Cedar Rapids residents elected yet another Republican mayor on November 30, as former television news anchor and Women Lead Change CEO Tiffany O’Donnell defeated Amara Andrews by 13,479 votes to 6,358 (67.8 percent to 32.0 percent), according to unofficial results. As is typical for runoff elections, turnout was lower today at 21.4 percent of registered voters than in the November 2 election (28.1 percent turnout).

After receiving about 42 percent of the vote on November 2, O’Donnell appears to have consolidated support from almost all residents who preferred outgoing Mayor Brad Hart. He and Andrews both received about 28 percent of the vote four weeks ago.

O’Donnell is the fifth Republican (including Hart) to be elected mayor of Iowa’s second-largest city since 1996. Only one Democrat (Kay Halloran) has won Cedar Rapids’ highest office during the same period.

While it was logical for Andrews to run as a progressive Democrat in a city that generally favors Democratic candidates, in retrospect it looks like a strategic error for her campaign to focus on her opponent’s Republican ties. For whatever reason—I’d welcome insight from locals—a lot of Democratic-leaning voters in Cedar Rapids are comfortable with Republican mayors.

Only a week after United Auto Workers members ratified a new six-year contract with John Deere, the company announced record profits of $5.96 billion during the fiscal year that ended on November 1.

Tyler Jett reported for the Des Moines Register on November 24,

The company announced Wednesday that the new contract with the UAW will cost $250 million to $300 million. J.P. Morgan analyst Ann Duignan wrote in a note that she expects Deere to increase prices by 1.5% to offset its higher pay to workers.

That cost estimate appears to cover the immediate 10 percent raises and $8,500 ratification bonuses for each of Deere’s approximately 10,000 employees represented by UAW. The range of $250 million to $300 million would work out to between 4 percent and 5 percent of the company’s profits for the fiscal year that just ended.

For Aiden Vasquez and Mika Covington, the news was life-changing. Polk County District Court Judge William Kelly ruled on November 19 that Iowa’s law designed to deny Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming surgery “violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution.”

He ordered the Iowa Department of Human Services to change a longstanding regulation “excluding coverage for sex reassignment surgery” and said the agency must apply the revised rule to allow “transgender individuals coverage under Iowa Medicaid for medically necessary gender affirming surgery for the treatment of Gender Dysphoria and other relevant diagnoses.”

Vasquez and Covington are transgender Iowans who qualify for Medicaid and have been unable to obtain the health care they need for years. They have been seeking legal redress since soon after Governor Kim Reynolds signed the discriminatory statute in May 2019.

Naturally, not everyone was happy with what the ACLU of Iowa’s legal director Rita Bettis Austen described as a “historic win for civil rights in Iowa.” Soon after the court ruling was published on November 22, Reynolds’ spokesperson Alex Murphy told reporters, “The governor’s office is disappointed in today’s decision and disagrees with the district court’s ruling on Medicaid coverage for transgender reassignment surgeries.”

Reynolds echoed the sentiment when speaking to reporters on November 23: “Of course we were disappointed with the ruling and disagree […] My legal team is looking at it. There will be more to come later on. We’re still looking through it and trying to determine what our options are.”

She should stop fighting this battle.

With the state’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and Single Audit for the 2020 fiscal year in the rear view mirror, the State Auditor’s office has been churning out its annual “reports of recommendations” for state government agencies and other entities. The majority of reports issued so far have cited no concerns related to internal control or compliance with statutory requirements.

However, the latest report for the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS), published on November 23, pointed to several practices “for which we believe corrective action is necessary.”

A news release noted that State Auditor Rob Sand “recommended the Department strengthen internal controls over receipts in certain Bureaus,” adding, “The finding discussed above is repeated from the prior year.”

That’s an understatement. Sand and the previous two state auditors have been warning IDALS about the same internal control problems for more than ten years.

