District Of The Day: The Reboot

If you're reading this, it's after 5 PM on March 16 and legislative filing for the June 5 primary is closed. I've long been promising a District Of The Day rewrite and trust me, it's on the way. In fact, it's all written. It's just that some of it is going to need to be re-written tonight.

Here's how we're going to work this. I'll do one final Who Filed Today post. Then I'll retreat to the Deeth Blog World Headquarters and start posting, a senate district at a time, starting with Senate 1/House 1 and 2, till I'm done. How long that takes depends on how fast Team Schultz posts Friday's list, how many last second surprises I get, how many Some Dudes I have to Google, and whether and when I decide sleep is important.

When it's finally posted all the way through Chuck Isenhart's House 100 in Dubuque, I'll post the whole thing as one huge file someplace, probably at the Register. Then I'm going to take a break and not post as much for a little while.

Some qualifiers. Friday's list is not "final."

1) Candidates can drop out through Wednesday the 21st. I'll update accordingly.

2) If no candidate gets 35% in the primary, the party has to have a convention. There's a couple places that might happen; the best chance is in TIWYDW.

3) Parties can nominate at a convention if no one filed in time for a primary. A nomination by convention post-primary is usually a strong indicator of Some Dude status; that's how I got into my race. But four current House freshmen, probably some sort of record, made the ballot this way in 2010: Dan Muhlbauer replaced a candidate who dropped out, Dan Kelley replaced a legislator who died, Bob Hager joined the race late, and Brian Moore was nominated at a Republican convention after losing a Democratic primary. That gives you a sense of the kind of things that happen.

4) And independents and third party candidates file later, in July-August. I'll reboot again after that, with the July 19 finance reports and the August voter registration numbers.

Voter registration numbers are as of March 1 and include both active and inactive voters. That shouldn't affect the basic party ratio, but it does puff the raw numbers in places that have lots of inactive voters like college towns.

Campaign finance numbers are through the January 19 Iowa Ethics deadline. I have links to everyone who filed by then; I only examined the numbers if multiple candidates had filed. Usually I use cash on hand as my baseline unless something else sticks out like Massive Loans To Self.

Some Dude is not a pejorative; when I ran for the House I was a Some Dude:

Some candidates start out with certain built-in advantages: They already hold office, they have personal wealth, or they have a prominent public profile. Some Dude has none of these. If you Google Some Dude's name, you'll find very little information-probably just the news article or blog post where they were first mentioned as a possible candidate. A good hint you're dealing with a Some Dude is that they're described as an "activist" or "Tea Party member" in press accounts. Note: Some Dudes sometimes win!

After you run and lose three times you graduate from Some Dude to Perennial Candidate.

I'm writing from the assumption that if you're reading me, you follow Iowa politics closely. I'm not going to slow down and explain what "Map Day" means every time.

I'm not bothering with the congressional races. You can get that other places.

As always I appreciate corrections, tips, rants and feedback from my readers. And traffic. I love traffic.