Caucus Changes: The One Significant Problem

I do not want to understate this: The Iowa Democratic Party's Virtual Caucus plan for next February's first in the nation caucus is, in the big picture, good. People who can't attend in person can participate, New Hampshire is mollified for the moment, and it meets the DNC's requirement to release a raw vote count.

But this is a draft plan, and drafts invite critiques.

There's still one piece to the plan that needs work: the way that votes from the Virtual Caucus get counted toward the state and national delegate counts.

As I said in part one, my personal preference is for a primary. But I accept the political impossibility of that - not that Iowa Democrats should not be considering that, but that Iowa Republicans are running the state and see no reason to change.

Given that, my second choice would have been to send those absentee votes - "virtual attendees" as we are now calling them - out to the precincts. The caucus chair opens up a smart phone app and sees "Simon 22, Jackson 18, Gephardt 6, Babbitt 1, Dukakis 19, Gore 0, Kevin Phillips Bong naught." They get counted as if they were in the room, and there's some kind of system to re-allocate the ones that are non-viable.

I like that - but I have worked in an election office for 21 years and I spend my free time setting up caucuses and playing with complicated election math and lists and writing stuff like this. I am not normal (my mother had me tested). And in yesterday's conference call, IDP chair Troy Price indicated that local activists weren't keen on that kind of complication (and by implication were more than happy to let the state party deal with it).

So the state party will. And they will do it by taking the Virtual Caucus votes and pooling them at the congressional district level. As Price described it, it will be like adding a county to each congressional district, Virtual Caucus County so to speak. Within each CD's Virtual Caucus County, non-viable votes will be re-allocated by second/third/fourth/fifth choice until they're in a group with 15% viability.

For me that's not as good as doing it at the precinct or even county level, but it's still pretty good.

Here's the catch, and here's the single biggest flaw to the whole plan.

The Virtual Caucus vote will count for 10% of each congressional district's delegate math. (The non-virtual counties will be allocated as they always have been, based on votes for president and governor in the last two general elections.)

If 10% of Iowa Democratic caucus participants choose to participate in the Virtual Caucus rather than going to the traditional in-person caucus, they count for 10% of the delegate allocation. And that's good.

But if 50% of people choose the Virtual Caucus, they still only count for 10%.

In addition to the question of fairness, this raises a couple other issues: campaign strategy and overcrowding.
 
While Pat Rynard at Iowa Starting Line sums the overall plan up as "pretty neat and a good step forward," he notes:

By capping the delegates you can get from the virtual caucuses at 10% of the total, it's not clear what is the most beneficial approach for a campaign. Someone's vote could count more by going in person to their local caucus... or maybe not!

Basically, with this setup, if I were running a campaign, I wouldn't try to just go around trying to sign up my supporters who could go in-person to their caucus for this virtual system. I'd probably only limit it to people who legitimately can't turn out on caucus night.

With the new rule of locking down attendees once they are in  a viable group, IDP is rightly moving away from strategic game playing toward a more open and fair system. But weighing votes differently depending on how they are cast introduces new ways to play games, some of which we can't even envision yet.

But for me the bigger problem, indeed the biggest problem of all with the caucus, is overcrowding.

City High caucus, Iowa City, January 3, 2008: Attendance 719.
That climbed to 935 in 2016.

The caucuses as they existed in 2016 were NOT a "neighborhood meeting" for "organizing the party." They were a frustrating endurance exercise of being crammed into a too-small room, and trying to understand confusing and arcane rules. 430 people attended my caucus, but only 30 stayed once alignment was final, and only 15 stayed for the platform and party business once the delegates were chosen.

And this is most people's only interaction with the local party structure. How many times have you heard a variation of this: "The caucus was so disorganized, the Democrats don't have their act together, I'm never going to any of their things again."

Some of the rule changes, especially the ones locking down people once they are in viable groups and letting them go home if they want, will help. But as far back as 2004 the caucuses had outgrown "neighborhood meeting."

There simply are not enough rooms in enough neighborhoods that are big enough to hold the number of people who want to attend. There are not enough parking spaces to hold all the cars when you require all the "voters" to be at the "polls" at the same time rather than letting them come and go all day. More and more venues are saying no, legally or not, because they don't want the crowds in their facilities.

The Virtual Caucus needs to be the centerpiece of addressing the overcrowding problem.  We need 50 to 80% of people voting early, to get physical attendance back down to the 2000 and 2004 levels, or else we won't be able to fit into the space available.  

Yet how can I in good faith encourage 50 to 80% of my county's caucus goers to sign up for the Virtual Caucus, when their votes will only count for 10% of the delegate allocation? I can tell people who could not otherwise attend to sign up, and that's good (my own wife missed Caucus Night 2016 because she had mandatory overtime).

But I would have to tell anyone who was wavering, or only looking to vote Virtual for convenience rather than necessity: "Your vote will count more if you go in person." 

Maybe not, because in theory only 1 or 2 or 5% of people could choose the virtual caucus. But in practice it seems that 10% is a severe underestimate of the interest in a system where you do not have to fight that crowd and can sit at home and vote on your phone.

So that's the problem. Here's a couple solutions.

Laura "Bleeding Heartland" Belin, who is also mostly positive about the plan, would like to see the Virtual Caucus counted based on turnout.

If 20,000 Democrats caucus virtually and 180,000 caucus in person, then 10 percent is the right share of delegates to assign based on the virtual results. But if 50,000 people sign up to caucus virtually and 200,000 show up at precinct caucuses on February 3, then the virtual caucuses should determine 20 percent of the total state delegates. If 100,000 people call in and 150,000 attend precinct caucuses, then 40 percent of the state delegates should be assigned based on the virtual results.

That seems fair and reasonable. I'd like to take it a step further, make the whole caucus process more fair, and maybe promote my own county's self-interest.

Since the party is going to calculate and release a raw vote count for both the first alignment AND the realignment, why not simply base the national delegate count on that?

Put all the votes from each congressional district, virtual and in person, into one pool. Reallocate non-viable votes as needed - either through ranked choices for the virtual voters or realignment for the people who attend. Then allocate the national delegates based on that CD level vote.

This keeps the Hard Math at the state level and not the local level, and eliminates the need to pre-determine or estimate what share of the vote should be allocated to the virtual caucus. To repeat the House District 55 mantra: just count all the votes. There would be some minor variation between the four congressional districts, but within each CD it would be one person, one vote.

Caucus delegate counts, at both the precinct and county level, are not based on one person one vote. They are in effect based on a hypothetical general election universe, with precincts and counties allocated delegates based on their performance for governor and president in the last two general elections.

That rewards precincts and counties that vote Democratic in general elections but do not show up for the caucuses, and punishes counties that both do well in general elections AND turn out heavily on caucus night.

That would be us.

Johnson County gets a lot of shade for being "the People's Republic," but we also produce the best Democratic margins in the state and provide a lot of cash to candidates in other districts.

But on caucus night, the rules sell us short and we are punished for our own success. Our votes count less than small counties. Because delegates are allocated by general election vote, we only counted for 6% of the 2016 delegates. Yet we were 11.5% of the statewide caucus turnout. Put another way, a vote in Random Average County was twice as valuable as one in Johnson - and this has been the case for cycle after cycle.

One person one vote would give Johnson County what we consider our fair share. I understand that the small counties won't like my one person one vote idea - but nothing is stopping any other county from showing up at the same percentage rate that Johnson County does! If rural travel is harder, well, now we have the virtual option so that's not an excuse anymore.

