You Had One Job
The Iowa Supreme Court scheduled arguments for today on appeal of a district judge’s ruling which would keep former Congresswoman Abby Finkenauer off the June Democrat primary ballot for U.S. Senate. The judge ruled that her nominating petitions fell short of the required number of legal signatures…which include decipherable signatures and the date.
She claims it’s a Republican conspiracy because the GOP is afraid of her taking on Sen. Charles Grassley in November. Obviously Grassley has to win his primary first…and perhaps Finkenauer should have paid more attention to just getting on the primary ballot to have a chance at winning the nomination before worrying about the general election.
This is not the first high profile error of this type in recent years. Recall that the long-awaited Republican primary fight for governor in 2018 was blunted when Ron Corbett’s team failed to get enough legal signatures and he was left off the ballot. Earlier this year, former House Speaker Brent Siegrist found himself off the June ballot when he did not get enough signatures from voters in his district after boundary lines were redrawn, and he had signatures from folks who now vote in a different district.
In each of those occasions, the candidate did not file a legal challenge; Corbett ended his campaign, and Siegrist—since no other Republican is on the primary ballot—is seeking to get the nomination via convention, all according to law.
While I have informally advised both Republican and Democrat candidates over time, I’ve never run a campaign and never collected signatures. That said, how can any serious candidate fall short? Wouldn’t you push to have at least 10-15 percent more signatures than you need, in each of the specific categories, just in case there are issues?
This failure to plan or count is clearly not limited to one party. The rules themselves do not seem onerous, and are pretty clearly written.
So why all the stumbles? Failure to focus on just taking one step at a time, instead of writing victory speeches? Failure to hire good people as staff members? A sense that the law is not to be taken seriously?
Perhaps a bit of all that. Regardless, it’s the ultimate “unforced error”. And how do you not say to the person in charge of signatures, “you had one job”?
