Democrat Mike Sherzan announced today that he is running for Congress in Iowa’s third district. I’ve enclosed his press release after the jump, along with excerpts from Sherzan’s comments to the National Journal. He’s on Facebook here and on Twitter here. For now, the Sherzan for Iowa website is only set up to collect donations and the names of volunteers.

Bleeding Heartland covered Sherzan’s biography in this post. If Republican incumbent Tom Latham decides to run for the open U.S. Senate seat, I expect several other Democrats to run in the IA-03 primary, including possibly State Senator Matt McCoy. Otherwise, the field may be clear for Sherzan to take on Latham, which will be an uphill battle. On paper, this looks like a swing district, with 159,939 active registered Democrats, 166,109 Republicans, and 157,442 no-party voters as of February 2013. But Latham consistently outperforms the top of the Republican ticket and gained more votes than Mitt Romney in every IA-03 county last November.

The well-informed Shira Toeplitz reported this week at Roll Call that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee may have a challenger to ten-term Republican Representative Tom Latham in Iowa’s third Congressional district.

I figured that before too long, Democrats would float some possible candidates for IA-03 in 2014. I didn’t figure that the leading recruit would be someone I’d never heard of.