While former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney campaigned in Des Moines last week, Representative Leonard Boswell publicly criticized the Republican presidential front-runner for the second time this month. The eight-term Democrat authored a guest column in the November 16 Des Moines Register criticizing Romney’s position on health care for veterans. His latest attack focused more broadly on Romney’s position on taxes and entitlement programs.

Any comments on today’s election results are welcome in this thread. Polls closed at 9 pm in Iowa, but returns from the special election in Senate district 18 are coming in slowly. I will update this thread later as the outcome becomes clear. With six out of 40 precincts reporting, Democrat Liz Mathis leads Republican Cindy Golding by 5859 votes to 2474. UPDATE: Looks like a big win for Mathis. With 75 percent of precincts reporting, Mathis leads by 10,651 votes (58 percent) to 7,613 votes (41 percent).

SECOND UPDATE: The Linn County Auditor’s office posted unofficial results here (pdf). With all 40 precincts reporting, Mathis received 13,184 votes (55.8 percent), Golding received 10,283 votes (43.5 percent), and Constitution Party candidate Jon Tack received 151 votes (0.64 percent).

Democrats have retained control of the Iowa Senate with a 26-24 majority for the 2012 legislative session. It may even be a “stronger” majority if Mathis turns out to be less conservative than her predecessor, Swati Dandekar. Iowa Senate Republicans won’t be in a good mood when they elect a new minority leader on Thursday.

Nationally, Democrats have had good election results in Ohio (repealing a law that restricted collective bargaining rights) and Kentucky (holding the governor’s chair). It’s not yet clear whether Democrats will retain a Virginia Senate majority. I was surprised to see that Mississippi voters defeated a “personhood” ballot initiative stating that life begins at conception.

What races are you watching tonight? The incumbents on the Des Moines City Council easily won re-election. My two preferred candidates lost the Windsor Heights City Council election. Other Polk County results are here.

THIRD UPDATE: Democrats and allies are celebrating the Mathis victory with statements I’ve posted after the jump. The Iowa Democratic Party had lots of outside help with early GOTV from labor unions such as the Iowa State Education Association, the LGBT advocacy group One Iowa, the Planned Parenthood Voters of Iowa PAC, and the national 527 group Progressive Kick.

FOURTH UPDATE: An amazing result from Arizona tonight: voters recalled State Senate President Russell Pearce, author of the notorious “show me your papers” immigration law (which is being litigated in federal court). Apparently no state senator has ever been recalled in Arizona before. Pearce had been a leading opponent of the state’s “clean elections” public financing system.

FINAL UPDATE: The official canvass showed 13,324 votes for Mathis (56.0 percent), 10,322 votes for Golding (43.4 percent), 151 votes for Tack, and nine write-in votes.

I’ve seen a lot of hippie-punching by professional Democrats, but the Iowa Democratic Party’s attack on Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement yesterday was a particularly cynical example.  

With less than a month remaining until the start of the 2012 fiscal year, Iowa House Republican leaders have stepped up efforts this week to draft the two-year budget Governor Terry Branstad is demanding. Republicans have drafted an omnibus budget bill combining all the usual appropriations bills, plus a few other things on their legislative wish list. The omnibus bill includes two small gestures toward a compromise with Democrats who control the Iowa Senate. However, Senate Democrats don’t sound ready to accept this package as the final work on state spending for the next two years.

Details and early reaction to this week’s budget news are after the jump.  

Few weapons are more effective in politics than well-placed ridicule. Used incompetently, however, political mockery is just cringe-inducing.

Case in point: the event the Iowa Democratic Party staged yesterday to make fun of Mitt Romney.

The Democratic Activist Women’s Network, which seeks to support, recruit and elect pro-choice Democratic women in Iowa, has announced the honorees for its second annual Women’s Appreciation Day event.

Award winners include Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge (Special Recognition Award); State Representative Kirsten Running-Marquardt (State Elected Official Award) Representative Anesa Kajtazovic (Rising Star Award); Johnson County Recorder Kim Painter (Local Elected Official Award); Margo McNabb (Activist Award); Maggie Rawland (Lifetime Achievement Award).

During the reception, DAWN’s List will also honor Marcia Nichols for her dedication and immeasurable contribution to the advancement of democratic progressive values.

Guest speaker at the reception will be Iowa Democratic Party Chair, Sue Dvorsky.

