Rita Hart comes home to pump up Democratic Party faithful

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Rita Hart, the Iowa Democratic Party chair, doesn’t mince words. Times have been tough lately for the party. Party faithful are discouraged. They wonder if Iowa can ever be brought back to the purple or even blue state it once was.

The answer, she said during a visit to her home town earlier this week, is “yes.”

With a lot of hard work and focused effort, getting the right candidates and the right message and bringing former reliable Democratic supporters back into the fold, the “D’s” can start again winning elections, she told a group of about three dozen people Monday evening.

Hart, who grew up a Rottinghaus on a farm near Charles City and now lives on a farm near Wheatland in Clinton County, has been the state Democratic Party chair since January.

She talked about a wide range of issues at the Aroma’s gathering, including the party’s recent past and what she said is its hopeful future; how, she said, Republican candidates’ messages in the last election did not match their actions in office; and the Democratic Party’s plans for the 2024 presidential caucuses.

Many Democrats were stunned by the depth of the party’s state losses in the 2022 election, failing to win even one of the four U.S. House seats up for bid, losing all statewide Iowa elected administrative offices except for one (that of re-elected Auditor Rob Sand, who was also at the gathering in Charles City Monday evening), and with Republicans winning super majorities in the Legislature.

And that was in spite of Democrats performing better than expected nationally.

Hart was a twice-elected state senator before being picked by Fred Hubble as his running mate in the race for governor and lieutenant governor in 2018. After Hubble lost to Kim Reynolds, Hart ran in 2020 for the U.S. House of Representatives in Iowa District 2, losing to Mariannette Miller-Meeks by six votes – the closest margin in U.S. House history, she said.

Hart told a story that she has been using at speaking engagements across the state, about how when they were growing up the nine Rottinghaus children would be taken out by their father to help pick up rocks in the fields, and how it felt like a pointless task because there would always be more rocks coming to the surface the next year.

But each child, no matter how big or small, had a role to play, to pick up they rocks they could handle and to help out when it took more than one person to remove a rock, she said.

And after they finished, their father told them to look back at the field and see the difference they had made, how each rock removed was one fewer to dent a disk, muck up a piece of machinery or stop the combine.

“That’s how I look at this job,” she said about her role as chair of the state Democratic Party. “It’s going to take all of us. But we all know how to work. We all know how important it is, and nothing worthwhile comes about without hard work. And what can you think of that is more worthwhile than turning this state around?”

In addition to the traditional things like fundraising, recruiting good candidates, organizing and getting their message out, they need to empower the county party organizations, she said.

“I’m a true believer that we have let the counties kind of wither on the vine,” she said.

“Here’s something that happened last election that we just can’t have happen again, and that is that we did not get our reliable Democratic vote. The best example of that is (former longtime state attorney general) Tom Miller. How many people regret that we didn’t get Tom Miller re-elected?” she asked.

“If we look at the results, he lost by about 27,000 votes. And we had 92,000-some votes of Democrats who dropped off, who did not vote in this election,” she said.

People are getting tired of politics and the fighting between parties, she said. Many have become convinced it doesn’t matter who is elected, and that’s a message that Republicans have encouraged, because the poorer the turnout, the better chance they have to win.

“We’ve got to do better, and I really believe that’s what we have to do at the county level, is empower the counties to do a better job of getting out that reliable Democratic vote, so then the campaigns can come in and work on the persuadables, and the less reliable Democrats, and the Republicans who are reasonable. Then the campaigns can focus on that because they know that the county party structure’s got that under control,” Hart said.

A woman asked Hart if she thinks Iowa has changed fundamentally when it comes to its political leanings.

“It does feel like that,” Hart said. “It totally feels like that. I am hopeful that that is not true. I think when you look at your day-to-day life it seems like it’s not true when you recognize that good things happen every day.”

She said people still care about the things that affect their lives, like schools and jobs and health care, and those are issues that Democrats are strongest on.

Hart said people were excited to see her take on the role of state party chair because she is a farmer, and the Democrats have struggled with the rural vote, not just nationally but even in Iowa lately.

“Here’s the reality. Who, beside the Democratic Party, has fought harder for the middle class and for working class and for small towns and for rural people? It’s the Democrats that have done that,” she said.

The woman who asked the question continued, “It’s crazy to have a Legislature that is so obsessed with these really mean-spirited taking people’s freedoms away, targeting people who are already vulnerable. It’s so mean-spirited.”

Hart said, “These Republican legislators are very much extreme, I believe, in comparison to the common person.

“If you look at the campaign ads last time, did you see any campaign ads that said, ‘We’re Republican and we’re going after public dollars and putting them into private schools’? Did you see any ads that said, ‘We’re going to go after women’s reproductive rights and we’re going to take them completely away?’ Did you see that? No,” she said.

“If they had told their real intentions, maybe the election wouldn’t have come out the same, because I think fundamentally we have more in common with folks than it feels like we do,” she said.

Regarding the presidential precinct caucuses, Hart said the Democratic Party was not going to let the Republicans in the Legislature tell them how to run their own party process.

At the time the Republicans were moving forward with a bill that would require caucuses to be held in person, rather than allowing mail-in ballots as the Democrats plan. Since then the Legislature has approved that bill.

“We’re still going to have caucuses, and they’re still going to be held on the same night as the Republicans, and we’re still going to have the opportunity to talk to each other and have that same historical kind of conversations. We’re just not going to couple that with the complicated process that we used before,” Hart said Monday.

“We’re going to make it simpler and we’re going to make it more inclusive,” she said.

She said she recognized the reasons that the Democratic National Committee had voted to take away Iowa’s status as the first test for presidential candidates, including because having the caucus on one night meant people who couldn’t be available that evening couldn’t participate.

“We don’t know what New Hampshire’s going to end up able to do. We don’t know if Georgia’s going to be able to fix their issue. We don’t know what the DNC is going to end up with with that first tier,” she said. “We’re going to take a wait and see attitude on it and see how we can’t end up with a process that is first and foremost good for Iowa Democrats. … We are going to be in charge of our own caucuses. We get to decide how it’s done and when it’s done.”