Dave Muhlbauer announced on November 23 that he is ending his U.S. Senate campaign to take more time to grieve with his family. Douglas Burns reported for the Carroll Times Herald that Muhlbauer’s 4-year-old nephew Jed Riesselman died in a farm accident on August 12.

In a statement posted on his social media feeds, Muhlbauer said the loss of his nephew “has had a devastating effect on our family. It’s something you can never prepare yourself for and will leave a hole that will never be filled.”

The public is one step closer to learning who funded a sophisticated messaging and organizational effort to re-elect Senator Joni Ernst in 2020. A federal court on November 19 denied a motion to dismiss a watchdog group’s lawsuit against Iowa Values, which supported Ernst’s re-election in 2020 but did not disclose its fundraising or spending.

The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit focused on “advancing democracy through law,” sued Iowa Values in February, after the Federal Election Commission did not act on the center’s complaint against the pro-Ernst group for more than a year.

Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia comprehensively rejected legal arguments the pro-Ernst group raised in trying to dismiss the lawsuit and return the case to the FEC, which would likely do nothing.

President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure bill on November 15. The reaction from Iowa’s two members of Congress who voted for the measure could not have been more different.

U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-02) has revised the financial disclosure forms Congressional candidates and members of Congress must submit annually. The new documents mention more than 50 assets, liabilities, or income sources not listed on the 2020 annual report Miller-Meeks submitted in August. The apparent omissions prompted the Iowa Democratic Party’s executive director to file an ethics complaint last month against the first-term Republican.

Despite working with the House Ethics Committee to fix the problems, Miller-Meeks’ latest filings don’t entirely line up.

On this Transgender Day of Remembrance, I should be writing about the 46 transgender or gender non-conforming people who have been killed in the United States so far in 2021—the most recorded in a single year. Most of those murder victims were people of color; young Black trans women are especially at risk.

Iowa Republicans didn’t speak out today for ensuring the safety or equality of trans or gender-nonconforming people. When GOP politicians acknowledge LGBTQ Iowans exist, it’s usually to portray them (and any attempt to accommodate them) as a threat to straight white Christians, whom Republicans value above all others.

Governor Kim Reynolds scored points with her base by scapegoating trans athletes in the spring. More recently, conservative politicians and their activist allies have demanded that high school libraries remove books that explore sexual themes, especially queer sexuality. They are also targeting books by authors of color that supposedly contain obscenity or portray some institutions in a negative way.

Iowa Senate President Jake Chapman announced this week that he is having legislation drafted “to create a new felony offense” in Iowa for educators who disseminate “what I believe to be obscene material.” Chapman promised his bill will have “additional mechanisms to force prosecutions or allow civil remedies.”

Governor Kim Reynolds used $448,449 in federal COVID-19 relief funds to cover a shortfall in her office budget without documenting that 21 of her staffers were “substantially dedicated” to the pandemic response, a state audit determined.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General asked state auditors in January 2021 to review whether the spending complied with rules governing the use of Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds. Bleeding Heartland was first to report in September 2020 on CARES Act payments supporting the governor’s permanent staffers, and reported exclusively last December on how documents were altered to make a “FY 2020 Shortfall” in the governor’s office budget appear to be “COVID-19 Personnel Costs.”

State Auditor Rob Sand warned the Reynolds administration in October 2020 that without adequate documentation, COVID-19 relief funds used to pay governor’s staff salaries might need to be repaid to the federal government. The report issued this week advised the governor to return the money to Iowa’s Coronavirus Relief Fund “for other eligible and supported uses prior to the December 31, 2021 deadline.”

The governor’s spokesperson Alex Murphy told reporters the office is “now working with Treasury to provide them documentation” to support the CARES Act spending.

That’s easier said than done.

Republicans talk a good game about running government like a business. But almost every U.S. House Republican balked when asked to punish conduct that would be a firing offense at just about any private company.

