Dubuque businessman Rod Blum will formally announce today that he is seeking the Republican nomination in the first Congressional district. Blum considered running against Democrat Bruce Braley during the last election cycle, and I suspect he would have had a much better chance of winning the primary and general elections in 2010.

Blum is chairman and CEO of the Digital Canal company, which sells software primarily to contractors, homebuilders, remodelers, and structural engineers. He was raised and educated in Dubuque and has worked for different companies in the area for his entire career. Blum chaired the Dubuque County Republican Party in the mid-1990s and has written occasional opinion columns for the Dubuque Telegraph Herald since 2002.

I sought comment on whether the Telegraph Herald would continue to publish regular commentaries by Blum now that he is a candidate for Congress. Executive Editor Brian Cooper responded that “we won’t run his portion of the monthly Double Take feature during his campaign.” Blum’s final column as the conservative “Double Take” voice will run on Sunday, November 6.

In a video posted on the Telegraph Herald’s website on October 21, Blum said he was running for Congress because he believes “we have lost our way as a country” and forgotten principles like “hard work, personal responsibility, accountability, fiscal sanity, things like that.” He claimed that polls show 80 percent of Americans do not believe their children will live better than they do. Blum also used a standard conservative talking point about how most Iowans don’t spend more from their family budget than they bring in, a message that “for some reason is falling on deaf ears” in Washington. Blum has used the same analogy in his opinion columns.

The truth is that many individuals and families take on substantial long-term debt in the form of a mortgage, car loan, or student loan. Blum also ignores the fact that the federal government’s budget plays a different role in the economy than a family’s budget. And if you believe as Blum does that government should be run like a business, you need to acknowledge Dean Baker’s point that businesses borrow money all the time, and “a corporate board would think a CEO was out of his mind if he came to them and announced that while the company lost money, it had paid off its debt.”

But those are arguments for another day. For now I want to focus on Blum’s prospects as a candidate. They aren’t as bright as they would have been if he had taken the plunge in 2010.

Repeating verbatim his take on Blum from two years ago, Craig Robinson argues today at The Iowa Republican that Blum’s conservative columns for the Dubuque newspaper

will be helpful for a couple of reasons. First, having a regular column in the local newspaper helps build credibility and name ID. Secondly, writing a political column means that he has well thought out positions on many of the issues facing our country today, something many first time candidates lack.

Those advantages are less significant than they may appear. First of all, IA-01 now spans 20 counties rather than 12 counties under Iowa’s old Congressional map. I don’t know how many Republicans in northeast Iowa read the Dubuque Telegraph Herald, but the daily’s circulation doesn’t reach a majority of district residents or even as large a proportion of IA-01 voters as it did two years ago.

Blum’s name recognition in the Dubuque area would have been much more helpful for the 2010 primary campaign. Few Iowans had heard of Ben Lange or the three other candidates who sought the GOP nomination that year. But after Lange nearly defeated Braley in 2010, some Republicans are recruiting him to run again. Even though the new IA-01 contains eleven counties that Lange didn’t campaign in two years ago, I would wager that Lange’s race against Braley gave him higher name recognition among Republicans district-wide than Blum has from his Dubuque newspaper column.

The other declared Republican candidate in IA-01 is Steve Rathje. He is a business owner in Linn County, the largest by population in the new IA-01. Rathje has run for Congress twice before, so like Lange, he has plenty of experience discussing national policies in media interviews and at public forums. While writing a newspaper column is bound to sharpen a person’s communication skills, I think Blum will struggle to convince Republicans that he has a better grasp of the issues than his competitors.

Blum’s business connections might have given him a fundraising advantage in the 2010 GOP primary, but now Lange is well-known to Iowa Republican donors. Rathje’s campaign had just under $80,000 cash on hand as of September 30. That dwarfs what Lange was able to raise before the June 2010 primary. Two of Lange’s primary rivals didn’t raise enough money to file Federal Election Commission disclosure reports, and the third, Jim Budde, raised less than $5,000 total.

That’s not to say that Blum can’t raise the funds to run a strong district-wide primary campaign. But if he does, he won’t be the only Republican able to advertise or pay for direct mail.

