Obama has a “deep almost spiritual, hopeful message that he’s capable of giving,” David Bonior told a Monday crowd of over 100 at the University of Iowa. “It doesn’t work when you do it all that time, but he was fabulous on the campaign picking those moments.”

Former Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich.

“He will be a great asset not only to our country but internationally,” Bonior said of the president-elect. “He is the embodiment, literally, personally, of the hopes and dreams of billions of people in the world, and it is a gift that you, the American people, have given the world.”

Bonior did not openly speculate on his own cabinet chances. “I don’t know (Obama) hardly at all, we’ve talked maybe four or five times” at multi-candidate events during primary season, he said. Bonior left Congress, redistricted out of office by a Republican Michigan legislature, in 2002, before Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004.

Still, Bonior’s reputation as a labor and economic expert led Obama to include him in a group of economic advisors who met with the president-elect on Friday. “He told us our business was to deal with this immediate crisis,” said Bonior.

Bonior also stressed the importance of helping his home state’s auto industry, an issue Obama also raised during a Meeting with outgoing President Bush at the White House. “We’ve lost over 400,000 good paying auto jobs in the last six years,” said Bonior.

Bonior said the early days of the Obama Administration will be critical for the labor movement, and he hoped the new president and the expanded Democratic majorities in Congress will move forward on the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow a simple “card check” method of organizing unions. Instead of elections, which Bonior says are stacked in management’s favor, workers would be allowed to organize unions simply by signing up.

“It’s what they do in every other industrial country in the world,” said Bonior. “The right to organize is a human right.” Bonior said the Senate, which stands at 57 Democrats to 40 Republicans with three races still undecided, may be the holdup. “It will require the power of the presidency, and it may require one or two Republicans, and holding all our Democrats together.”

Bonior said union membership was not only important as a right, it played a key role in the 2008 election. Across every demographic, union members voted more Democratic than non-members. Bonior said this helped Obama rebuild a new version of a Roosevelt coalition, with emerging ethnic groups like Hispanics taking the place of the eastern European groups that Roosevelt relied on. He said the Hispanic vote had swung to the Democrats by 11 percent since the 2004 election, and was a major factor in Obama’s wins in Florida, Colorado and New Mexico.

Audience members asked if the Roosevelt comparisons set the bar too high for the next president. “I by no means want to equate what we’re going though now with the great depression,” said Bonior, “but there are some parellels and some lessons we would be wise to follow.” Many problems, like inequality of income and an under-regulated stock market damaged by speculation, are similar, he said. The New Deal “was an activist govt that engaged its people and it made a huge difference.”

“There was no safety net, no health care, no food stamps, no housing policy. The country was in deep despair. And what was needed then was bold leaders who could inspire based policy on the premise that govt could and should help its citizens. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in baby steps.”

“Boldness is not something we should be shying away from in these troubled times.”

While a recount may give a losing candidate emotional satisfaction and a sense of closure, the vote shifts tend to be very, very small.

Iowa absentee ballot with outer envelope and secrecy envelope.

I don’t mention my day job here much, but I’ve worked in the Johnson County Auditor’s Office for the past 11 years (which explains why you didn’t see as many of my stories the last couple weeks before the election). In that time, I’ve had hands-on experience with three recounts.

In 1999, we re-fed all the ballots from an Iowa City council race, nearly 8,000, and only one vote shifted, narrowing a three vote lead down to two. In a three-county recount in a 2002 state senate race, about three votes moved. In 2005 a recount in the North Liberty mayor’s race changed no votes at all out of over 1,000 ballots fed into the machine. The write-in winner lost a couple votes because the recount board interpreted the spelling of his name just a little more strictly than the Election Day poll workers, and tossed a couple votes where they thought the name was too vague. That wasn’t enough to change the outcome.

Multiply those one or two vote county shifts by a whole state with a 200 or so vote margin, which is where the Al Franken-Norm Coleman U.S. Senate race sits in Minnesota, and you might have something. But a state legislative district that’s, say, 100 votes? Highly unlikely.

In fact, the big shifts have already happened with the decisions on the provisional ballots as boards met Thursday and Friday. Those boards also counted absentee ballots that arrived on Wednesday and Thursday, but were postmarked by the day before the election.

