Aside from today being the last state primaries in the presidential process, it is primary day for Iowa races. In northeast and southwest Iowa, Democrats will pick their nominees to face two freshman Republican U.S. House representatives.
The 1st District has been getting a lot of attention. Pat Murphy and Monica Vernon are again vying to take on Rod Blum, this time head-to-head instead of in a five-way race. Many big names have lined up behind Vernon. The Iowa Democratic Party is not happy (cheesed off, even) about losing out on “first Iowa woman in Congress”, and this year’s 1st District general election is probably the best chance to break the glass ceiling on the House side.
Blum is a freshman representative in a district with more registered Democrats than Republicans that is a lean-R tossup in Cook Political Report and a lean-D tossup in Sabato’s Crystal Ball. David Young, Iowa’s other House freshman, fares slightly better. Although the district also leans D in registration, it’s by less, and the 3rd is a lean-R in Cook but tossup-R in Sabato. Cook judges that only three states have more than one tossup district — Iowa, Florida, and New York.
You have to go back to the 1960s to find the last time a member of the U.S. House from Iowa only lasted one term. In the LBJ/Democratic landslide of 1964, five of Iowa’s seven districts changed hands, but in 1966 four of those winners were ejected (the survivor: Neal Smith). After 1978, as many Iowa congressmen standing for re-election lost in incumbent-on-incumbent redistricting (Dave Nagle and Leonard Boswell) than lost to a challenger (Smith, on the other end of his career, and Jim Leach).
Sabato’s Crystal Ball has a column about the effect of the growing rural-urban split on races. Besides a clean redistricting process, that’s another part of what makes Iowa so competitive: We don’t have enough districts to split those areas up.