Election Results: Iowa

It's the morning after, the sun still rose, the schools are still open, the zombie apocalypse did not occur. Though this latter point truly disappointing me, I do want to take a moment and reflect on what yesterdays election result mean, specifically for my state of Iowa.

The booths looked simular in 2010, coincidence?

We begin by looking at the national elections, The incumbent President takes the state by a healthy margin  and we had 5 incumbents running of our now 4 congressional districts, of which incumbents won all four. With neither of our senators that have served a combined 60 years of service up for reelection this go around. We move on to the state senate elections where 26 elections were held with 13 incumbents running. Thanks, once again, to redistricting, 2 of the incumbents got to go head to head, the race for state senate district 26 resulted in 50% of the loses that were handed to the incumbents, so even counting that as a win and a loss, incumbents won about 85% of their elections. 91% if you just remove the incumbent v. incumbent race.

The state house wasn't much better, and by better, of course, I mean worse, just a sliver shy of 93% of incumbents that ran got re elected. This includes counting Erik Helland as a loss since he got primar'ied out by Jake Highfill who ended up winning the seat for district 39. And I'm counting Art Stead's win over Renee Schulte as a loss, even though he held a seat in the legislator from '06 to '08, ironically loosing to the same person who he just defeated then.

What is to be extrapolated from this information? The optimist in me says that Iowa was generally dissatisfied with the alternatives offered and simply will sit and wait for a better listing of candidates. The true optimist in me says that Iowa has it figured out, that we have conquered all adversity, or at least 90 some percent of it, and we are down to tweeks rather then reforms in our republic. The realist in me has another possibility, we are just lazy.

The kicker to this story is that over $15 million was spent just on the local house elections, and over $5 million on the senate, not even going into the federal elections, this means that Iowa spent roughly $17 per vote in order to keep everything just the way it is.

Is this a case of "The devil you know..." or "May the best man win..."? We may never be certain.... I'm sure I had a broader point to make there but I can't think of what it was or what it should be at this moment. I'll leave it to you, good people of the blogosphere, to draw your own conclusions. I will continue to yell at the universe from the safety and security of my couch, Cherios and underwear well in hand. Wait, that came out wrong.