and their Beltway consultants were trash.
This isn’t valuable support and team building. As I see it, Republicans are doing it and Democrats aren’t.
More missed opportunities.
I recently watched via ZOOM an in-person meeting where Legislative Democratic leadership told local progressive groups who have boots on the ground working for change every day what the Democratic priorities are going to be in the 2025 legislative session. They shouldn’t have been telling these groups what they were going to be doing. They should have been asking them what to do and learning.
A respected academic friend who pays close attention to Iowa politics told me at lunch the other day:
The Iowa Democratic Party should be dissolved and replaced with a labor-forward party under completely new leadership. No one who’s been involved with the degradation and depletion of the IDP should be allowed anywhere near the successor party.
More lost opportunities. The Democratic Party needs to be built from the bottom up, not the top down.
Laura Belin reminds me that it’s easy to point fingers and blame Iowa party leadership, but to remember that the trends against Democrats are nationwide and that Tom Harkin and Tom Vilsack couldn’t be elected in Iowa today. Find Laura’s work here and here.
One Democratic legislator tells me that normally Iowa Democrats send out approximately 250,000 absentee ballot request forms and this year only 40,000 were sent.
While Republicans were “banking the vote” Democrats backed off.
The legislator tells me that because of changes Republicans made in election law, Democratic leadership decided that instead of mailing out 250,000 absentee ballot requests they were only going to mail requests to “voters with a very strong history of voting by mail.” That was apparently only 40,000 voters.
One would think that party leadership wouldn’t have forgotten that Rita Hart lost to Mariannette Miller-Meeks by only six votes in 2020.
Turns out the first batch of request forms went out with insufficient postage and had to be resent. To me, that’s an error, and they happen. But it was certainly confusing and frustrating to potential voters.
While the legislator told me the “rationale,” I’m waiting for a response from on high. On Monday, December 9, I emailed party leadership asking them why they didn’t send out 250k absentee ballot requests.
On Wednesday, December 11, I sent the following message to leadership as a gentle reminder that I really wanted an answer:
I would very much appreciate a response to my Monday email. I most likely will be posting a story mentioning it in the next week or so and would respectfully like to include your response.
Crickets.
As a reminder, I just wrote above: normally Iowa Democrats send out approximately 250,000 absentee ballot request forms and this year only 40,000 were sent out.
According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s website, in the District 1 U.S. House race Democrat Christina Bohannan lost to incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks by only 799 votes.
Sending out only 40,000 instead of 250,000 absentee ballots is a missed opportunity of historic proportions.
799 votes.
According to Pew Research:
Republicans will kick off the 119th Congress with a five-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives – the smallest margin of control in modern history. Their grip could become even more tenuous as three Republican seats are expected to be vacant in early 2025 until special elections are held.
Imagine how much better off Iowa and our nation would be if Democrat Christina Bohannan were in the U.S. House of Representatives instead of Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks.
A missed opportunity of historic proportions amid countless others.
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I'm curious what Republicans say about those failing rural schools. Surely some of them have kids who are affected? I suppose some of them might see homeschool as the answer or default to family responsibility. But surroundings are an expression of expectations, and when kids grow up in a crumbling building, they know not much is expected of them. The lack of interest and investment in candidates is telling. I guess chickens are coming home to roost.
This discussion reminds me of the decades of gridlock between industry and environmental activists in the West. Environmentalists mostly come from places like North Liberty. They are often just as wealthy as the barons they oppose. But really working people in rural areas are forced to choose between two oppressors. One gives them a paycheck and some pride (even if also exploiting them). The other offers guilt and unemployment -- nothing of value that they can see.
Ditto to Pat Shipley’s reply. The latest episode in the Dems “keep the old guard in” saga is having the election for the Iowa Democratic Party Chair on January 4th giving no one a chance to run against the current Chair. The Rural constituency caucus of the IDP whose has youth at its leadership has been working hard to let folks know the unfair situation and calling the party to task.
I too am of the older group of Dems who demand the old guard step aside and support new leadership and new ideas.
The current IDP leadership needs to realize that the strategy of the last 40 or more years hasn’t worked. I am disappointed as others are with the lack of understanding of the current situation.
There are people within the party that have held back progress - money and decision making behind closed doors has not helped.
Your examples are right on - there have been many missed opportunities.