Judge served in the Iowa Senate and as secretary of agriculture before being elected lieutenant governor. Running-Marquardt won a special election in Iowa House district 33 in late 2009 and was re-elected in 2010. Kajtazovic is both the youngest woman and the first Bosnian immigrant elected to the Iowa legislature, having won the November election in House district 21. Among Iowa’s county recorders, Painter has been an outspoken supporter of marriage equality. McNabb has been active in the Story County Democratic Party and is in the state Science and Technology Fair’s Hall of Fame. Rawland is a retired teacher and a longtime activist supporting the peace movement and education funding. Nichols is the legislative director for AFSCME in Iowa.

The DAWN’s List event will take place on March 7, beginning at 6:30 pm, at Forte (615 3rd Street, Des Moines). Tickets are $20, and you can RSVP either at the DAWN’s List website or by e-mailing event AT dawnslist.org.

President Barack Obama delivers the State of the Union address tonight. Share any comments about his speech or his presidency in this thread.

I find the prospect of a Democratic president arguing for austerity budgeting deeply depressing. A domestic budget freeze is a bad idea, and an earmark ban is just a waste of time. Earmarks don’t add to the deficit; they just give members of Congress more power to control how certain pots of money are spent.

I cannot believe how much media coverage has been wasted on plans for some Democrats and Republicans to sit together for the State of the Union. Who cares?

The “revisionist history” blaming Rahm Emanuel for Obama’s mistakes during his first two years sounds pathetic, even though I am not at all an admirer of Emanuel.

UPDATE: John Deeth is liveblogging at his place.

SECOND UPDATE: I don’t know why Obama is so intent on repeating the “great mistake” of 1937.

I’ve posted statements released by Iowa’s Congressional delegation after the jump.

Iowa Democrats will compete in 2012 with the same leaders who ran this year’s election program. On Saturday, the Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee re-elected all five officers for the next two-year cycle: party chair Sue Dvorsky, first vice chair Michael Kiernan, second vice chair Chris Petersen, treasurer Ken Sagar and secretary Dori Rammelsberg-Dvorak. Last month, the Iowa Senate Democratic caucus re-elected Mike Gronstal as majority leader, and Iowa House Democrats chose Kevin McCarthy as minority leader. McCarthy has been majority leader and right-hand man to outgoing House Speaker Pat Murphy for the previous two election cycles.

Some might expect a few changes at the top after Iowa Democrats suffered their worst election defeats since 1994. In a December 4 statement, Dvorsky promised to “build on the lessons learned in the last election to grow the Iowa Democratic Party and advance Democratic values across the state.”

John Deeth mentions that the IDP’s field program won “national praise” (in the form of one line by Marc Ambinder). I find it hard to see how anyone can view this year’s coordinated campaign as a success. Granted, it was a tough year for Democrats in most parts of the country. Yes, a million dollars from out-of-state turned out the vote against the Iowa Supreme Court justices, which surely helped Republican candidates. Yes, Democrats were unlucky GOP power-brokers talked Terry Branstad out of retirement. If not for that, Bob Vander Plaats would have been the Republican gubernatorial nominee, Chet Culver might be gearing up for his second term, and Democrats might have held more legislative districts.

Still, we lost every competitive Iowa Senate seat plus one few people had their eyes on. We saved a few targeted Iowa House seats but suffered a net loss of 16 in the chamber, worse than almost every Democrat’s worst-case scenario before the election. We lost state House and Senate seats in every Congressional district. Even in a bad year, we should have been able to contain the losses at a lower level. Democrats have almost no margin of error for holding the Iowa Senate in 2012, and it will take at least a few cycles to get the Iowa House back.  

I don’t have the data to know whether the field program was targeting the wrong voters, not enough voters, using the wrong methods to reach voters, or just suffered from a lack of funds to execute the plan. Many of our candidates lost despite working hard and exceeding their early vote targets. The direct mail for Iowa House and Senate candidates seems to have been largely ineffective, and the television commercials (at least the ones I saw) didn’t make any case for re-electing our incumbents.

All Iowa Democrats in Congress won re-election, but can that be attributed to the IDP’s field program? Turnout compared to 2006 wasn’t up by much in the key Democratic counties in the first district, for instance. I think Democrats were lucky that the GOP’s best Congressional challenger was in the most Democratic-leaning seat. Otherwise, we could easily have lost IA-01 and/or IA-03.  

I’m not saying this is all Dvorsky’s fault, or that electing new party leaders would fix the problem. One way or another, the IDP needs to have a much better field operation in 2012. It’s dangerous to assume performance will automatically improve because more voters participate in presidential elections. The economy could (probably will) remain weak, and there’s no way Barack Obama’s campaign will generate as much excitement as it did in 2008.