Sure, more absentees might show up before canvasses make the results final this week, but there’s a law of diminishing returns. Auditors don’t all of a sudden get a bigger pile of absentees in the mail six days after the election than they do one day after the election. And the later it gets, the more likely it is that those ballots have an Election Day postmark and are thus worthless.

In seesaw House races in Woodbury County, Democratic incumbents Wes Whitead and Roger Wendt held leads of 43 and 155 votes respectively at the end of Friday, with 168 provisionals to be counted Tuesday.

Given the heavily Democratic nature of Iowa’s absentee voting this year, any Republican who’s trailing is harder pressed catch up, which means state Sen. Jeff Danielson in Waterloo, who trailed Election Night, is likely to hold his single digit lead. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a Democrat who’s trailing, like state Rep. Art Staed in Cedar Rapids, who’s down by a couple dozen votes, will either.

“As a Republican House member from Iowa, (Nussle) was part of the Gingrich transition team that ushered in the Contract with America” in 1994, writes Mike Allen at Politico. “Nussle has to lay low for now because he’s working on the transition. Attribute all this to Nussle sources.”

“Mr. Nussle is also very close to Rudy Giuliani, who hasn’t lost his appetite for national office,” writes Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic. Nussle headed Giuliani’s Iowa campaign after losing the 2006 governor’s race to Chet Culver, until taking the Budget job.

Ambinder is pessimistic about Nussle’s chances: “If Newt runs, he’s the odds-on-favorite to win.”

Early election results showed incumbent Democratic state Reps. Wes Whitead, Roger Wendt and Elesha Gayman losing their seats as the returns rolled in. A buzz of panic rippled through an Iowa City victory party: “Did we lose the House? Did we lose the House?”

Iowa absentee ballot with outer envelope and secrecy envelope.

But the three incumbents had won re-election (assuming Whitead holds his six-vote lead) before the polls even opened. When the absentee results were added in, their early vote totals overcame the Election Day leads of their Republican challengers. It was like watching the second half of a ball game before seeing the score of the first half, making an early lead look like a come-from-behind win.

“We won on election night, and we lost when they opened the mailbox,” House Republican Leader Christopher Rants told the Des Moines Register. “Election Day is no longer 24 hours, it’s 24 days.” 40 days, to be exact, as state law allowed any Iowa to vote early beginning Sept. 25.

Democrats carried a 92,000 voter lead into Election Day out of the record 533,000 absentee and early ballots. In places where absentees were reported first, rather than last, Democrats jumped out to a big lead fast and saw the margin narrow.

The early vote margin was less than Barack Obama’s 160,000 vote margin in Iowa. But fast reporting of early ballots, including Johnson County’s 23,000 vote absentee lead for Obama, may have contributed to the network’s fast call of the state, almost as soon as polls closed at 9 p.m.

Chris Cilizza of the Washington Post makes a case for placing the White House budget director and former Iowa congressman on the short list of possible candidates to chair the RNC as the party rebuilds from John McCain’s defeat and the loss of House and Senate seats in Tuesday’s election.

“Iowa — and the Midwest generally — is a central political battleground in 2010 and beyond, Cilizza writes as an argument for Nussle. But he continues: “Nussle is abrasive (at times) and has made a fair number of enemies during his political career.”

“Initially considered one of the party’s strongest candidates nationwide,” in his 2006 race for governor, Cilizza writes, “Nussle’s campaign underperformed.”

Sen. Barack Obama campaigns in Cedar Rapids, 7/31. (Photo: John Deeth)

70 percent: Obama’s winning percentage in his best county, the People’s Republic of Johnson County. Obama exceeded a local Lyndon Johnson record of 68 percent from 1964. The dusty old canvass books may tell if Obama’s margin breaks any sort of FDR record. Johnson County had by far the biggest Obama percentage in the state.

Other counties that traditionally go heavily Democratic, such as Des Moines, were just over 60 percent. Obama had an unusual hot spot on the Minnesota border, topping 60 in Winneshiek, Worth, and in his second best county, 63 percent in Howard. Democrats picked up highly targeted state House and Senate races in Winneshiek, so the extra effort may have been a factor.

81 percent: McCain’s winning percentage in his best county. One guess… yeah, Sioux County.