So those are two ways to more fairly allocate the Virtual Caucus votes. However, there's one major catch to my one person one vote plan: the Iowa Democratic Party's constitution requires that state convention delegates be allocated by county based on general election results. That can and should be changed to one person one vote - but that can't happen till the next state convention in June 2020. Since that's the case, I'm with Belin: give the virtual caucus a share of the delegates based on their participation rate.

But IF we are going to be married to the idea of Virtual Caucus County equals a pre-determined X% of the allocation, then X needs to be a lot bigger than 10.

One of Price's arguments for the 10% number is that there is no track record available to estimate how many people will choose an absentee process - which is true - and it's "a good starting point."

Another starting point would be to use the same principle we use to allocate delegates to counties: the general election results. Again, I want to get away from that and move toward one person one vote. But if we're going to use that, then consider the Democratic vote in the 2016 and 2018 general elections:

	Absentee vote	Total Vote	Absentee Percentage
2016 Clinton	331,964	653,669	50.78%
2018 Hubbell	293,920	630,986	46.58%
Combined	625,884	1,284,655	48.72%

Just over half of Iowa Hillary Clinton voters, and just under half of Fred Hubbell's voters, chose an early ballot.

So, if you're going to have a pre-set percentage, I'd be a lot more comfortable with the Virtual Caucus share of the delegates at 50% rather than 10 - especially since we need to get roughly 50% of the crowd out of the caucus rooms in order to fit.

I would also be a lot more comfortable encouraging people who are concerned about "how much" their vote will count to choose virtual caucusing rather than in person if the Virtual Caucus was weighted at 50% rather than 10. Sure, it's a guessing game - but it's a better guess with some math behind it. And if the guess is too high, well, then the people who were historically under-represented because they couldn't attend in person will be over-represented for one cycle.

Monday's roll out of the delegate selection plan was the start of a 30 day public comment period. So I've made my public comment, and I'd encourage other Iowa Democrats to think about these things and share your thoughts with Troy Price or your friendly neighborhood state central committee member.

As for me, I'm more than ready to do the work of making the 2020 caucuses happen, and it will be an all hands on deck task. Help your candidate, sure, but help with the prep work and the signing in and the explaining too.

Caucus Changes Part 2: Lots Of Good Stuff Happening

Gotta hand it to party chair Troy Price and the whole team at the Iowa Democratic Party. They have come up with a crafty and creative solution to a problem that seemed insurmountable: how to meet a Democratic National Committee mandate that caucus states have an absentee process, without triggering New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner's somewhat inscrutable standards about the difference between a "caucus" and a "primary" and thus prompting him to move his state ahead of Iowa on the calendar.

The big picture plan, for those tuning in late, is a good one. IDP will offer a half dozen phone-in "virtual caucuses" in the final days before, and on, Caucus Night. Advance registration will be required, but anyone who wants to can sign up. The virtual caucus will let people cast a ranked choice vote (up to five).

The virtual caucus votes will go into one pool at the congressional district level. If your first choice is non viable your vote transfers to your second choice, and so on, until you are in a viable group. The only way you "don't count" is if all five choices are nonviable or if you don't make all your choices.

These Virtual Caucus votes will, under the draft plan, count for 10% of each congressional district's allocation (which I will discuss more in part three).

The most interesting thing about this Phoning It In approach is that Iowa, after meeting with Gardner off and on for months, may finally have cracked his code.

The word that makes a caucus into an election seems to be "ballot" - both marking one and qualifying for one.

Eccentric person with funny headgear

Political junkies (if you are reading this, you are) have all seen the New Hampshire primary filing pictures - state law requires the candidate, be it Hillary Clinton or Vermin Supreme (the very real perennial candidate pictured above), to file in person at Gardner's office. My sense is Gardner revels in this - and does not want a similar "filing" picture coming out of Iowa.

Which is why it's being called "virtual caucus" and "non-present" and not "absentee ballot," and why the re-countable part of the in-person caucus process (another new DNC mandate) is being called a "preference card" and not a "ballot." My bet-the-beret bet  is these preference cards will NOT be printed with names in advance, because that would imply that candidates "filed" and "qualified."

I'm still not 100% convinced that Gardner will be OK with this - he plays his cards close to the vest and won't be Officially setting New Hampshire's date until as late as possible (current DNC calendars say February 11, 2020, with Iowa on February 3). He isn't saying, but initial reaction from others in New Hampshire has been positive.

The other DNC mandate is for release of a raw vote count - which has always been the deepest darkest secret of the Iowa Democratic caucuses. Now that we HAVE to, IDP is planning on releasing caucus results in three formats:

• the first alignment body count from all caucus goers virtual and in person
• the count after everyone is re-realigned into a 15% viable group, either through virtual second choice votes or the traditional in person going to another corner
• the state delegate equivalent, which is how Iowa Democrats have always reported caucus results in the past

Only Iowa party activists, the delegate counters for the campaigns, and a handful of numbers-geeky national reporters (I'm thinking Steve Kornacki and maybe Chuck Todd) will care at all about delegate equivalents or realignment. The headline out of Iowa will be what the national press has always wanted and what Iowa Republicans have provided: the winner based on the first alignment vote count.

(What we are NOT likely to get is precinct and county level detail. My impression from yesterday's press conference call and from overall feedback is that local activists did not want their math complicated any further by having to factor in absentee- oops, virtual - votes.)

The virtual caucus plan also addresses a concern I've heard and expressed for years: that a not-present process would turn Iowa into a "year long absentee chase" by the campaigns. The timeline to sign up is late and it is relatively short: January 6 to 17, with the first Virtual Caucus set for January 29. That doesn't address the nightmare scenario of the Caucus Night Ice Storm or the individual issue of a personal thing coming up - but neither does an election. You either make your plan and vote early, or if you wait till Election Day you take your chance.

Once you sign up for Virtual Caucus, you can choose to call in for any one of the six - but you CAN'T change your mind and attend in person instead. That's part of why the last Virtual Caucus is scheduled to coincide with the in-person caucus, so people who change their mind and show up will still have one last chance to call in.

The late dates also address a concern unique to the presidential nomination process: last second changes in the field of candidates. A lot of California early voters will cast ballots for people who will drop out before that state's primary day. (Of course this can happen to early voters in regular elections, too, says the guy who voted for Nate Boulton on the first day of the 2018 governor primary.) Past caucus cycles have seen people drop out at the last second, and a late schedule (along with ranked choices) minimizes that factor.

These new options will require some earlier deadlines. Virtual Caucus participants will have to be registered Democrats by December 31, before signing up for the Virtual Caucus itself during the January 6-17 window. That's stricter than Iowa election law, but not bad compared to deadlines in other states (New York independents had to re-register months before the primary). And people registering or re-registering later, as late as Caucus Night itself, will still be able to caucus. They'll just have to go in person.

If you DO go in person, not much will be different. Price acknowledged in yesterday's call that speeding up sign-in and taking pressure off crowded rooms is still a priority but he did not go into details. (The BEST way to speed up sign-in is to get everyone registered as a D, and at their current address, by that December 31 date. As for the best way to deal with the crowds, that will be in part three.)

The single biggest difference will be in the realignment stage. Only people in the under 15% non-viable groups will be allowed to re-align. Once you are in a viable group, you are locked in.

