Abstract
A Republican representing northeast Iowa in Congress is a political anomaly. Almost immediately after Rod Blum’s initial election in 2014, he was viewed as vulnerable. Blum did not match the dynamics of Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, where Democrats have consistently outnumbered Republicans by four to five percentage points and President Obama won by 14 points in 2012. To understand this mismatch, this chapter draws on an original survey sent to 1‚500 randomly selected voters in the district. Blum’s success was in part due to independent voters seeing him as neither too hot nor too cold. Given the district’s support for Donald Trump, it is still an open question on whether Blum’s representation of the district is truly anomalous, or whether it is a new normal.
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Hoffman, D.R., Larimer, C.W. (2018). Iowa First Congressional District: Anomaly or New Normal?. In: Foreman, S., Godwin, M. (eds) The Roads to Congress 2016. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58094-4_10
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