Iowa Puts Politicians Through the Paces

Standing against a setting sun, Stan Thompson suffers all the usual indignities of a first-time candidate challenging a member of the U.S. House.

Many waiting in line for a recent Southeast Polk High School football game here mistake him for one of the ticket-takers and try to hand him their stubs. Most don’t know whether he’s a Democrat (no) or a Republican (yes).

For Thompson, the silver lining on this cloudless autumn evening is that his opponent, Democratic Rep. Leonard L. Boswell, is as much a blank slate for most of those at the game. Though Boswell has served three terms, the state’s unique system for redrawing congressional seats wiped out his mostly rural southern Iowa district and forced him to move into a new district centered on urban Des Moines and suburbs such as this.

And that, as much as anything else, has made Thompson’s challenge a competitive race in a year when competitive House races appear on the verge of extinction. Nor is Boswell the only incumbent facing a serious challenge in Iowa.

Largely because of the state’s nonpartisan system for drawing congressional boundaries, either party has a genuine chance to win three of Iowa’s House races this year -- with a fourth contest, though tilting toward the GOP, still having the potential for an upset.

That means Iowa, with five congressional districts, has more competitive races than California (one), Illinois (one) and New York (none), who have a combined 103 districts. Nationwide, operatives in both parties say that, absent some late developments, the outcome may be truly in doubt in as few as two dozen of the 435 House races.

This collapse of competition has been driven largely by the states’ practice of drawing congressional districts that provide a lopsided advantage to one party or the other. That trend worries observers from all points on the political spectrum, who argue that it is denying most Americans the right to cast a meaningful ballot for the House.

“This is a real assault against democracy,” said Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political group. “It is basically disenfranchising huge portions of voters.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that Iowa, the state where competition for the House is thriving this year, is also the state that has gone the furthest to take redistricting away from politicians.

“Iowa is 100% unique,” said Tim Storey, a redistricting expert at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “If there is such an ideal as taking politics out of redistricting ... then Iowa moves closer to that ideal than any other state.”

Every 10 years, states redraw their lines for House and state legislative districts to reflect population changes recorded in the U.S. census. In 43 states, including California, the lines are drawn by state legislators and approved by the governor.

Six other states draw their district lines with the help of independent commissions, though Storey notes that these are not entirely insulated from politics because the members typically have ties to the two major political parties.

Generally, the parties this year opted less to try to squeeze out new gains in congressional redistricting than to solidify the seats they already held. The result was a series of new maps that made districts more favorable for incumbents.

California is a typical case, where the only race among 53 House districts that analysts view as competitive is the one between Democrat Dennis Cardoza and Republican Dick Monteith in the Central Valley. They are battling for the seat held by Rep. Gary A. Condit of Ceres, who lost in the primary. “You had state legislators decide they would rather protect their clout in Washington [by solidifying incumbents],” said Amy Walter, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

More security for incumbents has translated into less competition for voters.

Iowa’s redistricting system, though, minimizes the influence of incumbents -- and the political parties -- on the process. Under its approach -- adopted in the 1970s after the state Supreme Court threw out a redistricting map drawn by the state Legislature -- the district lines are drawn by the nonpartisan Legislative Service Bureau.

In drawing the maps, the law requires the bureau to avoid splitting counties, to keep the districts compact and to ensure they have equal population. Most important, it bars the bureau from considering any political information about the districts: voting history, partisan balance or where incumbents live.

“We have no political information when we do it. All we look at is total population,” said Ed Cook, a senior counsel at the bureau who directed the process. Under Iowa law, the Legislature must vote up or down, without amendment, on the bureau’s plan. It rejected the first proposal last year, but accepted the second -- and immediately set off a shuffle among House incumbents. Boswell and 13-term Republican Rep. James A. Leach were forced to move when their homes were swallowed into new districts.

When the dust cleared, only the 5th Congressional District in the heavily Republican western part of the state was considered entirely safe for one party. In the new 4th District, competitive on paper, Republican Rep. Tom Latham has established a clear advantage over John Norris, a former Democratic state party chairman.

But the other three races are all highly competitive. Boswell leads Thompson in the latest Democratic polling, but both sides consider the race within reach. In the new 1st District, Republican Rep. Jim Nussle, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is facing a formidable challenge from Ann Hutchinson, the mayor of Bettendorf. And Leach, now running in the new 2nd district, is getting all he can handle from Democrat Julie Thomas, a pediatrician.

Incumbents still have important advantages in the Iowa races. Except for Leach, who doesn’t accept financial contributions from political action committees or donors outside the state, the incumbents all have raised more than their challengers. And no issue is generating a broad demand for change; the candidates are slugging it out over Social Security, prescription drug costs, health care and taxes--issues that haven’t produced a decisive advantage for either side around the country.

But the Iowa incumbents are being pressed harder than their colleagues almost anywhere else, largely because the redistricting is forcing them to court so many new voters. The change is greatest for Boswell: three-fourths of the voters in his new district weren’t in his old one.

But Nussle and Leach are running in districts where almost 40% of voters are new to them. That creates opportunities for challengers unavailable in districts where almost all voters have settled impressions of an incumbent.

“It’s the new territory that makes these districts so problematic for the incumbents,” said Mark Gersh, a top Democratic strategist on House races.

Helping Boswell is that he typically bought ads on Des Moines television stations during his races in his old district. Early polls for Thompson’s campaign found that about 80% of voters in the new district recognized Boswell’s name.

But at the Southeast Polk football game, it was clear that the recognition didn’t go much further than that with voters such as Ted Eddleman, a Runnells postal worker.

“Your hear his name on the news,” said Eddleman, who struggled for a moment when asked what else he associated with Boswell, before adding: “He’s a farmer.”

That rural imagery was an asset for Boswell in his old district; it’s a mixed blessing in this heavily suburban area.

That subtle cultural contrast is just another way that Iowa’s redistricting approach exposes its House members to electoral pressures that have become distant memories for most of their colleagues in other states.