The 2018 election went pretty well for Democrats in Iowa, as I predicted. They took 2 of 3 Republican House seats. They won seats in the state legislature. Not enough for a majority, but better than last election. Democrats also did pretty well nationally, as we know. But it didn’t go so well for Fred Hubbell.
Fred Hubbell lost.
Why did he lose?
The Results
First, let’s look at the overall picture.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-governor-elections.html
He won 11 counties and lost 88. That’s better than the Democrats did in 2014. But it’s not enough to win.
Unfortunately this map doesn’t show the relative strength of the candidates’ victories. So let me point that out. Hubbell won Johnson County (University of Iowa/Iowa City) by a lot. 71.6% of the vote, to be precise. He won Iowa’s two other ‘college town’ counties – Story (Iowa State) and Blackhawk (UNI) – pretty robustly. He won the two largest cities of Iowa, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. And he narrowly won a few industrial counties along the Mississippi River. He narrowly lost Winneshiek County (Luther College).
That’s about it. He got shellacked everywhere else.
Hubbell vs. Other Democrats
For a second look, let’s compare how Hubbell performed relative to the Democrat in each Congressional district.
The short answer is: not well. Overall, Hubbell lost to Kim Reynolds by about 40,000 votes. But in the four races for Congress, Democrats beat Republicans by about 50,000 votes.
Let’s dive in and look at each district. Here’s how many more or fewer votes Hubbell won than the Democratic candidate in each Iowa district. I’ve rounded the numbers to the nearest thousand.
IA-01: -8,000 votes
IA-02: -11,000 votes
IA-03: +7,000 votes
IA-04: -25,000 votes
Three things stand out. One, Fred Hubbell did much worse overall than his party. Two, Hubbell did his best in Des Moines (i.e., IA-03). Three, Hubbell did badly in rural areas, especially the strongly rural IA-04. Democrats usually do badly in IA-04, but Hubbell did really badly.
To add to this, I looked into precisely where in each of the four districts Hubbell did well. In northeastern Iowa (IA-01), Hubbell ran about 2,000 votes behind Abby Finkenhauer in the urban areas of Cedar Rapids and Dubuque. He ran about 6,000 votes behind her in the rural areas surrounding those cities. In southeastern Iowa (IA-02), he ran about even with Dave Loebsack in Iowa City and 3,000 votes behind him in Davenport. He ran about 8,000 votes behind in rural parts of IA-02. In southwestern Iowa (IA-03), he build his lead over Cindy Axne mostly from urban Des Moines votes. In northwestern Iowa (IA-04), Hubbell got outperformed by J.D. Scholten pretty much everywhere.
Explanations
I’ll lay out a couple of explanations for Hubbell’s loss below. To some extent, they overlap. To some extent, they don’t.
1. Rural Voters Disliked Hubbell Even More than Other Democrats
What stands out to me in the above data is that Hubbell did reasonably well in urban areas, but very poorly in rural ones. He didn’t do that much worse than Abby Finkenhauer in Cedar Rapids and Dubuque. He didn’t do that much worse than Dave Loebsack in Iowa City. Hubbell even did better than Cindy Axne in Des Moines.
By contrast, Kim Reynolds blew him out across rural Iowa. And, more damaging than that, other Democrats limited their losses in the rural parts of the state far more effectively than Hubbell did.
He came off to people as an out of touch, wealthy Des Moines businessman. That’s probably because he’s an out of touch, wealthy Des Moines businessman.
Funny how that works.
2. Democrats Didn’t Have Any Good Candidates
Hubbell wasn’t a good candidate. He didn’t really have a natural base outside of upper-middle income urbanites, who don’t make up a large segment of voters in Iowa. Liberal and center-left Democrats weren’t enthusiastic about him. Rural voters weren’t interested at all.
But this doesn’t tell the whole story on candidate selection. The deeper problem is that Democrats didn’t have many good options. They’ve repeatedly lost statewide elections for almost a decade now. Consequently, they don’t have a large bench of good candidates.
The Democratic primary field was large, but full of marginal candidates. Hubbell won the primary easily, and may have had the best chance of winning among them. Nate Boulton had potential to draw a wider range of support, but he went down in a scandal of his own making. Even prior to the scandal, he was a junior Des Moines legislator who offered more promise than demonstrated results or vision.
John Norris offered the most comprehensive and compelling policy vision for rural Iowa, but his campaign never got any traction. Had he won the nomination, it’s possible that he’d have been able to turn that policy vision into votes. But if he couldn’t do better than third place and 11% in the primary, why should we believe he’d be able to drum up significant enthusiasm in the general election? Possible, but not especially likely.
The third alternative was Cathy Glasson, who ran as the Sandersista candidate. I wrote about the Glasson campaign in an earlier post, so I won’t repeat it here. But the gist of it is that Glasson had a very enthusiastic, but very small base. She wasn’t able to win any votes outside her base. It’s incredibly unlikely she’d have been able to do so in the general election, either. Had Glasson been the candidate, I think she’d have lost by a wider margin than Hubbell. And possibly taken down some state legislature and even Congressional candidates with her.
Glasson’s Sandersista platform represents the future of the Iowa center-left, but they haven’t yet sold the vision to the broader electorate. Their challenge will be to build out their base over the coming months and years.
The other candidates were party insiders and/or minor officials who played no significant role in the primary.
A Mitigating Factor: The Steve King Effect
One thing worth pointing out is that a majority of Hubbell’s shortage of votes came from IA-04. This district is very rural and Republican. However, the Republican House member, Steve King, barely won the district. Thus, Hubbell finished way behind his fellow Democrat.
To some extent, this was due to the first reason I gave above. Scholten appealed to rural Iowans in a way Hubbell didn’t. Maybe a different Democrat could’ve captured some of those votes.
But most of the story here has nothing to do with Hubbell at all. The reason IA-04 was so close is that Steve King is such an over the top racist that even many Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him. Scholten won a lot of votes merely because his name wasn’t Steve King.
Many of these anti-Steve King Republicans wouldn’t vote for an open racist who is embarrassing their hometown all across the globe. But they had no beef with Kim Reynolds. They voted for her. It’s unlikely any other Democratic candidate would’ve won those votes, either.
Conclusions
Iowa Democrats have a solid base in Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, and the three major college towns (Iowa City, Ames, Cedar Falls). They struggle everywhere else. Their major focus should be on finding ways to appeal to the rest of the state without moving to the sort of centrist/center-right politics that wiped out Chet Culver and Bruce Braley.
If there’s one lesson from the 2018 election, it’s that Abby Finkenhauer probably showed more skill than anyone else at navigating these waters. There are probably lessons Democrats should learn from her campaign. That said, I haven’t followed Finkenhauer closely and don’t have many specifics in mind.
It’s clear that Fred Hubbell wasn’t that candidate. He didn’t have a compelling enough platform to attract the low-wage workers Glasson sought. He didn’t focus enough on rural policy to attract the rural voters Norris sought. And so he won the Iowa Democratic base and lost everywhere else.