And you can go home. Keeping all the cats herded until re-alignment is final is one of the most frustrating pieces of the caucus, both for attendees and for campaigns. This is not quite the Iowa GOP's "show up, vote, and leave," but it's a small step in that direction.

I had a bad experience with this in, of all years, 2012. That was at the height of Occupy, who were caucusing Uncommitted against Obama, and I knew it would be rough when I was challenged for chair, and almost lost. We had an odd number of delegates and a standoff for the last one. Uncommitted filibustered until a couple in the Obama corner announced that they had to go home to relieve their child care - and we may have been the only precinct in the state that the president lost.

So that tactic is gone, and so is the Old Bank Shot routine: "loaning" a candidate a few supporters as a strategic move to screw a third candidate. That's how Martin O'Malley won his lone Johnson County delegate; Team Hillary sent over a couple people to make him viable and to deny the delegate to Sanders.

Caucus night horsetrading has declined in recent years anyway. Historically, the prize for cutting a deal was the delegate seat. "I'll join Team X if I can be the delegate." When the caucus crowd was mainly party regulars, it was easier for a precinct captain to broker that deal and get the group to go along. But with increased attendance, increased campaign intensity, and more new faces, people are less willing to make that deal: "I've been with Hillary from the beginning. I want the delegate to be a Real Hillary Person and not this dude who just came over from O'Malley."

Party regulars may or may not like these tactics. But the new faces, who would rather just cast a secret ballot and go home, HATE them.

My sense is that this change is not being made to stop horsetrading. A true savant might still  be able to read the room and stash a few people away in a weak group, but you risk locking your people into an accidentally viable group.

What this is about is speeding things up. Example from my 2008 caucus:

All seven delegates were allocated: Obama had four, Edwards had two, and Clinton was hanging on to viability with one. The Dodd and Biden and Kucinich people had moved, but there was still a Bill Richardson group about three bodies short of viable. The Richardson people kept demanding more time and kept begging people to move - but it was not to anyone's advantage. To give Richardson a delegate, someone else would have to give one up.

This wasted about 45 minutes, during which a Richardson supporter kept screaming "Democracy takes time! Democracy takes time!" while the three viable groups tried to keep their people, not from defecting to Richardson, but from going home.

Under the new rules, this would not happen. The people in the three viable groups would be locked in, and could go home if they wanted or needed, and the people in the one non-viable group would have to move. (They would, however, get their choice reported in the raw vote count, for what that's worth.)

So all of this is good. People who can't attend can participate, New Hampshire is mollified for the moment, and in at least one big way things will move faster. But there's still one piece to the plan that needs some work, as we will see in part three.

Caucus Changes, Part 1: Primary Problems

One advantage of being a mere hobbyist blogger rather than a professional writer is that I have no deadlines. I write when I feel like it. And for the issue of changes in the Iowa caucus, I decided I needed time to think more than I needed to be fast, and there will be a long wonky post once I think it all through.

But before I dig into that I'm going to look at and set aside, for now and for the sake of argument, the question of switching to a primary, because some of the national reactions were "just have a primary."

While most of the first reactions to the Iowa Democratic Party's proposed caucus changes (which I will discuss in detail in two more posts) has been positive, more than a few people have responded in our Twitter feeds with JUST HAVE A PRIMARY. Some of these are sincere, and some are anti-Iowa trolls. (Daily Kos in particular has had a grudge against Iowa ever since 2004 when we tanked Howard Dean.)

The Scream was AFTER, and less of a problem than, the Disappointing Third Place.

After a lot of thought I, too,  have come to the conclusion that the Iowa caucuses have gotten so large and unwieldy that they cannot function as a "town meeting" to "build the party," and are instead a de facto election, with difficult rules, conducted by amateurs and volunteers. So philosophically I'm inclined to switch to a primary, even at the cost of First In The Nation.

First, of course, is the issue. In a complicated game of semantics and standoffs, two states have been "first" for the last 40 years: Iowa with the first caucus and New Hampshire with the first primary. Every move Iowa makes - and by "Iowa" I mean the political leadership of both parties - is with one eye on New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, who has a pitbull devotion to his state's law that New Hampshire "shall" have the first primary "or similar contest." (How is one state's law in any way binding on the other 49?)

Personally, I'd like to confront this head on. Schedule a primary before New Hampshire. Or concede the flaws in caucuses and concede First, but lobby for another slot in the early states like second or third - as a primary.

That's not happening this cycle. The leadership of both parties is committed to some version of the status quo standoff.

But what if the Democrats weren't? What if Iowa Democrats decided we actually want to switch to a primary?

Well, that's still a non-starter - because the Republicans have full control of state government.

That's the fundamental problem for people who would like the Democrats to tell states no caucuses, primaries only. Election law is mostly state law, not federal law, and the Democratic Party cannot tell Republican run states what to do. Each state has its own political culture, and some states, like Iowa, have a caucus culture. Other states are worried about money and have caucuses because the parties pay for those (in most states, primaries are government funded, though parties are billed in a few places).

Democrats have used that as an excuse before in different situations. When GOP-run Florida moved its 2008 primary date up to January 31, in violation of the rules of both parties, Democrats moaned and cried and said they couldn't do anything (even though Florida Dems, most of all Iowa caucus hater Debbie Wasserman Schultz, were willing junior partners). And, in the end, they and Michigan got away with it with no penalties, because they are big swing states.

But, hypothetically, if we wanted a primary, could Iowa Democrats persuade Iowa Republicans?

I've worked with local Republican activists a lot, both in my election office job and outside of work on caucus issues. The Johnson County Democrats and Republicans have a good relationship on caucus issues (as long as we avoid policy issues) and we team up to work on them.

My GOP activist friends are understanding and sympathetic to the reality that the Democratic National Committee rule changes, requiring caucus states to provide some sort of absentee system, are forcing Iowa to change.

But they are concerned that any monkeying with the system we have risks First. What I hear from Republicans is: "if you have absentees, that makes it not a caucus." And they are worried that THEY will lose First on their side because of rule changes on OUR side - because when it comes to First it's about the states, not the parties.

No one is pressuring or forcing Iowa Republicans to change their process. The accessibility and disenfranchisement issues that that drove the DNC to push for caucus changes simply don't resonate as much on the Republican side.

So Iowa Republicans would rather stay safe and keep what they have, and feel no need to do Democrats a favor by switching to a primary... which the Democrats aren't asking for anyway.

Warren, Northam, and "Soul Man"

Touchy issues of race on the Twitter feed today, as Virginia governor Ralph Northam tries to cling to political life after yearbook photos from 1984 showing him in either blackface or a KKK robe have come to light.

The shifting story - first apologizing, then backtracking and saying he's not one of the two people pictured - is implausible. And obviously the photo is indefensible.

But I'm about the same age, and I have to ask: While Klan robes were clearly understood as offensive by the Civil Rights era, did every young person in the mid-80s really get or accept that blackface was wrong?




(The positive Bill Cosby reference makes it even MORE dated.)

This was a major motion picture released in 1986, the height of the Reagan era, when backlash to affirmative action was kicking in as a big wedge issue. Refresher on the plot for my younger readers: Rich white dude poses as black to get a minority scholarship to Harvard Law. That's right, the entire premise of the movie was blackface, and the contrived Moral Of The Story ending did not make it better. (And what on earth convinced James Earl Jones, Darth Vader Himself, to play a good-sized supporting role?)

