Subscribe to our RSS feed
Follow us on TwitterFAIRFIELD — Midmorning one Saturday, just over a week before the Sept. 1 special election in Iowa House District 90, the business district in this Jefferson County town was teeming with activity.
Republican Stephen Burgmeier, left, and Democrat Curt Hanson are running to replace state Rep. John Whitaker in Tuesday's special election.
Campaign headquarters for both major-party candidates – Republican Steve Burgmeier and Democrat Curt Hanson – anchor two corners of the town square. Inside, volunteers used hands-free cell phones to check in with volunteer canvassers, making sure no voter had been missed in a door-knocking campaign that seemed frantic. In a campaign that is set to last barely longer than a month, opportunity lies behind every door.
The vacancy in House District 90, which includes all or parts of Jefferson, Van Buren and Wapello counties in southeast Iowa, was created when U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack tapped Hillsboro farmer John Whitaker to head the Farm Service Agency in Iowa. Whitaker was a state legislator since 2002.
House District 90 by the numbers
The district is made up of an eclectic mix of historic riverfront towns that have retained much of their 1880s look, Amish settlements, century farms that have remained in the same families for generations, and one larger town that couldn’t be more different from the rest of the district: Fairfield, the Jefferson County seat, has about 1,500 votes at stake. About one-third of the population there practices Transcendental Meditation, a relaxation technique popularized by Maharishi Mehesh Yogi, founder of the local Maharishi University of Management (M.U.M.).
Iowa House District 90 (Source: www.legis.state.ia.us)
Democrats outnumber Republicans district-wide, with 7,189 voters compared to the GOP’s 6,419. No-party voters are the largest bloc with 7,997. Those numbers, combined with significant “get out the vote” efforts from both major party campaigns, mean next week’s election could come down to the wire. And, as with almost any special election, because turnout will probably remain low, any single factor could make the difference.
“The district has been Democratic, but in a special election, anything can happen,” said Iowa Democratic Party Executive Director Norm Sterzenbach. “It comes down to who turns out.”
One indicator of turnout is absentee voting, which can offer a glimpse into each candidate’s relative strength going into election day. By that measure, things look good for the Democrats. According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, voters had returned a total of 2,156 absentee ballots by last Thursday. 1,308 came from Democrats and only 603 came from Republicans. No-party voters mailed in only 243 ballots, a sign that both campaigns are more focused on turning out their base rather than persuading unaffiliated voters to support them.
The total number of absentee ballot requests, including ballots that have been sent to voters but not returned to county election officials, reflect a similar margin between the parties.
Although party registration does not necessarily dictate whom a voter will support, most special elections are decided by which side better turns out the base of their party, so it is a useful, if not definitive, point of data.
GOP sees opportunity among conservative Democrats
Democrats have held District 90 for the last several election cycles, but one unknown factor going into Tuesday’s election is how contentious political issues at the state and national level might filter down to the local race. Sterzenbach said that most, if not all, legislative campaigns are waged on local issues, but in a special election, “everything matters a little bit.”
The GOP may see opportunity in the fallout from this year’s Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, from President Obama’s efforts to reform health care, or from Gov. Chet Culver’s I-JOBS plan, for instance.
So far, all of the television commercials released by the Burgmeier campaign and its allies have focused scrutiny more on statewide and national issues than on Hanson himself. The National Organization for Marriage has spent more than $80,000 to promote Burgmeier’s opposition to same-sex marriage, for instance, not mentioning Hanson in their commercial at all. Iowans for Tax Relief released a television ad attacking Hanson for being in the same party as Culver and as George Soros, a billionaire businessman who has donated to liberal causes nationally, but who has not been tied to the Hanson campaign in particular. These sorts of messages may be intended mostly to rile up the Republican base, but they could also serve to shave away at the Democrats’ advantage in absentee ballots by making more conservative members of the party nervous about their candidate.
That group of voters – Democrats on paper who are social and fiscal conservatives at heart – is significant in House District 90, said Fairfield farmer Phil Gevock, who has been a Burgmeier ally in many local government disputes over the years.
“In this part of the state, you have a fair number of what you’d call old-line conservative Democrats, the Blue Dog Democrats, who are Democrats only because FDR saved their family farm,” Gevock observed. “That type of Democrat is conservative on every issue down the line, but they still register Democrat because their parents might roll over in the grave if they didn’t.”
“Of any of the Republicans who have run in this House district in the last 12 years, [Burgmeier] probably stands a better chance of getting more crossover vote than any of them,” Gevock said.
If Burgmeier wins the support of many conservative Democrats, it could be because he used to be one of them. He ran for Jefferson County supervisor two times, first as a Democrat and then as an independent, before finally winning the seat as a Republican in 2000. Burgmeier says he’s always been fiscally conservative and opposed to abortion rights, so his move away from the Democratic Party didn’t represent a huge ideological shift on his part. “I felt more and more that the longer I stayed in the Democratic Party, the more of an outsider I became,” he said.
Third-party candidates unlikely to affect the outcome
Campaign yard signs have become ubiquitous in House District 90, adorning the lawns of the stately homes on either side of Iowa Highway 1, Fairfield’s main thoroughfare. Barn signs dot the surrounding farmland for miles. The two major-party candidates’ signs were designed and produced professionally, offering a stark contrast to the crude hand-painted signs promoting the candidacy of one of the other candidates in the race.
In all, two independent candidates – both from Keosauqua – are also vying for the seat in the Iowa House. Dan Cesar, representing the virtually-unknown Fourth of July party, and Douglas Philips, who was nominated by petition without a party affiliation, are making things interesting, but aren’t likely to change the election’s outcome.
Tolerance for third-party candidates runs high in House District 90, but the third- and no-party candidates are more punctuation marks on the district’s uniqueness rather than part of its political foundation. Cesar, who was incumbent Whitaker’s only opponent in the 2008 election, lost by a large, double-digit margin.
“My guess is they would probably take just a little bit of support away from [Burgmeier],” Gevock said, “but on the other hand, people who will vote for those guys probably wouldn’t have voted otherwise.”
Philips admitted in an interview that he does not expect to win Tuesday, but he said that if he can convince just one individual to take on the two-party system and expose it as broken, his candidacy will have been a success. “I think there has been an understanding, in this district at least, that the status quo two-party system is broken,” Philips said.
The rural-urban divide
Burgmeier himself thinks his chances of winning are good. Based on his reputation as an advocate for property rights and an opponent of eminent domain, he says he has earned solid support among the district’s rural residents, particularly in Van Buren County, where there are about 5,200 votes up for grabs and exactly zero traffic lights.
But in Jefferson County, a more densely populated part of the district where there are twice as many eligible voters, the stakes are higher. Burgmeier supporters know their candidate will have to do well there to win, and that could be a challenge.
Conventional wisdom dictates that to succeed in Jefferson County, a candidate must win the support from meditating members of the community, who are difficult to lump together politically because they include Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens and former members the now-defunct Natural Law Party. In recent elections, to the extent that the group votes as a bloc, it seems to be based more on rural-urban lines than strictly ideological ones.
The same could be said for many other voters in Fairfield, where Burgmeier’s answers to questions related to municipal airport expansion and rural subdivision paving have angered some residents.
But Burgmeier’s supporters, who acknowledge that rural voters alone will not be enough to deliver a victory for their candidate, say he still enjoys a solid reputation for giving all groups a fair hearing, even when he sides with rural interests over municipal ones.
“He’s never shut anyone out,” Gevock said. “He’s always listened and treated people with respect.”
Of course, no one was saying that Hanson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, would do otherwise. Both Hanson and Burgmeier are well known and respected throughout the district. A retired Fairfield High School driver education teacher, Hanson taught hundreds of today’s voters to drive. Burgmeier is a three-term county supervisor and father of five who has umpired Little League for 23 years. Both are known for their honesty, fairness and accountability.
In other words, when residents of House District 90 speak of either candidate, they usually have nice things to say. But that doesn’t mean Tuesday’s election is on everyone’s mind. At Revelations, a Fairfield coffee shop, café and used book store whose sandwich and pizza menu is loaded with the locally grown produce offered at the twice-weekly farmers market up the street, chatter is as likely to be about the Beach Boys’ Labor Day concert at the Fairfield Middle School as politics. Tom Gamrath, a prominent community leader and long-time main street business owner, steers clear of the subject as best he can.
“For some people, it’s really important, but the people who run the parties are typically the ones who are really into it,” Gamrath said.
Who will get his vote?
“I’d rather not say,” Gamrath hedged. “I have to do business in this town.”
Beth Dalbey edited the Fairfield Ledger from 1996 to 2001. An award-winning journalist, she has also edited newspapers in Adel and Des Moines.