Blum, Lange and Rathje appear to share many conservative views, so I don’t expect a lot of issue contrasts in the primary. I am curious to see whether one opinion column will come back to haunt Blum, though. He recently argued in favor of plans to close many small U.S. post offices:

Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe wants to close unprofitable post offices and move some of their operations into convenience stores and supermarkets; he’s targeting 3,500 of the more than 31,000 post offices. Donahoe has said some communities that lose retail locations might get what USPS is calling a Village Post Office — smaller automated stations or a local vendor that sells stamps and flat-rate boxes.

Local small business owners have expressed interest in performing some postal services in towns that lose their post office. Donahoe proposes eliminating Saturday delivery and reducing headcount by 20 percent over five years through attrition, since the union contract prohibits layoffs. Donahoe is taking prudent actions that occur every day in the private sector when a business is in trouble.

Past reform efforts have been stymied by political pressure to preserve the status quo. U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley has said he will fight the “bad decision” to close any postal facilities in his district. Business as usual is what got us into this mess. Kicking the can down the street is not a solution. The world has changed and the USPS must change with it.

The U.S. Postal Service can survive IF it is allowed to operate like a private-sector business.

I give Blum credit for showing more ideological consistency on this issue than, say, Governor Terry Branstad or Representative Steve King. But regardless of party identification, most people don’t like to see post offices closing in their area.

Whoever wins the GOP nomination will probably have a more difficult road in IA-01 during a presidential election year. Voter turnout in Iowa skewed toward the GOP in 2010 (pdf), but more Democrats can be expected to vote in 2012. The new first district contained 169,769 registered Democrats, 135,836 registered Republicans and 190,798 no-party voters as of July 2011. Like Braley’s current district, the new IA-01 has a partisan voting index of D+5, meaning that in the last two presidential elections, residents of the district voted about 5 points more Democratic than the country as a whole.

Blum told the Telegraph Herald that any Republican candidate needs to perform well among independents in order to win this district. That’s especially true in a presidential year, when many more independents participate. (Just 36.5 percent of registered no-party Iowa voters cast ballots in 2010.) Lange carried first district independents in 2010, so it’s not hard to imagine the GOP nominee doing the same next year. But Braley still has to be considered the favorite unless the Iowa Democratic Party’s field operation is a total failure.

As Bleeding Heartland discussed here, quite a few Iowa Senate districts that are likely to be competitive in 2012 are located in the new IA-01. Since Democratic control of the Iowa Senate is the main check on Governor Terry Branstad’s agenda, Democrats will invest heavily in GOTV across northeast Iowa next fall. Competitive districts that are entirely or partly within the first Congressional district include Senate districts 26, 28, 30, 34, 36 and 48 (view the new Iowa Senate map here).

Share any thoughts about the first Congressional district race in this thread.

UPDATE: James Q. Lynch reported from Blum’s press conference today:

The top three issues in the Iowa’s 1st District congressional race next year will be “jobs, jobs and jobs,” according to Dubuque businessman Rod Blum. […]

“We’re at ground zero,” he said Oct. 24 after formally announcing in Dubuque that he will seek the Republican nomination to face three-term Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley of Waterloo. His company’s employment has fallen from 45 to less than one-third of that as a result of the housing slump. […]

If he gets the nomination, Blum said, he will be “running against Bruce Braley and Barack Obama and their policies.”

Since President Obama took office, “he and Bruce Braley have racked up $4 trillion in deficits,” Blum said in his announcement at a Dubuque hotel. The national debt has grown to $15 trillion – the same as the Gross Domestic Product.

“If we don’t start living within our means, Greece’s future will be our future,” Blum warned.

“When I begged my parents for something, most of the time the answer was ‘We can’t afford it,'” he said. “I didn’t like to hear that answer but my parents knew they couldn’t spend more than they made. If my parents, with their 10th grade educations could figure that out, why can’t Washington politicians?” […]

“The older I get the less attention I pay to what people say and more attention to what they actually do,” he said. “Quite frankly, people are sick and tired of hearing one thing from politicians on the campaign trail and seeing a different thing once they’re in office. And Republicans are just as guilty as Democrats of forgetting whose money they’re spending and who they’re supposed to be representing.”