Tone of state legislative campaigns turns negative

With control of the Iowa House hanging in the balance, candidates and interest groups from both sides of the aisle are waging a campaign that has turned decidedly negative.

As fundraising totals continue to rise, campaigns for the Iowa House of Representatives are getting increasingly negative.

The State House elections of 2008 are on track to be the most expensive in the state’s history, and along with the increased spending, Iowa is seeing a wave of negative television, radio and mailed advertisements.

While negative advertising in Iowa is nothing new, observers point out that the size and scope of the negative ads is bigger than the Hawkeye State has ever experienced.

In Davenport, incumbent Democrat Elesha Gayman ran a 60-second television advertisement accusing her opponent, Ross Paustian, of being sentenced to jail in 1993 for failing to pay child support. Paustian held a press conference calling the ad “an outright lie.” Republicans later paid for a mailer against Gayman (and several other Democrats) that featured pigs on the cover with the text “These little piggies went to Des Moines.”

In district 58, Republican Chris Hagenow has run television ads (paid for by the Republican Party of Iowa) accusing his opponent, Jerry Sullivan, of raising taxes five times while he was the city’s mayor, though records show he only voted once to raise taxes.

Democrat Tim Hoy, running in district 44, has sent out a mailing accusing his opponent, Republican Annette Sweeney, or favoring a 30 percent sales tax, something she denies. The state Republican Party responded with a television ad saying Hoy gave city officials raises while mayor of Eldora, citing it as one of the reasons the city’s citizens “fired him.”

Iowa Progress Project, a conservative nonprofit, produced a radio ad calling out Democrats for appropriating $300,000 to the City of Dubuque for an Amtrak depot despite the fact that Amtrak doesn’t service Dubuque. Democrats have responded by saying the money is to establish a rail line between Chicago and Dubuque, which House Speaker Pat Murphy, D-Debuque, said would be an economic development boost for the state.

Republicans ran a radio ad that implied that potheads from California would move to Iowa if Democratic challenger John Beard were elected in district 16.

The list goes on and on.

“In the past, campaigns relied on mailings if they wanted to attack their opponent,” said John Norris, chairman of the Iowa Utilities Board and former chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. “If candidates could purchase television time, they only had the resources available to do positive, biographical ads. More money means that campaigns can afford two sets of television advertising – the personal ad and the attack ad.”

While Norris said he hasn’t followed this year’s state campaigns closely enough to say whether 2008 is more negative than year’s past, more money means more options for ads, he said, which can translate into more negativity.

“If a candidate sent out a negative mailer, only those in their district would see it,” Norris said. “If they put out a negative television ad, all the sudden you are spreading that message to a lot more people.”

Spending has certainly gone up, and not just from candidates. Independent expenditure groups, including political action committees (PACs), 527s, and the Republican and Democratic parties, are adding to the fundraising totals by pumping millions of dollars into the quest for control of the House.

“State races are becoming increasingly professionalized,” said Christopher Larimer, a professor of political science at the University of Northern Iowa. “More money is getting pumped into the campaigns and it is still too early to know if that will lead to better candidates or just uglier campaigns.”

Two Des Moines-based 527 organizations, the Iowa Leadership Council and Midwest Enterprise Group, have taken in nearly $1 million this year alone, spending money on mailers and Web sites criticizing legislative candidates. American Future Fund, a conservative nonprofit that had previously focused on races outside Iowa, recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on television advertisements attacking Democratic candidates in battleground legislative districts. And a series of new PACs have sprung up this year supporting both Democrats and Republicans.

“I think this election could really make people start looking at campaign finance reform,” Larimer said. “Other states have done this with the hopes of limiting this type of activity on the state level.”

Fundraising has gotten much more sophisticated, Norris said, and both parties have developed better strategies to find donors.

“And there are more special interests getting involved,” he said. “All this makes a great case for public financing.”

Commenting on Democratic leadership’s decision to turn over a dossier of opposition research on Republican candidates to The Des Moines Register, Steve Grubbs, a Republican strategist and former chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, said the high stakes of this year’s election, and the ramifications of its outcome, could also be a factor in the negative campaigns.

“If Republicans make big gains, someone in [Democratic] leadership is going to lose their job,” Grubbs said. “Scouring public records for misdoings and then turning them over to the media in one lump sum, I’ve never heard of anything like that happening before in Iowa, and I think it’s a sign of fear on the part of Democratic leadership.”

The Democratic research turned up mostly minor criminal charges in the background of several Republican House candidates.

After a 14-year reign in the Iowa House, Republicans lost the majority in 2006. Democrats now have a slim majority, as well as control of the Iowa Senate and the governor’s office.

So by the same token that Democratic losses could spell trouble for party leadership, another year of Democratic gains could signal changes in at the top of the state Republican Party.

“This is a good year to be a Democrat,” Larimer said. “They have a number of advantages, and Republicans may have to do some soul searching when this is all said and done to overcome those advantages.”

House candidates had raised about $8 million for this election cycle and had spent $6 million as of mid-October, according to the latest campaign disclosure reports.

In the 2006 election cycle, candidates raised $8.3 million and spent $8 million through Election Day.