30,069: Obama’s Johnson County winning margin. Local Democrats set a goal of 25,000 months ago, and far exceeded John Kerry’s 19,000 margin.

4,173: John McCain votes in Iowa County.

4,173: Barack Obama votes in Iowa County, giving Iowa County the Golden Hanging Chad Award for close results. Cedar County got national attention in 2000 with an election night tie, but less attention for a final count that gave Al Gore the county by two votes.

55.2 percent: The percentage of Johnson County’s vote that came in as early ballots. Yes, more people voted before Election Day than on Election Day. Statewide, 533,967 voters had returned absentee ballots through midday Tuesday, 16 percent higher than 2004. Absentees postmarked by Monday, Nov. 3 can still be counted, which might affect a couple of the races listed below.

62.6 percent: Senator Tom Harkin’s winning margin. Some polls showed low-profile Republican Christopher Reed breaking 40 percent, but he landed at 37.4. That can now be marked as the official baseline for Republican votes in Iowa, a few points above Democrat Art Small’s 2004 loss to Chuck Grassley.

O. Kay Henderson at Radio Iowa reports that Reed has still not called to congratulate Harkin, but then, neither has Jim Ross Lightfoot, who lost to Harkin 12 years ago.

35.7 percent: Republican Dave Hartsuch’s count in the 1st Congressional District, lowest among the ten major party nominees. Rob Hubler made the deep red 5th District as competitive as any of the others, with 37.3 against Steve King.

42.2 percent: Republican Kim Schmett’s percentage, making his race against 3rd District Democrat Leonard Boswell, surprisingly, the closest in the state.

0: Iowa women elected to Congress or governorship, as Iowa remains in the club with Mississippi. Democrats had high hopes for Becky Greenwald in the 4th, but Tom Latham held her under 40 percent.

Likewise, the Iowa Republican blogosphere was convinced, without any neutral indications to guide them, that Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the 2nd District was the sleeper candidate of the entire nation. But she only pulled 38.9 percent to Democrat Dave Loebsack’s 57.1, with the remaining 4 points going to two other candidates.

31-19: The new Iowa Senate margin. Democrats gained three Senate districts. Swati Dandekar won an expected victory in open District 18 in Marion, and Mary Jo Wilhelm knocked off GOP incumbent Mark Zieman in District 8 in the northeast corner. Steve Sodders took open District 22 from the GOP in Marshall County. But two incumbent Democrats went down in defeat: Jeff Danielson in Waterloo’s District 10 and Frank Wood in the Quad Cities District 42.

6: State Rep. Wes Whitead’s lead in House District 1. Not percentage lead, vote lead. Six (6) votes, the state’s closest. Seesaw results and conflicting reports kept the Iowa House in question during the night. For a few hours, Rep. Elesha Gayman was shown as losing, but the highly-targeted Democrat held on once the absentees were added in.

160: Democrat Larry Marek’s winning margin in House in House District 89 for a Democratic gain. Marek won with a big margin in the Johnson County part of the district, the same way Becky Schmitz carried the corresponding Senate District 45 two years ago.

56-44: The new Iowa House margin, with six Democratic gains. In addition to Marek, the pickups were open district 16 in the northeast (John Beard) and 13 in Mason City (Sharon Steckman). Kerry Burt knocked off ex-TV anchor Tammy Weincek in Waterloo’s District 21. Gene Ficken defeated incumbent Dan Rassmussen in District 23 in Buchanan and Black Hawk counties. Phyllis Thede, who narrowly lost a Senate seat to Hartsuch two years ago, beat incumbent Jamie Van Fossen in Davenport’s District 81.

But Democrats lost three seats, including two in two northern Linn County. Nick Wagner beat Gretchen Lawyer in open District 36 (Dandekar’s old seat), and Renee Schulte bashed first term Rep. Art Staed over the head with a flowerpot (a frequent ad theme) in District 37 by 47 votes, which is within the provisional ballot and late absentee ballot margin.

Incumbent Democrat Mark Davitt appears to have lost in House District 74, though the Des Moines Register reports that Davitt’s campaign gathered different numbers and says they won.

If all results hold (Staed and Whitead may not), that’s a Democratic gain of three from the last session, but only a gain of two over the 2006 election results. In perhaps the most frustrating result for Democrats, party switcher Dawn Pettengill held on in Benton County’s District 39.