Speaking of the Obama campaign, I assume his Iowa staff will take over the coordinated GOTV efforts, as they did in 2008. That didn’t work out too well for our statehouse candidates. Even Obama’s Iowa director Jackie Norris admitted that more could have been done for the down-ballot candidates. The president’s re-election team will work to maximize turnout in heavily Democratic precincts, which in most cases are not part of battleground Iowa House and Senate districts.

Share any relevant thoughts in this thread.

The Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee elected Sue Dvorsky the new IDP chair on June 27. No one challenged her for the leadership position, and the vote was unanimous. Dvorsky had been serving as acting chair since the previous IDP leader, Michael Kiernan, stepped down earlier this month for health reasons.  Background from an IDP press release of June 28:

Sue Dvorsky, 55, recently retired from teaching special education in Iowa City for 30 years.  She was instrumental in Tom Vilsack’s historic election in 1998 and has been a tireless advocate for Democrats her entire life. She lives in Coralville with her husband Senator Bob Dvorsky and their daughters Ann and Caroline.

Michael Kiernan, 35, was elected Chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party in February of 2009 and served until resigning in June of 2010. Kiernan ran Governor Chet Culver’s campaign for Secretary of State before serving two successful terms as an At-Large Councilman in Des Moines. He was born and raised in Madison County, Iowa.

I wish Dvorsky every success in her new position and encourage Iowa Democrats to get involved in at least one competitive race this year. We have so many good candidates running for Congress, statewide offices as well as the Iowa House and Senate. They can all use volunteer help (and of course donations from those who can afford to give). Almost every weekend there are opportunities to help with door-knocking, pancake breakfasts, parades, county fairs and other events.  

Who else is watching the World Cup? I am surprised by how much my kids are enjoying the games, even though they don’t play soccer and it’s such a low-scoring sport. Des Moines business owner Tanya Keith and her husband have gone to every World Cup since 1994, and Tanya is blogging here about her family’s trip in South Africa. What I want to know is, how are her two young kids coping with the vuvuzela noise at the games? It sounds deafening even on tv.

I wasn’t around last weekend to write up the Iowa Democratic Party’s state convention in Des Moines. Radio Iowa’s blog covered most of the highlights here. Sue Dvorsky of Iowa City is the new IDP chair, replacing Michael Kiernan, who needs to have surgery on a tumor near his salivary gland. Iowa Democrats nominated Jon Murphy as our candidate against State Auditor David Vaudt. Read more about Murphy at Radio Iowa or at Iowa Independent. I am so glad we’re not giving Vaudt a pass.  

Convention delegates also voted to change party rules so that the gubernatorial nominee can choose the lieutenant governor candidate. The move was intended to undermine Barb Kalbach’s efforts to replace Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge on the Democratic ticket, and will make it impossible for an activist to do something similar in the future.

John Deeth has been pretty harsh on Kalbach, suggesting it’s a waste of time for her to run against Judge when her own Republican state representative and senator don’t have Democratic opponents. I see things differently. Kalbach said in announcing her candidacy, “I am taking this opportunity to represent the progressive, grassroots base of the Democratic Party who feels the issues that they have put forward have been ignored at the state level.” Kalbach wouldn’t have run if the Culver administration and Democratic legislative leaders had done anything to limit factory farm pollution during the past four years. She wouldn’t have run if the governor had done anything to advance the cause of local control (agricultural zoning), which he claimed to support during the 2006 campaign. Kalbach wouldn’t be able to draw attention to those failures as a candidate for the Iowa House or Senate in a conservative district. By the way, Culver would have an army of grassroots volunteers now if he had listened less to Patty Judge. He would also have a great campaign issue to use against Terry Branstad, on whose watch factory farm pollution became a much bigger problem in our state.

Moving to Iowa’s U.S. Senate race, while I was away a group called Americans United for Change started running this television commercial against Senator Chuck Grassley. The ad mentions campaign contributions Grassley has received from oil interests and draws a line between the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and Grassley’s vote for a “resolution of disapproval” that would have limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a poor ad, because as Grassley’s office noted, that particular vote had little to do with big oil or offshore drilling (click here for more background). In voting for the Murkowski amendment, Grassley was carrying water for big coal, utilities that rely on fossil fuels, corporate agriculture interests and major industrial polluters.

Grassley has done plenty throughout his career to represent corporate interests rather than the public interest. There’s no excuse for such a sloppy attack ad.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder interviewed Grassley’s opponent Roxanne Conlin yesterday, and the Cedar Rapids Gazette tried to make a big deal out of her misspeaking on when Grassley won his first election. Rasmussen’s latest Iowa poll of 500 likely voters on June 14 found Grassley ahead of Conlin by 54 percent to 37 percent. The previous Rasmussen survey, taken in late April, had Grassley leading Conlin 53-40. I would like to see other polling of this race. The Washington Post published a feature on Scott Rasmussen this week, including some criticism of his methods.

