Second in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections.
The successful Republican effort to knock Libertarians off the ballot in three U.S. House districts may have influenced the outcome in at least one of them.
All three affected Libertarian candidates—Nicholas Gluba in the first Congressional district, Marco Battaglia in the third, and Charles Aldrich in the fourth—indicated that they would continue to run as write-in candidates. Unofficial results show write-in votes for Iowa’s four U.S. House races this year totaled 3,626—about 0.23 percent of the 1,604,965 ballots cast for a Congressional candidate.
When Libertarian candidates have been on the ballot for recent Iowa Congressional elections, they have typically received 2-3 percent of the vote.
AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE FIRST DISTRICT
In IA-01, unofficial results show Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan by 799 votes (49.98 percent to 49.79 percent). Bohannan has not conceded, and the race has not been called. But it’s unlikely that enough provisional ballots remain to be counted for her to overtake Miller-Meeks. Iowa no longer counts absentee ballots that arrive after election day.
Meanwhile, 963 people wrote in a candidate for the IA-01 race (0.23 percent of the 413,502 ballots cast). If Gluba had been named on the ballot, he would have received many more votes, probably in the range of 2 percent, based on other Iowa Congressional races.
Libertarians are widely viewed as a threat to Republican electoral prospects. That’s why GOP activists represented by a prominent Republican attorney filed the objections to this year’s Libertarian candidates for Congress. It’s also why Iowa’s GOP trifecta changed state law in 2019 to make it more difficult for third-party candidates to qualify for the ballot. (A federal court later struck down the early deadline for third-party candidate filings, but higher signature thresholds remain.)
Gluba’s top campaign issues—supporting gun rights, limiting the federal government’s executive branch power, opposing eminent domain abuse, reducing U.S. entanglements in overseas military conflicts—suggest he would have drawn more votes from conservatives than from those who might otherwise favor Bohannan.
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