Former Cedar Rapids Mayor Paul Pate is giving consideration to becoming the Republican Party of Iowa's candidate for Secretary of State, Republican activists told The Gazette.
Pate, who served in that office for eight years, would replace Chuck Allison, who dropped out of the race earlier this week, citing personal reasons...
Pate never misses an opportunity. He may be Iowa's champion job hopper: state rep and state senator from a Marion district, then in mid-senate term he jumps to Secretary of State forcing two special elections.
Sidebar: Here's the sequence from late `94 and early `95 in Linn County:
November 1994: General election, Pate elected Sec of State, resigns Senate seat.
December 1994: Representative Mary Lundby elected to Senate seat in special election. In February 1994, there was a senate vacancy in Johnson and Linn counties and then-Rep. Bob Dvorsky resigned the house seat so the two special elections could be combined. (We had a naaaaasty blizzard that day.) Bund Lundby refused to make that move, forcing yet another special election which was held in January `95.
Also in this time frame: Linn County has a special election for sheriff, AND the Marion and Linn-Mar school districts, which partially overlapped the legislative districts, had a (failed) merger vote.
So there were voters in parts of Marion that were in the Marion or Linn-Mar districts who went to the polls five times in nine weeks.
Four years later Pate loses the primary for governor, then he carpetbags into Cedar Rapids and gets elected mayor. Then the voters in effect abolish the job out from under him by making it part-time (coincidence?)
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