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Don McDowell, the former college Republican who blogged at Cyclone Conservatives, is listed as the registrant of BranstadForGovernor.com, a domain that would come in handy for former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad if he decided to run against Gov. Chet Culver in 2010.
McDowell works at the capitol as a communications staffer for Senate Minority Leader Paul McKinley, who has said he plans to run for governor of Iowa himself. The domain was registered July 27.
It is unclear what this means, but there are a couple possible explanations:
The first, most straightforward explanation is that McKinley’s staff decided to ‘cyber-squat’ on Branstad’s domain name to prevent him from using it for himself. That’s a bit of a dirty trick, and it was too easy to catch them, so I doubt that’s what’s going on. If it is, they just made an enemy of a pretty important figure in Iowa GOP politics.
Another explanation is that McKinley’s candidacy is never really going to go anywhere. Word on the street is that McKinley’s key backers would pretty quickly turn into Branstad’s key backers if the former governor got into the race. Perhaps there is an alliance emerging here, and McDowell is merely freelancing for a friend of his boss.
Whichever explanation is true, one thing is clear: if Branstad is running for governor, his plans aren’t very far along.
Even if he asked someone to register BranstadForGovernor.com for him, he only did it last week. If Branstad had retained the services of a professional Web design firm for his campaign, they would have registered it, not a McKinley aide.
Politics has certainly changed a lot since Branstad’s last campaign for re-election 15 years ago. Back then, registering a domain name wasn’t the first thing a candidate did after deciding he wanted to run. These days, the internet has become a more central part of political campaigns.
If he hopes to be governor again, Branstad will probably need to catch up online.
UPDATE: McDowell denies that his domain purchase has anything to do with his work for McKinley.
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