I remember "Soul Man" (and by extension blackface yearbook photos) being considered cringe-worthy even then, in reasonably enlightened circles... but it was still a hit. A person with a graduate level education should have known better than blackface in the mid-80s, but the mainstream success of "Soul Man" shows that a lot of people didn't, or didn't care.

Affirmative action, and Harvard Law, are also at the core of the controversy around Elizabeth Warren's DNA test and subsequent apology to the Cherokee Nation. Warren has long claimed Cherokee ancestry, and both she and Harvard promoted this "fact," but the testing revealed that her Native genetic share was minuscule, roughly one great-great-great grandparent to great-great-great-great-great grandparent.

Yet I have never understood the Big Deal here. It was clearly a piece of family lore passed down over generations and exaggerated over lifetimes before Warren was even born. She no doubt believed it was true.

Cheap commercial DNA testing for genealogical purposes, as opposed to medical use or criminal investigation, has only been a mainstream thing in the last few years.It certainly wasn't available in 1992, when Warren first taught at Harvard, or 1995, when she was permanently hired.

By coincidence, I worked in a genetic lab (as a clerk) in that same era. We needed good-sized, specially treated and handled blood or amnio fluid draws or tissue samples back then just to count chromosomes and identify major structural chromosome issues. You certainly couldn't mail a saliva sample or cheek swab in and identify markers.

In the mid-90s, what reason would Warren have had to doubt family ancestry tales she had been told her whole life? Partial Native ancestry is not at all uncommon in her home state of Oklahoma, which has the highest percentage Native population in the country (because the land long knowns as "Indian Territory" was considered so worthless that it was the last piece of the Lower 48 that whites took from the Natives.)

It may have benefited both, but if both Warren and Harvard believed her Native ancestry was more extensive than was later shown on her genetic profile, there is no one to blame except 1) her long dead ancestors and 2) the entire system of diversity in hiring or "affirmative action." And voters who are angry about "quotas" are already firmly in the Trump base, have been since the "Soul Man" era,  and unlikely to consider voting for ANY of the Democrats running.

In any case, Warren repeating family tall tales she believed to be true is hardly equal to "Soul Man," or to Northam's behavior which was beginning to be understood as offensive even then.

Second Thoughts: Election Day as Holiday?

I appreciate the sentiment behind Election Day As Holiday. But that alone won't fix everything - it may not even be the best way to fix things. We also need to carefully consider all the unintended consequences, especially to child care and public transit.

Think it all the way through. What if your kid's school and the bus line closes on Election Day Holiday and your job does not? Then you're in worse shape than you would be on a normal working weekday. And there's likely to be a serious class division as to who actually gets the holiday.

Public safety doesn't close. Hospitals don't close. Radio stations don't close (my main experience in working holidays). And increasingly, unfortunately, retail doesn't close.

I am privileged enough, thanks to my union, that I got a nice four days off, two with pay and two weekend days, at Christmas. But that was 21 through 25 and I had to work on the 26th, so my schedule had me driving home through rural parts of Wisconsin and Iowa on Christmas morning.

Nearly every gas station was open. If they make you work on CHRISTMAS, do you think you're getting Election Day off?

We need to stop thinking of Election "Day" and think in terms of Election Season. A nationwide extended early voting period like Iowa has, including nights and weekends and satellite locations other than government offices, would do more good than a single day holiday.

Personally, rather than a holiday, I'd like to see us do what most other Western democracies do: vote on Sunday. But most countries are more secular, and zero odds that churches will accept it.

One way I think an Election Day holiday would help: freeing up a pool of people to serve as pollworkers. If the schools close, that also addresses school security concerns (which I think are overblown, but I hear them)

But what we lose with closed schools: Kids seeing grownups vote and learning the behavior, and voters who may not have students seeing the schools.

Thoughts on Howard Schultz

My Howard Schultz take is heavily influenced by this graph:

There are a *lot* more people with economically liberal but socially conservative views, but that's not how "centrism" gets interpreted in elite political discourse

— Steven White (@notstevenwhite) January 28, 2019

There are very few voters in his economic conservative/social liberal elite niche, but you see a LOT of social conservative/economic liberal working class voters. Two entire generations of Southern Democratic New Deal segregationists lived in that quadrant of the graph.

Donald Trump was kind of this, or could have been, if he had followed through on his vague talk of infrastructure. But after two years of government and passing every tax cut for the rich McConnell and Ryan served up, no one takes that seriously anymore.

The Economically Liberal Socially Conservative platform almost writes itself:

• It starts with a "Higher Wages For Real Americans" slogan: a minimum wage increase coupled to mass deportation (which I still think is End Game for the Steve King base).
  
• Free college/voc ed? Sure - but with an end to tenure and affirmative action, curriculum restrictions on "political correctness," a military service requirement, and limited to citizens only.
• Medicare For All but with with no abortion/family planning component and a strict work requirement - and again, citizens only.
• A WPA style program replaces public assistance. The projects are rural highways (and definitely not parks, wind and solar power, or bike trails)
• Pay for it with raised taxes on millionaires; but cut the gasoline tax. (Rural folks drive long distances in fuel-inefficient trucks.)

All that is interesting, if very scary. Not to go You Know Who Else but it applies: 1930s Germany expanded social programs - as long as you were a hetero non-disabled non-Jewish non-leftist ethnic German. If you weren't, well...

None of this has much to do with Howard Schultz. All he brings to the table is an excuse for Trump-queasy Republicans who can't quite bring themselves to go all the way and mark the D (and don't think that's an accident). He's Evan McMullin without the national security experience and without the Mormon connection that got him into double digits in Utah.

But you don't need double digits anywhere, you just need the right numbers in the right states, da?

Thoughts on Sanders version 2.020

At the risk of getting ratioed by trolls, some thoughts on Sanders version 2.020. All of this is analysis, as objective as I can make it, and I’m not planning to endorse before the caucuses.

First some setup. There are very few general election swing voters left. The floor for both parties used to be in the 37% range (Goldwater & McGovern). That left 25% of voters persuadable. Now that floor is closer to 45% and both sides were close to that at Hillary 48, Trump 46..

That leaves only 10% persuadable – but not persuadable in a traditional way. There are two remaining swing groups of about equal size, roughly 5% of the full electorate, and persuading these two groups is a mutually exclusive task.

(Aside: The Republicans in general and Trump in particular have moved far enough to the right that there is no breathing room for fringe parties of the far right; the Constitution Party polled just 0.15%.)

The first swing group is roughly in the center: the tiny handful of pure Independents, along with moderate-right suburbanites who were turned off by Trump.

Some of these voters held their noses for Trump, and others scattered to McMullin or the Libertarians. Some, in 2016 and especially in 2018, went all the way to the Democrats, and that group may expand after four years of Trump and with a non-Hillary heading the Democratic ticket.

The other swing group is the left edge of the electorate. This brings us back to Sanders, and the unfortunate need to revisit 2016. 

Leave aside all the discussion about How 2016 Went Down (the word “rigged” gets you blocked). It’s not relevant to the point here.

The vote totals show Sanders with 43% of the primary vote. (That was NOT 43% for “Socialism”.) Round that up to half for the sake of this discussion: half the primary vote, and in a 50-50 nation that’s 25% of the general electorate.

Half of that Sanders primary vote was simply Not Hillary. Whether that is misogyny, 25 years of anti-Hillary propaganda, or just general distaste does not matter. If you wanted to vote Not Hillary, Sanders was the only option – and 2020 will not be a binary primary.

So take away half of Sanders 2016 support and scatter it a dozen ways. That gets you down to 25% of the Democratic primary electorate and 12-13% of the whole electorate.