Like all but two of their GOP colleagues, Iowa’s Representatives Ashley Hinson (IA-01), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-02), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) voted against censuring Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona and removing him from the House Oversight and Natural Resources committees.

Iowa’s largest strike in decades is over after nearly five weeks. About 10,000 United Auto Workers members, including nearly 7,000 in Iowa, ratified the latest tentative agreement with John Deere by a vote of 61 percent to 39 percent on November 17.

The offer was only marginally different from the agreement UAW members voted down on November 2 by 55 percent to 45 percent. But many workers appear to have been convinced that this was truly Deere’s “last, best and final” offer, as management repeatedly claimed. Some local leaders warned the company might not come back to the negotiating table, or could hire strikebreakers if the UAW rejected the offer.

The last time John Deere employees went on strike in 1986, it took more than five months to resolve the impasse. Hundreds of UAW members who voted no in early November were unwilling to roll the dice on going into the winter receiving strike pay of only $275 a week, with no guarantee the final deal will be better than today’s tentative agreement. Tyler Jett reported for the Des Moines Register that support for the tentative agreement rose among UAW members at all five Deere facilities in Iowa.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the hugely profitable equipment manufacturer could have offered its workforce more generous terms. On the other hand, the new contract improves greatly on the company’s first offer in October. By going on strike, the UAW obtained the following:

Iowa’s new legislative maps create many more match-ups between Republican incumbents than Democrats. But two first-term Democratic senators, Claire Celsi and Sarah Trone Garriott, live in the new Iowa Senate district 16. Celsi announced in early November she’ll seek re-election in the district, which covers a blue-trending portion of Des Moines’ western suburbs.

Trone Garriott hasn’t decided how to proceed and told Bleeding Heartland in a recent telephone interview that she hasn’t ruled anything out. She has “lots of options,” she said, but “none of them are easy.”

Trone Garriott’s choice may depend in part on how Iowa Senate President Jake Chapman responds to being placed in a competitive district for the first time. Will the chamber’s second-ranking Republican stay in a district Joe Biden carried, or flee to safer nearby territory?

Republican-aligned candidates had mixed results in this month’s city and school board elections across Iowa, but they swept the board in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny. Not only did mayoral candidate Mark Holm win by 20 points, both Republican candidates for city council (Kelly Whiting and Joe Ruddy) were elected, as were all three school board candidates campaigning against mask mandates (Joy Burk, Trent Murphy, and Sarah Barthole).

In contrast, anti-mask candidates for school board were shut out in many other large Iowa school districts, including Cedar Rapids, Davenport, West Des Moines, Ames, and Waukee. Candidates taking the same stance won only one out of three available seats on the Urbandale and Linn-Mar school boards.

Although no single factor fully explains the GOP’s success in Ankeny, conservative candidates benefited from an unusual level of partisan spending on what are nominally nonpartisan races in Iowa. The likely result will be more spending by political parties to promote future candidates for city and school offices.

November 11 was first celebrated as “Armistice Day” in 1919 and became a national holiday in 1926. Since 1954, it has been known as Veterans Day.

It’s customary for American politicians to release statements on this day thanking veterans for their service to the country. But what has the government done concretely to return the favor to veterans? This year, more than usual.

Governor Kim Reynolds has declined to fill a District Court vacancy in northern Iowa, after finding the selection process was tainted by Judge Kurt Stoebe’s “unprofessional” conduct, including favoritism toward one applicant and “significantly misleading comments” that took another applicant out of contention.

In a November 11 letter to members of the District 2B Judicial Nominating Commission, Reynolds explained why she was taking the “extraordinary step” of not proceeding with an appointment, which she said “has been done only once before,” by Governor Bob Ray.

The district nominating commission submitted two names to the governor’s office on October 12. Normally Reynolds would be required to appoint one of those candidates within 30 days. However, the governor wrote, her staff investigated after hearing serious concerns about the commission chair, District Assistant Chief Judge Kurt Stoebe. Several commissioners indicated he gave one applicant extra interview time and “coaching” during the interview.