60.8 percent: The narrow winning margin for the $20 million Johnson County conservation bond. The issue got off to a roaring start with 70 percent of the absentee, but saw its margin drop through the night. Two vote No committees fought the measure, but by the time they got started many votes were already in the box. (Like mine–making their two robocalls asking me to vote no pretty much moot.) Local Republicans were urging a No vote on their headquarters answering machine, while the Democrats formally endorsed a Yes vote. With so many Democrats voting early, the election day pool of voters leaned more GOP than average. The measure won the Election Day vote in Iowa City by 60-40 but lost by the same margin in the rest of the county. Janelle Rettig of the Land Water Future vote Yes committee calculates the winning margin at 486 votes.

44: Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States. Obama frequently credited Iowa for the Jan. 3 caucus win that sent him on the road to the White House, and that should help Iowa keep its place in the front of the line for the 2012 and 2016 nomination process.

Editor’s note: Some of these numbers could change before results are certified, so take them with a grain of salt.

And if Barack Obama is going to win Iowa, it’s already happened. Depending on how you look at it, it happened in the past six weeks, or it happened starting two years ago.

Record early voting and Election Day voter registration could increase the impact of ballot challenges on Iowa’s seven electoral votes.

Iowa absentee ballot with outer envelope and secrecy envelope.

Iowa has seen unprecedented levels of early voting since ballots became available Sept. 25. Through Saturday, 553,669 voters had voted early or requested ballots by mail, and 481,179 ballots had been returned. Democrats held a roughly 100,000-voter edge in total ballot requests.

Early voting continues through Monday, the day absentee ballot boards start the work of processing ballots, opening envelopes, and dealing with challenges.

Republicans, as part of their “voter integrity” program, issued an unprecedented number of absentee ballot challenges in 2004, concentrating on urban and academic counties. In liberal Johnson County, over 2,000 ballots were challenged for mistakes such as bad addresses and missing signatures. Of the challenged and provisional ballots that were counted, John Kerry won 77 percent — better than any Election Day precinct in the county.

Should McCain or the GOP make a similar attempt to challenge ballots this year, it would happen Monday.

But Democrats took note of the Republican ballot challenges in 2004, and, after taking control of the state legislature in 2006, they passed election law changes making ballot challenges more difficult. Each challenge must now be presented individually, rather than as a group or “blanket” challenge, and the law restricts challenges to a few items such as citizenship, felony status, and residence.

A voter cannot be challenged for registering or changing address on election day. Challengers must provide a name, address and phone number, and are subject to misdemeanor charges for frivolous challenges.

In another legal change, auditors are directed to open the outer, “return carrier” envelope of absentee ballots when they arrive in the mail and check the inner “affidavit envelope” for problems like missing signatures. The change gives voters a chance to fix their own mistakes. In 2004, the outer envelopes weren’t opened till the day before the election.

The Democratic Party also adapted to the 2004 absentee challenges by targeting precincts with especially mobile populations, like college towns, later in the campaign. That way, fewer voters will have moved after having requested a ballot from an old address, thus subjecting themselves to a potential challenge. Democrats also steered voters toward more in-person early voting and less voting by mail.

The trend toward heavier early voting may produce some anomalous precinct results. With so many Democrats out of the Election Day voting pool, Republicans may “win” some precincts they haven’t before. Polk County saw the dynamic a few years back in a Democratic supervisor primary, where Gene Phillips won every Election Day precinct, but John Mauro had an exceptional early voting program and won 80 percent of the absentee vote to win the nomination. He lost the Election Day vote because his people had already voted.

That happened at the presidential level in 2004. John Kerry led the Iowa absentee vote by 70,000 votes, but George W. Bush carried election day by 80,000 to win the state by 10,000.

After all is said and done, some Republicans may look at the Election Day results, compare them to the absentee vote, and cry foul. They may already be laying the groundwork for that with the national attention to problem voter registrations collected by the ACORN community organization. But in Iowa, we’ll be able to look at the details. For the first time, absentee results will be released by precinct, rather than lumped into one county-wide “special precinct.” Political numbers geeks will be able to look at absentee results and Election Day results side by side to check the effectiveness of their absentee ballot programs in minute detail.