Within this share, about half of Sanders support was based on a policy/ideology preference of moving the Democrats in a more progressive direction. Sanders won all of this in 2016, but will now have to compete for it with several other candidates: Harris, Warren, Brown, whoever.

(Gabbard is barely viable anyway, but if Sanders gets in she is done, since the biggest thing people liked about her was her Sanders support. No one is going to pick The Surrogate over The Dude Himself.)

This Move The Democrats Left share is actually bigger than 25% of the primary voters because many in this niche voted for Clinton anyway because of Woman President or various issues with Sanders (not a D, personal history, personal finances, etc). I count myself among this group.

So that’s ¾ of the 2016 Sanders voters. Now we are down to the ballpark of 12% of the primary electorate – which is VERY close to what Sanders is polling -  and 6% of the general election voters, which is the third party/write-in share of the 2016 vote.

This group is responding specifically to Sanders and his rhetorical style – the Millionaires And Billionaires, the Oligarchy, the specific word Socialism, and his historic hostility to, and refusal to join, the Democratic Party.

I understand this because I used to BE this. You may call me “establishment” now but I spend a whole grad school semester writing a Bernie Sanders paper – in 19-freakin-90, back when Jesse Jackson was considered the bleeding left edge.

So I think it’s a good thing that these voters have someone speaking to them, which I did not get to have during that stage of my political growth.

And Sanders and his supporters have pushed the left edge of the Overton Window quite a ways (but not as far as Trumpism has pushed it in the opposite direction).

Some share of these voters – let’s again say half – will, in a swing state or a close race, “hold their noses” for the Democratic nominee just as I did for Dukakis. This share will grow with a non-Hillary nominee. And as much as “hold my nose” grates on me, it’s a vote & we’ll take it.

This Hold My Nose vote is among that 10% that Sanders is polling now for the 2020 nomination. So that accounts for 7/8 of the Sanders vote. Let’s round that up to 90% of 2016 Sanders supporters: Reasonable people who play by the rules, written and unwritten. I have no quarrel with them.

Now we are down to the final group: Just 5 or 6% of primary voters, and 2 or 3% of the general election voters.

This group believes My Vote Has To Be Earned, but nothing can Earn it other than the Sanders issues worded in the Sanders style. They want The Revolution Now. They want to replace the Democrats with a Euro-style explicitly socialist party. Some get their kicks from disruption.

This fringe sliver also includes the personality cult. Every candidate has a little personality cult around them (Obama and Hillary both did and Trump sure does) but Sanders has a bigger share than any American politician other than the Pauls.

(Someone really needs to study the Libertarian-Socialist-Alternative-Bro-ЯevolutioИ dynamic. Bernie Sanders was the worst thing that ever happened to Rand Paul.)

This final 2-3% of voters is unreachable. They are going to do what they are going to do: a write in, a Stein vote, a Libertarian vote.

Or even a Trolling Trump Susan Sarandon Things Have To Get Worse So The ЯevolutioИ Happens Faster vote. At each stage of caucus and convention process, through self-selection, these toxic voters make up a bigger share of the people showing up.

The only way to win these votes is to nominate Sanders. And in a cost-benefit analysis, that’s a net loss of votes.

The Sanders Style that turns on the hipsters in the grad student proletariat (again, this is only about 10% of ALL Sanders voters) turns OFF that 5% chunk in the middle that is trying to choose between the Democrat, a McMullin-style independent, or a reluctant Trump vote.

That’s where Hillary made gains in 2016 – and another candidate will be better positioned to build on those. That’s where we gained seats in 2018 – in the suburbs.

These reluctant Against Trump rather than For The Democrat voters will recoil at Revolution Rhetoric. Most Americans hear “socialism” & think of what the parlance of the left calls “tankies”: old-school Stalinists. Doesn’t matter if that’s “fair,” since when does “fair” matter?

It’s a tradeoff: If the Democratic nominee says the things s/he needs to Earn X number of Bernie Or Bust Votes, or is the person they want, s/he will lose Y number of Reluctant Moderate Against Trump votes. The idea is to get the largest number, and I contend that Y > X.

In short:

Electorate ½ D ½ R.

Ds ½ Hillary ½ Bernie.

Bernie 2016 was ½ Not Hillary ½ Move Ds Left.

Move Ds Left is ½ Open To Other Progressives ½ Core Bernie.

Core Bernie is ½ Hold Nose for Nominee ½ Bernie or Bust.

Don't waste energy on ½ of ½ of ½ of ½ of ½.

So candidates, reach out to the reasonable 90% of the 2016 Sanders vote – the Move The Democrats Left voters, and even to the Hold My Nose voters. But push back against the forces of destruction. They make noise out of all proportion to their numbers.

Feenstra (and more?) vs. King

Well, the inimitable Steve King has finally put his foot in his mouth one too many times, and now he has a serious primary challenge coming up from state senator Randy Feenstra.

This isn't a token challenge like Cyndi Hanson ran last year, or even a half-serious effort like Rick Bertrand tried in 2016. As you can tell from the state and even national Republicans poling on, this is the real thing.

And it's the correct strategy. You can't win a GOP primary running as a moderate, and Feenstra, who represents the number one Republican district in the state senate (the Orange Free State of Sioux County)  is as conservative as they get.  He'll get the moderate's votes anyway, just for being Not Steve King.

If elected, Feenstra will have exactly the same voting record, with none of the embarrassment. He's Steve King without  the Geert Wilders retweets - and without the weakness of running 10%  behind the ticket in a general election.

That weakness is King's real crime in the eyes of Republican leaders. This challenge is not happening because it's the right thing to do. It's happening because of Democrat J.D. Scholten's near miss last year proved that King has become an under-performing liability to the rest of the party.

The GOP is worried that in a presidential year, King could actually lose the seat, and losing one vote in the US House for two years (because a Democrat would certainly lose next cycle to a non-King R) is a higher price then they are willing to pay. Without King IA04 is rock solid Safe R.

.@SteveKingIA in 2020?

— John Deeth (@johndeeth) January 11, 2019

So Democrats  need to be careful what we wish for in the primary. If we want to hold the seat on a fluke for two years, cross our fingers, and see what happens in 2022 redistricting, the best scenario is a narrow King primary win. Or, better yet - a primary where King wins with under 50% because of multiple opponents (the technical term is "Clown Car Effect").

But if we just want to exchange King for an equally conservative but less offensive Republican, that may be worth crossing over. (Personally I'm opposed to crossing over in primaries, for any reason, but I seem to be one of the few any more.)

Democratic voters considering a crossover also need to think about a possible US Senate primary. If there's an interesting race developing, voters will have to choose between Beat King Now and Who Can Beat Ernst Later.

The Senate primary may also look suddenly attractive to Scholten or another northwest Iowa Democrat. If you get into the 4th District race, and King loses the primary, you just lost 10 points off your general election tally and the race is over. You also lose all the out of district and out of state money you can raise with the concise fundraising pitch "I'm running against Steve King."

This discounts the possibility of strategic voting, Democrats crossing over to stick Republicans with the weaker candidate, King. (The technical term is "ratfucking.") Very  few voters think or vote like that. They cross over to sincerely vote  for (or against) someone.

If there's a big crossover in Story County of students and professors eager to dump King, his team will get a heads up and have time to react- because of the primary being at the spring semester/summer session break, a lot of folks will have to vote early.