The commissioners said Stoebe made unprofessional comments about some others who applied for the judgeship.

U.S. Representative Mariannete Miller-Meeks confirmed on on November 10 that she will seek re-election in Iowa’s new first district, rather than in the new third district, where her home county (Wapello) is now located.

I never doubted that Miller-Meeks would run in the district containing sixteen of the 24 counties she now represents and roughly 80 percent of her constituents. President Donald Trump carried the counties in the new IA-01 by about 2 points. If Miller-Meeks had stayed in the new IA-03, she would have to run against Democratic Representative Cindy Axne in a district Trump carried by just 0.4 percent, where about three-quarters of voters live in Polk or Dallas counties.

Miller-Meeks hasn’t decided where she will move, or whether she will sell her Ottumwa home. Technically she is not required to move; as long as she resides in the state of Iowa, she doesn’t need to live in IA-01 to run there. But other Iowa members of Congress in similar situations (most recently Jim Leach and Leonard Boswell in 2001, and Tom Latham and Dave Loebsack in 2011) have moved after redistricting placed their homes outside the district where they planned to seek re-election.

Iowa’s new political maps created some headaches for southeast Iowa Republicans. State Senators Ken Rozenboom and Adrian Dickey were both drawn into the new Senate district 44, while State Senators Tim Goodwin and Jeff Reichman were drawn into the new Senate district 50.

On the House side, a potential match-up between State Representatives Jeff Shipley and Joe Mitchell in the new House district 87 seemed more easily resolved. Part of Shipley’s current district (Davis County) is in the new House district 26, which has no incumbent. I assumed Shipley would move there.

But not so fast! Former State Senator Mark Chelgren told the Ottumwa Courier on November 4 that he plans to run in the empty House district 26.

It’s the second attempted comeback for Chelgren, who served two terms in the district containing Ottumwa before retiring in 2018. He sought the GOP nomination for this year’s special election to replace Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who left the Iowa Senate to serve in Congress. But at a district convention, local Republicans preferred Dickey, who had been recruited by party leaders.

To my knowledge, neither Shipley nor Mitchell has publicly announced their plans.

The state of Iowa will receive approximately $5 billion from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill headed to President Joe Biden’s desk, according to calculations published by U.S. Representative Cindy Axne (IA-03). Axne, the lone Democrat in Iowa’s Congressional delegation, was among the 215 Democrats and thirteen Republicans who approved the bill late in the evening on November 5. (Procedural matters earlier in the day led to the two longest votes in U.S. House history.)

Iowa’s three Republicans in the chamber—Representatives Ashley Hinson (IA-01), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-02), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—opposed the infrastructure legislation.

When the Senate approved the same bill in August, Iowa’s Republicans landed on opposite sides, with Senator Chuck Grassley supporting the infrastructure package and Senator Joni Ernst voting against it.

HOW FUNDS WILL BE SPENT IN IOWA

The bill involves about $550 billion in spending not previously approved by Congress. Axne’s news release estimated Iowa’s share of several large pieces. Our state stands to receive:

Voters in Iowa’s bluest city will elect at least two new state lawmakers next year. State Senator Joe Bolkcom announced on November 4 that he will not seek another term in 2022. First elected in 1998, Bolkcom said in a message to constituents and supporters that it’s “time to rotate the crops” and “bring new ideas and new energy to solving problems facing working people and our communities.”

His decision creates an open seat in Iowa Senate district 45, covering Iowa City and University Heights. One of the House districts contained in Bolkcom’s district will also be open, since State Representative Christina Bohannan is running for Congress rather than for re-election.

The other half of Bolkcom’s district is represented by Mary Mascher, a Democrat first elected to the Iowa House in 1994. Asked whether she plans to run for the Senate, seek re-election, or retire in 2022, Mascher told Bleeding Heartland on November 4, “I am still weighing my options.” UPDATE: Mascher announced on November 8 that she won’t run for the House again.

I expect crowded Democratic primaries next June for every open legislative district in the Iowa City area. The primary is the deciding election here, as Republicans have no chance and rarely even field candidates in this part of Johnson County. If Mascher runs for Senate, she would be the front-runner in a primary but probably would not clear the field. Bohannan’s victory over long-serving State Representative Vicki Lensing in the 2020 primary showed that many Democrats in the area are willing to support new legislators.

Iowa progressives and conservatives both had reasons to celebrate following this year’s city and school board elections. These races are nonpartisan, but Democratic and Republican organizations have been increasingly involved in getting out the vote for school board or city council candidates.

About 10,000 United Auto Workers members employed by John Deere remain on strike after rejecting the second tentative agreement negotiated this fall. Pickets will continue around the clock at the equipment manufacturer’s facilities, including five plants in Iowa employing about 7,000 people.

Whereas around 90 percent of workers rejected Deere’s first proposal, the November 2 vote was much closer: about 55 percent against and 45 percent for accepting the deal. Turnout was high at roughly 90 percent of the unionized workforce.

The Des Moines Register’s Tyler Jett reported that 71 percent of UAW members in Waterloo (the company’s largest factory) opposed the agreement, and 64 percent voted no in Dubuque. UAW members in Ottumwa and Davenport voted for the proposal by wide margins, while workers in Ankeny split 51 percent yes and 49 percent no.

Democratic State Senator Pam Jochum will not be a candidate for governor in 2022, she confirmed to Bleeding Heartland on November 1. The longtime senator from Dubuque seriously considered the gubernatorial race in recent months. She could have run for statewide office without giving up her seat in the legislature, because she was re-elected to a four-year term in 2020, and Iowa’s redistricting plan puts her in an even-numbered Senate district, which won’t be on the ballot until 2024.

In a written statement, Jochum said she had been “humbled by the outpouring of support” for a potential candidacy. But after speaking with many activists and much “soul searching and prayers,” she determined, “My place is a strong voice in the legislative branch of government.”

Jochum believes Governor Kim Reynolds is “very vulnerable, but it is not going to be easy” to beat her. It would take “a minimum of $15 million to launch an effective campaign, and to “put all of the pieces together,” she would have needed to make the decision last spring.

Governor Kim Reynolds was “proud” to sign a bill designed to make it easier for Iowans to get around COVID-19 vaccination mandates in the workplace. State Representative Henry Stone, who floor managed the bill in the House, said Republicans worked on this legislation for months, seeking ways to lessen the impact of the Biden administration’s expected rules requiring large employers to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations or frequent testing of employees.

Democrats had no input on the proposal and did not see the bill text until hours before lawmakers debated House File 902 on October 28. Nevertheless, both chambers approved the bill by surprisingly large margins: 68 votes to 27 in the House and 45 votes to 4 in the Senate.

Why did so many Democrats vote for a bill that one supporter described as “a joke” during debate?

Now that Iowa’s political maps for the next decade have been finalized, it’s time to look more closely at the district lines in and near larger metro areas. Although most districts anchored in cities are safe for Democrats, these metros will include quite a few battleground Iowa House and Senate races over the next two election cycles. Several “micropolitan” districts containing mid-sized cities remain competitive as well, and a forthcoming post will cover those maps.

I’ll write more about the political landscape of individual House or Senate districts once lawmakers and other contenders have confirmed their plans for next year. Several incumbent match-ups have already been worked out, and I’m continuing to update this post. (Please send tips on candidate announcements.)

I’ve grouped each Iowa Senate district with the two state House districts it wholly contains.

UPDATE: Governor Kim Reynolds set the special election for Tuesday, December 14. Original post follows.

Republican State Senator Zach Whiting has resigned from the Iowa Senate to take a job in Texas, nwestiowa.com reported on October 29. In a statement, Whiting said he was proud of his service in the legislature and grateful to constituents, but could not pass up the opportunity to work for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative advocacy group.