This thread is for anything on your mind this weekend. Also feel free to post any links to good reads. I am working my way through this article by a self-described Tea Party consultant.

Congratulations to Des Moines City Council member Michael Kiernan, who was elected to chair the Iowa Democratic Party on Saturday, along with First Vice-Chair Sue Dvorsky, Second Vice-Chair Chris Peterson, Treasurer Ken Sagar and Secretary Dori Rammelsberg-Dvorak.

I was pleased to read Kiernan’s remarks from his first press conference:

“We have over 100,000 new registered voters in this state who are Democrats, hundreds of new activists. I think our key is to keep these folks in the party, to bring them home permanently. I think they’ve stopped by for a visit, and it’s our job to reach out to those new voters and bring them home permanently.”  

Kiernan said Democrats will use new technology, social platforms and grassroots engagement to bring additional people into the party and bring newly registered Democrats home to roost.

“Now it’s about telling these folks that they’re welcome in our party and making sure that they know they have a seat at our table permanently” […]

Kiernan echoed these points in the press release from the Iowa Democratic Party, which I’ve posted after the jump.

It’s good to know the IDP’s leader understands that we can’t count on first-time Democratic voters to continue to support the party. This is especially true because President Barack Obama will not be on the ballot in 2010. Many newly-registered Iowa Democrats were mobilized by Obama’s presidential campaign.

Kiernan noted his family’s tradition of “Democratic public service” on Saturday. He seems to be no more than two degrees of separation removed from anyone who’s anyone in Iowa Democratic circles. Tom Harkin held one of his first steak fry events at the Kiernans’ family farm.

I expect that this political legacy will greatly shorten Kiernan’s learning curve as the new party chairman. His mother, Joan Kiernan, has been a Democratic activist for decades and served as the IDP’s secretary in the past.

Michael Kiernan has also had a close-up view of election campaigns at all levels. His father ran successfully for the Madison County supervisors. His mother was involved in Dick Gephardt’s presidential campaigns. Michael Kiernan managed Chet Culver’s first bid for secretary of state in 1998 and Preston Daniels’ successful mayoral campaign in Des Moines the same year. He also won a special election for a seat on the Des Moines City Council in 2004. (He has not disclosed whether he plans to seek re-election to that position this fall.)

With this extensive campaign experience, Kiernan has seen what works and what doesn’t work for Iowa Democrats. That’s bound to help the IDP’s “coordinated campaign” going into the 2010 midterms. The national political environment is likely to be less favorable for Democrats than it was in 2006 and 2008, so the IDP will have to be at the top of its game in getting out the vote. (It can’t hurt that Kiernan is on good terms with labor union officials.)

Turnout is always lower in midterm elections. In 2006, about 1.05 million Iowans cast ballots for governor, whereas turnout in the most recent presidential election was about 1.5 million. Clearly not all of the newly-registered Democrats will vote in 2010, but even if only half of them turn out, that could give Democrats a significant advantage.

Kiernan and other party leaders can do plenty to build on the IDP’s success with early voting, but the mechanics of GOTV efforts won’t be enough to keep new voters in the Democratic fold.

Here’s where Governor Chet Culver and the Democratic leadership in the state legislature come in. Coasting on the usual advantages of incumbency is not going to be enough, especially if the economy is still in bad shape in 2010.

The best way to change Iowa from a purple state to a blue state is for Democratic elected officials to deliver real, lasting change. That will involve taking on some big problems despite the political risks. In a time of budget scarcity, state legislators can’t just throw money at a lot of popular programs.

Nothing succeeds like success. If Democrats can show that their governance made a tangible difference in the lives of Iowans, it will be easier to give voters a reason to back Culver and Democratic legislators again in 2010. I’ve got a few suggestions:

-Reduce the influence of money in politics by approving a voluntary “clean elections” system on the model of Maine or Arizona;

-Reject new coal fired power plants (as several of our neighboring states have done) and increase our capacity to generate wind and solar power;

-Allow “local control” of large hog confinements (agricultural zoning at the county level);

-Make progress toward providing light rail in the Ames/Ankeny/Des Moines and Iowa City/Cedar Rapids corridors.

I can’t say I’m optimistic about the Democratic leadership taking on any of those tasks, because powerful corporate interests could line up against them.

But I am convinced that we need to have something big to show for four years of Democratic control at the statehouse and Terrace Hill. Give Kiernan something to sell to the voters he’s trying to keep in the Democratic fold.

The IDP’s press release announcing Kiernan’s election is after the jump.