Closer to home for Feenstra, his state senate seat is on the presidential cycle, so it's up or out. That means an open seat primary for that job on his home turf, and the turnout spike helps him. When this seat was up in 2004, it saw general election level turnout in the Republican primary, because in Sioux County the primary is the de facto general election. Kind of like my county only opposite and more so.

But four years later, when Dave Mulder retired, Feenstra walked into the seat unopposed, and in three terms he has never had a primary OR general election opponent. In fact, he may not even have had an opponent when he was Sioux County treasurer before that. So he's somewhat untested as a candidate. You know who else was a county treasurer in that same era - a certain governor.

Feenstra briefly considered a run for state treasurer in 2009 but didn't; instead the GOP ran one Dave Jamison, who was both a county treasurer and a close "ally" of Kim Reynolds, but has had, well, a few problems of late...

Why Romney Can Speak More Freely

A lot, maybe too much, is being made of Mitt Romney's Washington Post piece attacking Donald Trump on character:

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state...

 (Which leaves him room to tsk-tsk Trump while voting for his agenda)

...and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

There's a reason why Romney is able to go after Trump on his way (back) into office, instead of on his way out which is the only time most other Republican officials suddenly find fault. And that reason is not Romney's standing as the Republicans' presidential nominee once removed.

It's his current home state (he's so rich he has three), Utah.

Utah, and to a lesser extent the next-door Mormon part of south Idaho, was the only place where social conservatives rebelled against Donald Trump over character issues. Trump took only 45% in one of the most conservative states in the nation. Conservative independent Evan McMullin, a fellow Mormon and a Utah native, won 21% of the statewide vote.

It's possible that because Utah is SO red, with such a low ceiling for Democrats, that people felt comfortable with a protest vote. If a third of Republicans had defected to a third party in South Carolina, Louisiana, or Mississippi, Hillary Clinton could have relied on a strong black Democratic base in those states and squeaked by with 40% plurality wins. You can kind of see why Republicans stayed in line there.

But that doesn't explain Tennessee, where the Democratic base is smaller with Clinton at 35%. That's beyond reach and safe enough that more Republicans who were truly disturbed by Trump's style and behavior could have safely bolted. Yet Trump was at 61% there, with Gary Johnson just short of 3%. Alabama (Trump 62, Clinton 34) is similar, though Roy Moore has since proved that even Alabama has its limits.

It also doesn't explain the difference between Utah and a couple of other similar red states with similar racial demographics and similar mid-sized cities -  but different religious demographics.

Oklahoma is the clearest example. Hillary Clinton won 29% in Oklahoma, about the same as her 27 in Utah. Yet in Oklahoma, predominantly Southern Baptist, Trump was at 65%.

Nebraska is mixed Catholic and mainline Protestant. It's a less clear example because of their congressional district elector system, but the state as a whole was uncompetitive. Hillary was only at 33, but Trump was still at 59.

The big trade-off - ignoring "grab them by the pussy" in exchange for the judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade - kept social conservative Republicans in the Republican column in most of the country. The only place you see defection at the double digit level is Utah. And that has to be more than just "McMullin is from here" or "it's safe to vote third party in Utah." I don't know exactly what, but that seems to be something uniquely and specifically Mormon.

What all this means is that a substantial part, at least a third, of the Utah Republican base is legitimately Never Trump. So unlike most Trump critics within the GOP, Mitt Romney is not vulnerable to a challenge for re-nomination, which is a bigger threat to most red state Republicans than losing to a Democrat. And that, more than any residual stature from his presidential campaign, is why he is more free to go after Trump than any other Republican with aspirations toward re-election.

That's assuming he would even want to run again in 2024 at age 77. If this Senate term is a one-and-done career valedictory and Romney is an instant lame duck 🦆 he may feel even more free to rhetorically challenge Trump. This will probably not, however, affect his actual voting record.

Change the rules if you don't like the results

As Royceann Porter takes her seat on the Board of Supervisors, I see the local Republicans (or at least the losing candidate in last week's election) are talking about supervisor districts again. Which is the classic 21st century Republican M.O.: If you don't like the results, change the rules. But districts would not get the outcome they want.

The apparent goal is an all-rural "doughnut" district surrounding the urban area, like Linn County had until this election. The math for that does not work in Johnson County. I showed the math six years ago.

Supervisor districts in Johnson County will NOT get you a farmer from Solon, a farmer from Oxford, a farmer from Sharon Center, a farmer from Lone Tree, and a token liberal from The City. Supervisor districts will get you three supervisors from Iowa City, one from Coralville, one from North Liberty, and shut out the rurals completely.

The best option for rural voters is the present at large system where they have influence over all five seats. And it's disproportionate influence, since they turn out at a higher percentage rate than the in-town folks.

But the rural voters can't do it alone. Even in a district system, all five seats would be dominated by urban voters. If they want a supervisor who "represents the rural community" they need a candidate who ALSO appeals to urban voters - like Sally Stutsman did in winning five terms.

A candidate with a philosophy that the Board should only plow and grade roads and rubber-stamp re-zonings will NOT appeal to urban voters.

House 55 a failure of strategy as much as law

The battle for House District 55 is now de facto over, with the courts kicking the question of 29 ballots that were barcoded rather than stamp-canceling postmarked back to the Republican-controlled Iowa House, which will undoubtedly refuse to open the ballots and will rule incumbent Mike Bergan a nine vote winner over Democrat Kayla Koether.

Leave aside the court's failure to define what legally constitutes an "intelligent barcode" or a "postmark." That issue is moot anyway. The Legislature will almost certainly eliminate the postmark issue by saying ballots must arrive before the polls close - which will be clear, but which will count fewer votes.

If so, they should make up for that lost time on the front end and allow auditors to mail domestic ballots 45 days out, which is what overseas and military voters get, or even the 40 days we had till this year. More time means more problems solved. But that's a different issue.

The issue I am concerned about is tactical, not legal.

Yes, I want to #CountEveryVote. But this needs to be said: Relying on vote by mail cost Koether and the Iowa Democratic Party the election. 

For at least the last ten cycles IDP has bullied voters toward mailed ballots, no matter what. You're a Bad Democrat if you don't fill out your ABR - even if you would be better served by a satellite site or a courthouse vote, even if you want to join the opening day March To The Polls, even if you are 100% reliable on Election Day - even if you work in an auditor's office!

I am never going to fill out an ABR. Don't even ask.  I have a convenient polling place three feet in front of my desk. Granted, most voters don't work in a courthouse, but even leaving that aside, I would never trust something as critical as a ballot to the Postal Service. They don't have the resources to do the quality of work they did 20 years ago. I have one bill without online payment available, and I don't even like sending that $25 to Von Maur in the mail.

(Why can't we vote online? Or, if you insist on voting by mail, why can't we do the whole request process online without requiring an original paper copy as follow-up?)

Vote by mail has its place and its uses but it is far less reliable than other methods of voting. But IDP pushes a one-size-fits-all program that emphasizes mail over all other voting methods.

1000 people at satellite sites or the auditor's office is 1000 votes, or maybe 995 because mistakes still happen. But 1000 ABRs is 900 votes and 100 problems - ballots lost in the mail or thrown away. People not understanding.  People filling forms out just to make the volunteer go away, either never intending to vote at all or intending all along to go to the polls, where they may now have to do a provisional ballot because of that ABR.