Whiting was a staffer for U.S. Representative Steve King before winning a three-way GOP primary and the 2018 general election in Iowa Senate district 1. The previous incumbent, David Johnson, did not seek re-election that year. He had left the Republican Party to become an independent in the summer of 2016, in protest of the GOP nominating Donald Trump for president.

Governor Kim Reynolds will soon schedule a special election in November or December to fill the remainder of Whiting’s term, which runs through 2022. Senate district 1 includes all of Lyon, Osceola, Dickinson, Clay, and Palo Alto counties. Whoever wins the GOP nominating convention will almost certainly become the next senator. The district is among the reddest in Iowa, with nearly three times as many registered Republicans as Democrats.

Iowa lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the Legislative Services Agency’s second redistricting plan on October 28, by 48 votes to 1 in the Iowa Senate and 93 votes to 2 in the House. Democrats had already committed to approving any nonpartisan maps. Republicans liked that this plan (unlike the first LSA proposal) creates four U.S. House districts that Donald Trump carried. It also gives the party an excellent chance to maintain their Iowa House and Senate majorities.

Republican State Senator Ken Rozenboom cast the only vote against the maps in the upper chamber. The plan puts him in the same district as his GOP colleague Adrian Dickey.

In the lower chamber, only GOP State Representatives Tom Jeneary and Jon Jacobsen voted against the redistricting plan. Both are placed in House districts with other Republican incumbents, but Jacobsen told Bleeding Heartland in a telephone interview that’s not why he opposed the plan. Rather, he said the legislative maps carve up Pottawattamie County outside Council Bluffs into several districts represented by incumbents who live elsewhere.

I’ll have more to say about some legislative districts in forthcoming posts. For now, here are the basics about the plan Governor Kim Reynolds will soon sign into law. UPDATE: The governor signed the bill on November 4.

The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) of Iowa is seeking a judicial order declaring that the state’s English-only law “does not apply to voting materials, including ballots, registration and voting notices, forms, instructions, and other materials and information relating to the electoral process.”

The state’s largest Latino advocacy organization filed suit in Polk County District Court on October 27, according to the Democracy Docket website founded by Democratic voting rights attorney Marc Elias. His law firm is representing LULAC in this and other cases related to voting rights.

LULAC previously petitioned Secretary of State Paul Pate to allow county auditors across Iowa to accept official Spanish-language translations of voter registration and absentee ballot request forms. However, Pate’s legal counsel informed the group in late September that the Secretary of State’s office “is still under an injunction” from 2008 “which prevents the dissemination of official voter registration forms for this state in languages other than English.”

When Iowa Republicans eviscerated public sector bargaining rights in 2017, they hoped to break the state’s largest labor organizations by creating new barriers to union representation. The law requires public employees to recertify their union in each contract period, which is usually two or three years. To be recertified, the union needs a majority of all employees in the bargaining unit to vote “yes.” Anyone who does not vote in the recertification election is deemed to be a vote against the union.

No members of Congress or statewide officials could be elected in Iowa if candidates needed a majority of all eligible voters to win, and non-voters counted against each candidate.

But for five years in a row, Iowa’s largest public-sector unions have won an overwhelming majority of the recertification votes. The Iowa State Education Association (ISEA) announced on October 26 that recertification passed in all 78 of its bargaining units that held elections this year.

Terror gripped many Iowa Democratic hearts when the nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency (LSA) announced it would release a second redistricting plan on October 21. Governor Kim Reynolds soon scheduled a legislative session to consider the plan for October 28, the earliest date state law allows.

Democrats had hoped the LSA would spend more time working on its next plan. Iowa Code gives the agency up to 35 days to present a second set of maps. If lawmakers received that proposal in mid-November, Republicans would not be able to consider a third set of maps before the Iowa Supreme Court’s December 1 deadline for finishing redistricting work.

By submitting Plan 2 only sixteen days after Iowa Senate Republicans rejected the first redistricting plan, the LSA ensured that GOP lawmakers could vote down the second proposal and receive a third plan well before December 1. So the third map gerrymander—a scenario Bleeding Heartland has warned about for years—is a live wire.

Nevertheless, I expect Republicans to approve the redistricting plan released last week. The maps give the GOP a shot at winning all four U.S. House districts and an excellent chance to maintain their legislative majorities.

Equally important, state law and a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court precedent constrain how aggressive Republicans could be in any partisan amendment to a third LSA proposal.

“We want to get Iowans back to work!” Governor Kim Reynolds tweeted on October 20, touting a new business grant program financed through the American Rescue Plan, which she used to denounce as a “blue state bailout.”

But there was more: “We also announced a new reemployment case management system to refocus Iowa’s unemployment system and ensure Iowans can get back to work as quickly as possible.”

That’s a creative way of saying Reynolds plans to push more Iowans into available jobs by making it harder for them to collect unemployment benefits. However, the policy changes the governor announced at her latest news conference won’t address several important reasons many Iowans remain out of the workforce.

Iowa’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency released the second redistricting plan on October 21.

Although Republican leaders have not signaled their intentions publicly, I anticipate they will accept this package. Not only does it give the GOP a shot at sweeping all four U.S. House districts, it appears to solidify the party’s majorities in the state House and Senate for some time. Former lawmakers and longtime Iowa politics watchers have uniformly told me that lawmakers are more concerned with the legislative maps than the Congressional plan.

Bleeding Heartland will cover the new maps in more detail if the legislature approves them during the October 28 special session.

For now, a quick review of the big picture: as expected, the House and Senate maps create some opportunities for Democrats in growing urban and suburban areas. But as Evan Burger predicted early this year, that’s not enough to get the party to legislative majorities without winning back some ground in smaller counties or mid-sized cities where Democrats used to perform well.

There are winners and losers in every redistricting plan. The second set of nonpartisan Iowa maps, which the Legislative Services Agency released on October 21, was much kinder to U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson than the first map, which put Hinson in a Democratic-leaning Congressional district.

Fortunes were reversed for U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. The first plan put her in a district that Donald Trump carried by more than 10 points in 2020. Today’s proposal puts most of the territory she now represents in a district Trump carried by about 2 points. She was certified the winner last year against Rita Hart by six votes in a district Trump carried by 4 points.

Even worse, Miller-Meeks’ home in Ottumwa (Wapello County) is part of the proposed third Congressional district, where Trump outpolled Joe Biden by just 0.4 points.

On Iowa social media feeds today, I’ve seen some speculation about how Miller-Meeks might fare against Democratic Representative Cindy Axne, or about Democrat Christina Bohannan being able to run for Congress in an open seat covering most of southeast Iowa.

I wouldn’t spend a lot of time pondering those scenarios.

Part 8 in Evan Burger’s series on Iowa redistricting.

This morning, Iowa’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency (LSA) released their second redistricting proposal on October 21. Here’s a quick analysis of the Congressional map included in Plan 2; Laura Belin will write a companion piece examining the legislative maps later today.

The big takeaway is that this plan strongly resembles Iowa’s current map of U.S. House districts, especially when you look at the ten largest counties. Here is how Plan 2 groups those counties:

• IA-01: Johnson (Iowa City), Scott (Quad Cities)
• IA-02: Linn (Cedar Rapids), Black Hawk (Waterloo/Cedar Falls), Dubuque
• IA-03: Polk (Des Moines area), Dallas (Des Moines suburbs)
• IA-04: Story (Ames), Woodbury (Sioux City), Pottawattamie (Council Bluffs)

The current map groups those counties the same way, with the exception of Pottawattamie, which moves from the Polk district to the Story district.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack stopped by the United Auto Workers picket line in Ankeny on October 20 to express support for John Deere workers who have been on strike since October 14. He is the first cabinet secretary in recent memory to join union members on a picket line.