Casual election watchers Tuesday night may see Iowa’s vote totals narrow as the votes come in. Absentee totals, which will favor Democrats, tend to be released earlier. The Election Day precincts, which will lean Republican because Democrats disproportionately voted earlier, will trickle in later.

John McCain picked up a relatively rare newspaper endorsement Saturday from the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The eastern Iowa daily also backed incumbent Democrats Tom Harkin for U.S. Senate and Bruce Braley in the 1st Congressional District, but chose Republican challengers Mariannette Miller-Meeks over 2nd District Rep. Dave Loebsack and Kim Schmett over Leonard Boswell in the 3rd District.

“Obama has offered no clear plan to deal with our country’s staggering debt,” wrote the Gazette editorial board, citing McCain’s economic policies as the main reason for the endorsement. “(Obama’s) tax plan could stifle the economic rebound we desperately need.”

But the Gazette expressed disapproval of McCain’s vice presidential choice. “Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin might well shake up Washington’s entrenched politics as usual, but she obviously lacks working knowledge and understanding of foreign policy and many national issues, which raises valid questions about McCain’s judgment in choosing her.”

The Gazette cited Harkin’s seniority in its endorsement and noted that his Republican challenger, Marion businessman Christopher Reed, did not meet with the editorial board.

Likewise, Bruce Braley’s challenger, state Sen. Dave Hartsuch, did not meet with the editorial board, which said Braley “quickly gained a reputation in his first term as a smart, bulldog questioner who does his homework.”

“We were pretty comfortable with endorsing Loebsack for a second term … until we met Mariannette Miller-Meeks,” writes the board. While praising the Mt. Vernon freshman Loebsack, the endorsement calls Miller-Meeks a “dynamo” who can “say no to requests and programs that can’t be funded without more taxpayer debt.”

In contrast, the Gazette had little praise for the 3rd District candidates and said Boswell offered few specifics. Schmett “didn’t exactly wow us… but it’s time for someone else to represent the 3rd District.”

The Gazette has a policy of no endorsements in caucuses and primaries.

Thursday morning, Obama shares on the Winner Take All market were selling at 85 cents, down less than a penny in the last two weeks. The 85 cent price means traders give the Democratic ticket an 85 percent chance of winning. Republican John McCain’s shares are selling for 15.3 cents. The Winner Take All market pays a dollar per winning share and nothing for a losing share.

Winner Take All market

On the Vote Share market, which predicts percentage of the popular vote and pays a penny a percent, Obama was selling at 54.7 cents Thursday morning, and McCain was selling at 47 cents.

In other markets, traders overwhelmingly predict increased Democratic majorities in both the U.S. House and Senate, but believe that the Minnesota U.S. Senate race is getting closer. Democrat Al Franken has a narrow edge over GOP incumbent Norm Coleman.

The University of Iowa College of Business project, in which traders use real money to measure candidates’ chances, has had a strong predictive track record since it started in 1988.

“If there ever was a time that the election of a president could jump start America’s flat-lining moral standing in the world, it would be the election of Barack Obama on Tuesday,” writes the editorial board. “Moreover, Obama has proven to be a smart enough politician that he recognizes and will be able to make the best use of that opportunity.”

“If only candidate McCain from 2000 — the one who really did take on the leaders of his party when they were moving in the direction of the policies proposed by George W. Bush — were in charge of a party that has wreaked such havoc on Washington for eight years,” the paper says of the Republican nominee. “But by giving his vice presidential nod to Sarah Palin as a last-ditch attempt to garner hard-core conservative support, McCain has shown undeniably how he controls neither his own campaign nor his own party.”

The only Republican to win endorsement from the Iowa City paper was state Rep. Jeff Kaufmann of Wilton, whose Democratic opponent dropped out of the race but remains on the ballot.

Despite Iowa City’s liberal leanings, the local paper doesn’t always endorse a Democratic sweep. 2006 Republican endorsements included Kaufmann, Jim Leach, and state Sen. Dave Miller, who lost his seat to Becky Schmitz. And in 2004, in a slap in the face to local Democrat Art Small, the Press-Citizen endorsed neither Small nor Republican Chuck Grassley, but instead backed the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate.