Iowa GOP criticized for raising the stakes of HD90 race

Many Iowa Republicans looked at Tuesday’s special election in House District 90 and saw an opportunity to demonstrate the party was beginning to reverse its fortunes.

After losing seats in the state House and Senate for four elections in a row and giving Democrats control of both legislative chambers and Terrace Hill for the first time in decades, Republicans hoped a victory in this rural southeastern Iowa district would be just what the doctor ordered to show they’ve finally turned things around.

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn told The Des Moines Register the campaign was “a pivotal election and could set the stage for even more victories in 2010,” and in an e-mail to supporters July 29 he called the race “our spring board to a new Republican majority in 2010.”

As is often the case in politics, though, things don’t always go according to plan.

Now that the votes have been counted and the Democrats have managed to narrowly hang on to the seat, Republicans say they always viewed the election as a long shot, and that coming close provides a moral victory the party needed.

But some quietly question the strategy employed by Republican leadership of building up expectations for the race. Others are being more public, asking whether the loss will have more impact than it deserves because of the party’s tactics.

Jeff Patch, a former press secretary for Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Latham, said on paper the district was going to be a hard pickup for Republicans. But party officials made it a point to paint a picture that the race represented a bellwether of the party’s resurgence, creating an illusion that Burgmeier was the favorite to win.

“If the Republican Party started out saying the things they are saying now that the election is over, stressing that it is a district that was in Democratic hands for more than a decade, stressing that there is a Democratic registration advantage, I think they’d be in a better position now,” he said. “The story line now is that Republicans didn’t measure up to what their expectations were. That was an unfortunate tactical mistake that they made.”

Staking the party’s momentum to this race was not wise, Patch said, since Burgmeier was an underdog from the start.

“I think the popular sentiment going in was that this was the Republicans’ race to lose, and part of that is because the party built that storyline,” he said. “But if you look at the data of the district, it is completely the opposite.”

Democrats have held House District 90 for more than a decade and have an advantage in voter registration numbers of 7,211 to 6,427, according to figures from the Iowa Secretary of State. (Voters with no party affiliation outnumber both parties.)

Democratic Gov. Chet Culver won the district in 2006, and Barack Obama carried the district in last year’s presidential election.

Democrat Curt Hanson, right, defeated Republican Stephen Burgmeier in the special election Tuesday to represent District 90 in the Iowa House.

“This was a pretty big swing and a miss for the Republican Party of Iowa,” said Jeff Link, a veteran Democratic operative and founder of the consulting firm Link Strategies. “They should have worked quietly and made a big deal out of a surprise victory rather than raise the stakes and bring all this attention to the race and then come up short.”

Tim Albrecht, a Republican strategist and publisher of the conservative news aggregator TheBeanWalker.com, said the fact that the GOP were able to compete in a district where Republicans didn’t even field a candidate in 2008 is a step in the right direction.

“Republicans essentially turned a lock for Democrats into a competitive race,” he said. “They almost pulled off a long shot upset. It’s a sign that shows growing momentum for the GOP as they head into next year’s elections.”

Get out the vote

When looking for the foundation for the Democrats’ victory, many are pointing to early voting. The Iowa Secretary of State’s office received 1,731 absentee ballots from Democrats and only 747 from Republicans.

Giving Democrats a 1,000-vote head start on Election Day is not a good strategy for success, Patch said.

“I don’t think Republicans can win in 2010 unless they craft a strategy to overcome that problem,” he said, adding: “There is some disagreement within the party over just how important the early-voting program is. I think it is clear that it is a deficiency that Republicans need to overcome.”

The Iowa Democratic Party has heavily targeted absentee ballots in recent elections, racking up huge margins long before polls open on Election Day. By contrast, Republicans have focused on a so-called “72-hour strategy,” hoping to turn out the party faithful during the final days of an election.

In April, RPI Chair Strawn emphasized the need for his party to improve its early voting efforts, saying a focus on Election Day was no longer good enough.

Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn

“We just need to make sure that Election Day isn’t just Election Day anymore,” he told a panel of journalists on IPTV’s “Iowa Press.” “It’s election 45 days, election months. We need to start our campaigns earlier.”

Almost immediately after Burgmeier was chosen to run for the seat in July, GOP operatives and interest groups like Iowans for Tax Relief and the Iowa Family Policy Center were on the ground in the district.

And yet Democrats still vastly outperformed Republicans in early voting.

Albrecht said while the disparity in absentee voting is a major concern, he is confident the party has learned its lesson and will build an effective infrastructure going forward.

“I think the Republican Party of Iowa has good, steady, savvy leadership in place,” he said. “They are going to learn from this election and going forward build a strong campaign for 2010.”

Growing the party

Another concern the party must address is expanding their voter base as a whole, Patch said. Democrats currently have a statewide voter registration lead of more than 100,000. The upcoming GOP gubernatorial primary could go a long way towards narrowing the voter registration gap, but ultimately the party must broaden their appeal to independent voters and conservative Democrats.

“The bottom line is that if they can’t win in Democratic districts that are marginally competitive, like HD90, there is no way that they can retake the majority in the legislature or retake the governorship,” he said.

And unfortunately for Republicans, the political environment in House District 90 is “actually a little bit more favorable for Republicans than the statewide environment,” Patch said. While a Democrat has held the district for 13 years, the last time the seat was open in 2002 the race was decided by only 55 votes.

Despite the loss, Patch believes the party understands its problems and will correct them before voters go to the polls in the fall of 2010.

“I don’t think anyone in the Republican Party is excited about [Tuesday’s] result,” he said. “But I think they can see the light at the end of the tunnel after huge losses in 2006 and 2008 if they can make the necessary changes.”

Albrecht said he looks at the numbers from Tuesday’s election and sees hope that the Republican Party of Iowa can compete anywhere in the state.

“Democrats should be sweating that this election was so close,” he said. “I think the party showed it will invest in its candidates, and that will help candidate recruitment and fundraising.”

At the end of the day, Link said part of the GOP’s strategic error might be that the party’s leadership began to believe their own hype.

“Maybe they started to believe their own press a little bit,” he said. “They’ve gotten a lot of attention for changing things up and being more aggressive and trying to be better as a party. Maybe they just started to buy into that too much.”

Ultimately, though, HD90 is one of 100 House districts, and even if the GOP had won it would have had little overall impact, Link said.

“I think the Republicans looked at this and wanted to make a statement,” he said. “It backfired.”