While speaking to the workers, Vilsack recalled how important the UAW’s support was to his first gubernatorial bid in 1998. Backing from organized labor helped him win the Democratic primary by less than a 3-point margin. He then came from behind to defeat Republican nominee Jim Ross Lightfoot by a little less than 6 points in the general election. “You don’t forget the people who gave you an opportunity to serve. You just don’t.”

Regarding the issues that prompted the strike, Vilsack told the UAW members,

The latest Federal Election Commission filings from Iowa’s U.S. Senate candidates included one big surprise. Former U.S. Representative Abby Finkenauer raised more money than seven-term Senator Chuck Grassley during the third quarter of the year.

Follow me after the jump for highlights on fundraising and spending by all the Senate candidates.

Candidates running for U.S. House in Iowa raised a surprising amount of money from July through September, given that we have no idea what their districts will look like in 2022.

Follow me after the jump for highlights from the latest quarterly filings to the Federal Election Commission. Notable numbers from Congressional candidates’ fundraising and spending during the first half of 2021 can be found here.

On the fourth day of Iowa’s largest strike in decades, George Clark of Podcast by George and I planned to interview some John Deere workers on the picket line in Ankeny. We learned that United Auto Workers, which represents some 10,000 Deere employees on strike, is discouraging rank and file members from speaking to the media.

However, JD Neal was authorized to talk with us outside the UAW hall in Des Moines. Neal has worked at the Deere plant in Ankeny for seventeen years and is among the leaders of the UAW Local 450.

The Democratic field for U.S. Senate appears to be set at last, with retired Vice Admiral Mike Franken’s campaign launch on October 14. Franken is the fifth Democrat to join the field, following Dave Muhlbauer, Abby Finkenauer, Glenn Hurst, and Bob Krause.

Although he got a later start than his primary competitors, Franken enters the race with a strong base, having received 68,851 votes (nearly 25 percent) in last year’s four-way primary for U.S. Senate. Nominee Theresa Greenfield benefited from massive establishment support and some $7 million in outside spending before the June 2020 primary.

During an October 14 telephone interview, Franken discussed his decision to run and his stance on some major issues of the day.

Prominent Iowa Democrats were quick to express solidarity with United Auto Workers members who went on strike at midnight on October 14. But Republican officials were mostly silent as Iowa’s largest strike in decades began.

The work stoppage affects some 10,000 UAW members, of whom about 6,500 are employed at John Deere facilities in Waterloo, Ankeny, Davenport, Dubuque, and Ottumwa. Earlier this week, about 90 percent of UAW members voted to reject the company’s contract offer—a remarkable consensus, given that more than 90 percent of workers participated in the vote. Although Deere’s profits have increased by 61 percent in recent years, and CEO John May’s salary increased by about 160 percent from 2019 to 2020, the company offered workers only a 5 percent to 6 percent raise, with additional 3 percent raises in 2023 and 2025. Proposed changes to pensions also weren’t acceptable to most workers.

The last strike at John Deere plants began in 1986 and lasted for about five months. According to the Des Moines Register, the largest strikes anywhere in Iowa during the past three decades were a 1995 stoppage at Amana Refrigeration in Cedar Rapids, which involved about 2,000 workers, and a 2004 strike at Newton-based Maytag, involving about 1,600 workers.

The Iowa Democratic Party issued a statement supporting the Deere workers a few minutes after midnight, and many well-known Democrats added their voices throughout the day. I’ve enclosed many of those comments below.

Meanwhile, Governor Kim Reynolds, Senator Joni Ernst, and U.S. Representatives Ashley Hinson (IA-01), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-02), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) said nothing about the event directly affecting thousands of their constituents. Staff for Reynolds, Hinson, and Miller-Meeks did not respond to Bleeding Heartland’s inquiries.