Rita Hart Elected As New Chair Of Iowa Democratic Party

The Iowa Democratic Party has a new chair: Rita Hart, a former state senator and farmer who was the party’s lieutenant governor candidate in 2018 and a congressional candidate in 2020. The party’s state central committee elected Hart in a three-way contest this morning.

“My focus is squarely on helping our party win elections again,” said Hart in her speech, citing her past wins in a state senate district twice that Donald Trump carried.

Hart, as she acknowledged herself, has a tall task ahead of her. Following the 2022 election, Iowa Democrats find themselves in their weakest position in decades. Republicans control all federal offices in the state, all but one of the statewide offices, and 98 of the Legislature’s 150 seats. National Democrats are also stripping Iowa of their first place status in the presidential nominating calendar.

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Further complicating Iowa Democrats’ efforts to rebuild is the national party’s recent abandonment of Iowa as a competitive state—very few campaigns last year saw serious financial investment from the usual national Democratic partners.

Helping Hart in her effort to turn the Democratic Party around in Iowa will be legislative leaders Rep. Jennifer Konfrst and Sen. Zach Wahls, and State Auditor Rob Sand, all of whom are contributing their time to assist in strengthening the state party. In years’ past, other top Democratic elected officials largely kept their focus to their own individual campaigns.

Hart will be Iowa Democrats’ tenth state party chair since 2010. The role has been particularly unstable for a wide variety of reasons, only some of them involving the party’s poor election results in most cycles during that time period.

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But the constant changeover in state party chair has not helped Democrats as they struggle to adapt to Iowa voters’ hard shift to the right over the past decade. New leadership and staff have frequently cycled in and out of the party’s headquarters, each bringing with them new ideas and strategies to right the ship but rarely implementing them for more than one or two years.

Meanwhile, Jeff Kaufmann has been the Republican Party of Iowa chair since 2014.

There was a lengthy dispute early in the meeting over whether two proposed constituency caucuses created at the last state party convention should have been officially formed by this meeting and their members seated in order to vote. Outgoing Chair Ross Wilburn ruled, citing the opinion of the party’s attorney, that the way the new caucuses were written into the constitution about being elected in even-number years and that because they weren’t formed last year, they could not be elected this year.

About a third of the SCC members also attempted to delay or block a pending discussion about the creation of a new, smaller steering committee for the state party. It took the SCC over two hours to actually approve the agenda for today’s meeting and nearly an hour and a half to count the votes of 51 people in the chair’s race.

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Brittany Ruland, a campaign staffer on recent state senate races, and Bob Krause, who has run the party’s Veterans Caucus, also ran for state party chair.

“With this new coalition, we will be able to wrestle our state from the hands of a reactionary Republican party,” Ruland said. “Their power really lies in division and Iowa Democrats will be the opposition to this. We will instead offer a message a hope, inclusion and solidarity.”

Krause cited his experience of serving on the SCC for many years and focused on Democrats’ rural outreach.

“If we don’t turn that around, we have no chance in getting margins in the urban and the suburban areas to carry us to victory,” he said.

Hart received 34 votes, Ruland 14 and Krause one.

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As Hart takes over, the state party will also see another new group of staff come in, as most under Wilburn’s tenure already decided to depart.

by Pat Rynard
1/28/23

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