Voters are not even informed that satellite voting and the auditor's office are options - because staffers want to make their vote by mail quota. If you push a voter to the office or a satellite, that doesn't count toward your quota. And don't pretend there isn't a quota. In the 2004 cycle I heard stories of staffers having their friends fill out duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate ABRs to boost their numbers. (They still only got one ballot, but the unit of measure was requests.)

I attended trainings last summer to help teach doorknockers. They were TOLD, first thing, they HAD to fill out an ABR. When I brought up satellites and office votes I was barely acknowledged. Volunteers were also told they could not leave a blank request form with a voter. At that point I undercut the staffer and corrected that misinformation.

None of this is criticism of the staffers - it's criticism of the plan.

Well, congrats. Those 29 ABRs in Winneshiek County counted toward some staffer's quota. But they didn't count when it mattered. How many of these 29 (non) voters were right in town in Decorah and could have been asked to make a quick stop at the courthouse? How many could have been steered to the satellite site at the Luther student union? How many of these (non) voters were in populations actually best served with a mailed ballot - rural, mobility challenged, or out of town? These are not hypothetical questions; I'd like numbers.

It's way past time for the state party to back off on shoving vote by mail down everyone's throats, adapt plans to local needs and local political culture, and fully inform voters of all voting options.

Elected Official Factoids

With Endless Election Season finally over following Royceann Porter's election to the Board of Supervisors Tuesday, we have a more or less final roster of the elected officials who will represent Johnson County in the coming year.

A total of 219 elected officials represent Johnson County voters at all levels of government, from Donald Trump to dogcatcher (the official title is "Canine Control Commissioner"). That's not counting school boards for districts that are mostly in other counties. The county has a dozen school districts but only four are mostly in our county - one more complication of the new combined city-school election we will see next November.

Just kidding about Canine Control Commissioner (if we did elect dogg catchers there could only be one choice), but 84 of these officials are township officers - 21 clerks and 63 trustees who deal with fire and cemetery budgets and fence disputes in the rural area. These seats are rarely contested and sometimes decided by write-ins when no one files. Four of these township seats are currently vacant, though two appointments have been decided but not yet finalized (the incumbents who tried not to run are getting re-appointed anyway). I'm including those two people in the stats below.

The township officials are on average older and more male than other officials. We have a big gender gap - 70 of the 219 elected officials are women and 147 men. When the township offices are excluded, the gender balance gets much closer - 55 women and 80 men. Several governmental bodies are female majority, most notably the four women, one man Board of Supervisors.

Other types of diversity are harder to document and since I don't want to leave anyone out I won't go too far down that road. To the best of my knowledge we have four African Americans in office - Porter,  Iowa City council members Bruce Teague and Mazahir Salih, and Iowa City school board member Ruthina Malone.

30 of the 219 offices are elected on a partisan basis, and of those 30 there are 21 Democrats, including every seat that is controlled solely by Johnson County voters. Though we are the People's Republic, we have 51 registered Republicans representing Johnson County voters, from Trump to the trustees. These are either partisan officials at the state or federal level where other counties have outvoted us, or locals in officially nonpartisan office.(Township offices were partisan until 2006.)

135 of the 219 officials are registered Democrats, and 31 are registered no party. None are registered with third parties, though we have had a Green school board member and a Libertarian mayor in recent years.

The median age elected official is Kathy Swenka of the Clear Creek Amana school board, by coincidence celebrating her 58th birthday today. Excluding the township officials makes Porter our median age official; she turned 53 last week.

Seven of our elected officials are under the constitutional minimum of 35 to be elected president. The only one under 30 is new state senator Zach Wahls, who at 27 is the youngest by nearly four years. Tyler Baird of the Lone Tree city council, at 31, is next youngest.

Our oldest elected official is Union Township trustee Donald Johnson, who turns 90 next week. At 85, Chuck Grassley is next. Nine officials are over 80, all township officials except Grassley and Dottie Maher of the University Heights city council.

Grassley is also the official who has represented Johnson County the longest. Grassley has held public office since 1958, serving first in the legislature and then the US House, but he did not have Johnson County voters till his first Senate win in 1980. At least a dozen officials have served continuously since before the turn of the century; my data on first election dates for township officers is incomplete.
 
Among strictly local offices, the official with the longest service is a matter of definition. Jim Bartels has been on the Tiffin city council continuously since 1989. Tom Gill of the Coralville city council won his first term in 1987, but voluntarily took two years off at the turn of the century.
 
However you define the new champ, the old leader was Bob Dvorsky. He was continuously in office from his first Coralville city council win in 1979 until his retirement from the state senate this year, save for a gap of a few days in 1994 when he resigned from the state house  to run in a state senate special election. That allowed the two special elections to be combined. To my knowledge he's the only legislator who has ever done that and I can't repeat the story enough.

Porter's win a sign of long term change in Johnson County

Johnson County's endless election season, which went into overtime after the sudden death of Supervisor Kurt Friese on October 26, finally ended Tuesday with Democrat Royceann Porter's barrier-breaking win over Republican Phil Hemingway.

The December 18 election wraps up a run of four large elections in four months, with the November 6 general election and a September-October pair of Iowa City council elections in which Bruce Teague replaced Kingsley Botchway. It's the busiest run of elections since 1993, when we had a cluster of six in seven months: a school bond in May, a June-July pair in Iowa City to replace a city council member, and the usual fall run of September school, October city primary, and November city election. (The school election goes away next year and gets combined with the November city election.)

I worked in the auditor's office back in the Grunge Era, though not in elections. I was a part time minute taker, and I learned far more about politics in two years of meetings than I did in five years getting a political science degree (the extra year was spent drinking). I learned that zoning fights were the nastiest because that's where the money is.

The Johnson County Board of Supervisors was a rural dominated body back then, led by the traditional part-time officials who were mainly farmers. They only met twice a week, and some members were rarely in the building except for meetings.

That was just... how it had always been. Sure, we had newcomer Joe Bolkcom, the first Iowa City progressive ever elected to the board, but he was a skunk at the picnic and had trouble even getting his motions seconded. There was a sense that, despite all their other functions affecting the whole county, the Board of Supervisors "belonged" to the rural voters.

As we can tell from the Hemingway campaign's rhetoric this election, some people still think so. More than once I heard from voters: "city people shouldn't be allowed to vote for supervisor."

We had our ugliest special election ever in that era. A supervisor resigned out of the blue and the appointment committee named Don Sehr, a gruff but likeable big old farmer from Sharon Center who had served three board terms in the 70s and 80s. The liberals petitioned for an election and Sehr lost the nomination at the Democratic convention to Pat Gilroy, a longtime party activist and one of my many mentors who is sadly no longer with us.

Sehr bolted the party and ran as an independent, and won convincingly. The mood was so nasty that one of his supporters came to the Gilroy "victory" party to laugh at us.

Sehr won that 1994 special election with 4291 votes to Gilroy's 2571, and that was one of the key elections in developing one of my formulas for understanding Johnson County politics. As I wrote before Porter's election:

There is a "Farm Vote" constituency in Johnson County. Not all rural voters are part of it, and  it includes some old timers in town, but "Farm Vote" is the best shorthand label I have.  These voters will not support a progressive candidate for supervisor - that office in particular more than others.

It's made up of Democrats who will back a Tom Harkin or a Tom Miller, but maybe not a Hillary Clinton or a Bruce Braley. It's made up of sophisticated local Republicans more motivated by business than ideology. It's made up of independents who care more about who is in the courthouse than in the White House.

That Farm Vote has been consistently 3000 to 4000 votes, in presidential elections and in low turnout specials, all the way back to at least 1992 .


The "Farm Vote"

Election	Measure	Total
1992 general	Duffy minus Bolkcom	3802
1994 special	Sehr total (win)	4291
2000 general	Neuzil minus Thompson	3376
2000 general	Smalley minus Brown	3761
2004 general	Harney minus Sullivan	4435
2008 general	Harney minus Sullivan	4273
2010 special	Cardella total (loss)	3764
2012 general	Neuzil minus Sullivan	2788
2013 special	Etheredge total (win)	3142
2018 general	Heiden minus Rettig	3086

Tuesday's election fell right into that pattern. Hemingway won 4167 votes. He got the Farm Vote. He got EXACTLY the Farm Vote. In 1994, when we had just 59,000 registered voters in the county, that was a win number.

But now we have 97,000 registered voters, and that growth has been almost entirely in the cities and not in the Farm Vote. Porter won 5444, twice what Gilroy earned so long ago.

Our results for this election almost exactly - turnout within 100 votes and similar shares of the vote - paralleled the January 2010 special election in which Democrat Janelle Rettig, who had been appointed in October 2009, defeated Republican Lori Cardella, who had led a petition drive to force the election. (Cardella's number is slightly lower than Hemingway's because a third candidate took 332 votes, mostly from her.)

That election was a barrier breaker, as Rettig became the first out LGBT supervisor elected in the state. Porter breaks a barrier, too, as Johnson County's first black countywide office holder.

There have been African Americans in Iowa City office recently - current council member Mazahir Salih, former council member Kingsley Botchway, and former mayor Ross Wilburn. We've also had school board members LaTasha DeLoach and Ruthina Malone.Those jobs are non-partisan (though all those people are Democrats). You have to go back to state representative William Hargrave in the early 1970s to find a black Johnson County Democrat in a partisan office.

That's a very big thing for the Johnson County Democrats. At the nominating convention, a friend of Porter's who came along for personal support asked me, "where are all the black delegates at?" Having nominated, campaigned hard for, and elected Porter, the county party is now walking the walk when it comes to visible support.  Barack Obama is one thing, but that thing is over and this thing is here and now and local, and Porter's deep roots in the local African American community will further strengthen the ties.

There is still a lot of work to do in Johnson County on race; after the one forum, we heard comments about Hemingway "sounding better" and being more "articulate."  But I think Porter's seat at the Big Table will help shift those perceptions of what a leader in Johnson County looks and sounds like, and I hope our next convention we will be less monochromatic.

Your @JohnsonCountyIA Board of Supervisors pic.twitter.com/K4KpDEXvhp

— John Deeth (@johndeeth) December 19, 2018

Adding to the diversity, Johnson County may have the most female county board in the state with four women - Porter, Rettig, Lisa Green-Douglass and Pat Heiden - and one token male, Rod Sullivan. Add in recorder Kim Painter and county attorney Janet Lyness and that's six women to four men in the courthouse.

The Democrats did not take this win for granted. The memory of the March 2013 special election, in which Republican John Etheredge upset Democrat Terry Dahms, is still fresh. Everything that could go wrong in that election did go wrong, including self inflicted wounds - a split other than the rural-urban split that led some "progessives" to throw Dahms under the bus. There were no such splits this time, though a few people were unusually quiet.  (Hemingway has some ties to some left Democrats through the failed fight to keep old Hoover Elementary School open.)

Porter comes out of the Teamsters and this is another big win for local labor, which has been on a winning steak of late.

There is, however, a cloud to this silver lining.

Porter carried the election day vote in Iowa City and University Heights by two to one, 67-33%, winning every urban area precinct except North Liberty 6 (which includes rural Madison Township voters) and, losing by one vote, Coralville 2. But Hemingway won every rural precinct and led in the rural part of the county by a whopping 73-26.

Zoom in on the precincts and you see Porter carrying Iowa City 21 (the Goosetown part of the north side) with 88% and Hemingway winning Washington Township (Frytown and rural Kalona) with 95%. We saw these kinds of differences in the general election results, and back in the Rettig-Cardella election, but not nearly this extremely exaggerated.

So there is a lot of rural work to do. Johnson County has office holders who can bridge this gap. Senator Kevin Kinney is most prominent, but a couple of our small town mayors, Christopher Taylor of Swisher (who is also county Democratic chair) and Lone Tree's Jonathan Green (who served a term on the state central committee) are also noteworthy.

Unfortunately, Republican affiliation is becoming more and more a part of rural cultural identity - nationally, in Iowa, and even in the People's Republic. Gigabytes have been posted trying to "solve" that issue, and I don't know if it IS solvable.

There's certain to be some kind of backlash in rural Johnson County to Porter's win. There has been a years long simmering effort by Republicans to force supervisor districts, but the rhetoric has shifted, perhaps because of this post where I show the math.

A district map would not produce the Board that the Farm Vote would see as "fair and representative," which would be a farmer from Solon, a farmer from Oxford, a farmer from Sharon Center, a farmer from Lone Tree, and one token liberal from In Town.

We used to have boards like that, and part of the rural resentment is that they no longer have that kind of over-representation. Rural Johnson County is 16% of the registered voters, and they have 20% of the supervisors in Lisa Green-Douglass. We also have one supervisor, Sullivan, who grew up on a family farm and carries that experience whatever his current residence is.

A district plan would not even produce the map Linn County had until this year with a "donut" rural district surrounding the cities. A district plan in Johnson would produce three Iowa City districts, a Coralville seat, and a district that would be just over half North Liberty, and would be more likely to shut out rural representation than increase it.

Instead, the backlash move will probably be for a reduction in seats from five to three. The Farm Vote may have concluded that they can't control or win a seat, but at least, they think, they can try to force two liberal Democrats out of a job, and if they're lucky it might be the black woman and the lesbian.

But they have to win an election to make that happen, and Johnson County urban voters are much much more tuned in to such gaming-the-rules shenanigans and local inside baseball  issues than they used to be. At the time of the March 2013 loss I wrote:

Johnson County has a lot of lefties who will call their legislators about an amendment to a bill that won't even get out of the funnel, rather than calling their neighbors to get out and vote in a local election. We have a lot of ivory tower types who are above gauche townie things like a zoning fight, which is why Iowa City's council had been business conservative dominated all my 20+ years here.

Those days are over. The Iowa City council, after decades of Chamber of Commerce control, flipped in 2015 with the sweep of all four seats on the ballot by the "Core Four" progressives. Iowa City business conservatives have learned that they will never again elect an unreconstructed townie good old boy like Terry Dickens or Ernie Lehman, and that to win they have to appeal to at least some liberals.

Tuesday's election may have been the same watershed moment in county politics. Hemingway had a lot of advantages - name ID from his general election and school board runs and a low turnout off-cycle election a week before Christmas that gave his Farm Vote base an edge. But he fell 1300 votes short as city turnout swamped that constant, steady, stagnant, finite 4000 person Farm Vote.

The rurals punched above their weight - but there are just a lot more voters in town than in the country. If the shrinking share of the county vote that is rural wants a seat at the table, they need to build a coalition and find a candidate who also appeals to the much larger base of voters in Iowa City, Coralville, and North Liberty.

And the old-fashioned philosophy that the county supervisors should do nothing except plow and grade the roads and rubber-stamp rezonings does not appeal to voters in Iowa City, Coralville, and North Liberty.