There were some history-making victories in the city and school board elections on Tuesday, as voters in Des Moines elected the city’s first woman mayor and, in Cedar Rapids, a member of the LGBTQ community won a seat on the city council for the first time. But for the most part, Tuesday’s elections followed the typical Iowa pattern with incumbents winning, although there was a notable exception in Iowa City.
The campaigns for the two highest-profile ballot measures in the election, one in Polk County and the other in Cedar Rapids, saw very different results, but voters in both central and eastern Iowa elected school board members who oppose the anti-LGBTQ policies and book bans that Gov. Reynolds and Republicans in the Iowa Legislature have imposed on school districts.
Connie Boesen wins in Des Moines
When she takes the oath of office in January, Connie Boesen will become the first woman to serve as mayor of Des Moines in the city’s history, just over 100 years after Emma Harvat of Iowa City became the state’s first woman to be mayor in 1922. Boesen, who currently holds one of the at-large seats on the Des Moines City Council, will succeed Frank Cownie, the 20-year incumbent who chose not to run again.
Boesen won 48 percent of the vote, edging out Josh Mandelbaum, who represents Ward 3 on the Des Moines City Council. Mandelbaum won 46 percent of the vote, losing to Boesen by just 724 votes. Community activist Denver Foote earned 3 percent of the vote and musician Chris Von Arx got 2 percent.
During the campaign, Boesen said that as mayor she would “work to improve public safety, boost our economy, support our public schools, and revitalize our neighborhoods.”
“We know it’s not easy, we know there’s going to be a lot of work but I know if we collectively all work together, we can make great things happen,” Boesen told supporters gathered at Chuck’s on Sixth Avenue after the vote totals were reported.
There was controversy in the final days of the campaign, as mailers from “Citizens for Des Moines” attacking Mandelbaum began landing in Des Moines mailboxes. Mandelbaum called the mailers “incredibly false and misleading.”
Citizens for Des Moines was incorporated on Oct. 20, as Laura Belin reported at Bleeding Heartland. Because it formed so late in the process, it did not have to file any reports disclosing its donors before the election. Des Moines attorney Doug Gross is listed as the group’s president in its incorporation filing with the Iowa Secretary of State. Gross has long been active in Iowa Republican politics. He was the GOP candidate for governor in 2002, losing to Democrat Tom Vilsack in the general election. He also served as Gov. Terry Branstad’s chief of staff. Gross was a major donor to Boesen’s campaign.
Boesen, who was first elected tot the city council in 2017, boasted during the campaign of having bipartisan support. City elections in Iowa are by law nonpartisan. Boesen was endorsed by Cownie and three members of the city council — Carl Voss, Joe Gatto and Linda Westergaard — as well as by Patty Judge, who was lieutenant governor under Chet Culver, the last Democrat to serve as governor of Iowa.
There will be a special election in March to fill Boesen’s at-large seat on the city council.
David Maier wins in Cedar Rapids
There were two at-large city council seats on the ballot in Cedar Rapids, and both incumbents, Ann Poe and Pat Loeffler, were running for reelection. The third person in the race was first-time candidate David Maier, a CPA who works as a finance and controls manager at Transamerica.
Maier has been very active in the community since moving to Cedar Rapids five years ago. He’s served on the boards of the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, CSPS, Revival Theatre Company and CR Pride. Maier has worked as volunteer at Feed Iowa First and was a founder of the Wellington Heights Tree Equity.
In the three way race for the two at-large seats, Maier won 10,619, or 24 percent of the vote, finishing 871 votes behind first-place finisher Ann Poe. Pat Loeffler, who was running for a second term on the city council, got 8,024 votes.
Maier listed affordable housing, addressing climate change and homelessness, and improving public infrastructure, including flood control. He said he wanted to be a coach and mentor for young people who have “grown up in a culture in which politics is polarizing and toxic.”
Maier is the first openly gay person elected to the Cedar Rapids City Council.
“There are young queer people in our community that are scared, that feel unloved, that feel unwanted,” Maier told supporters gathered at Lion Bridge Brewing on Tuesday night, the Gazette reported. “It’s an important message that people don’t care about my sexuality. It was a non-issue in the election … There’s more the city can do to send a message to primarily our queer youth, but also their allies and their family and their friends that we are a welcoming, loving, open-minded community and we celebrate our differences.”
Laura Bergus reelected to Iowa City Council, but to a different seat
Laura Bergus was elected to an at-large seat on the Iowa City Council in 2019. In May of this year, Bergus announced she was running for reelection, which wasn’t surprising. On Aug. 28, Bergus announced that instead of running for her current at-large seat, she was running for the District A council seat. That was surprising, because six days earlier, two-term District A incumbent Pauline Taylor formally announced she was running for reelection.
“When I first ran, I lived in a district that did not have a seat up for election at that time. The district boundaries have changed since then, and now I live in District A,” Bergus said in a statement when she filed her election paperwork on Aug. 28.
“My reasons for wanting to serve have not changed,” she continued. “I am asking to continue to serve the whole community. I will continue to lead with love, courage, and conviction. Together, we can do hard things.”
Bergus did not mention Taylor in her statement.
There was a third candidate for the District A seat, Tim Borchardt, which meant there needed to be a primary in District A. It was the first district-only primary in a regular Iowa City election since 1985. Bergus easily won the primary, receiving 58 percent of the vote, while Taylor got 25 percent and Borchardt 17 percent.
Early Monday morning, Iowa City Mayor Bruce Teague issued a statement saying that while “love[s] and respect[s]” Bergus, people should vote for Taylor. Teague called Bergus “the anti-police candidate.”
“I disagree with the position Councilor Bergus laid out in a Gazette op-ed on May 9, 2021, titled ‘We Need to Talk about Abolishing the Police in Iowa City,’” the mayor said.
In that 2021 column, Bergus wrote, “Only systemic changes can solve systemic problems. As a city council member, I believe local government must be part of the solution. Even without knowing exactly what should replace policing as we know it, we must try something different.”
In his statement, Teague also cited Bergus’s opposition to the $17.3 million Iowa City Police Department Budget approved by the city council in April. Before the final vote on the budget, Bergus offered an amendment that would have diverted $1.6 million of the budget to programs that could serve as alternatives to traditional policing. After that amendment was voted down, she offered a scaled-back version of the amendment that would have diverted slightly less than $1 million from the budget. It was also voted down.
In the end, Bergus was the only city councilmember to vote against approving the ICPD budget. 
Bergus responded to Teague’s statement in a series of posts on social media on Monday afternoon. She made it clear she still considers herself an “abolitionist” when it comes to policing, and she’s pushing for a definition of public safety that goes beyond “armed officers” responding to calls for help or reports of public disturbance.
“Much to several other council members’ chagrin, I will not let us turn away from this issue, even when the protesters have been absent for years now,” Bergus tweeted. “(We shouldn’t need people in the streets to do what’s right!)”
Much to several other council members’ chagrin, I will not let us turn away from this issue, even when the protesters have been absent for years now. (We shouldn’t need people in the streets to do what’s right!) 3/21
— Laura Bergus (@lbergus) November 6, 2023
She said she knows pushing to move funds from the police department to alternative public service programs “makes some people uncomfortable, but I will not shy away from envisioning a future of accountability and care that doesn’t require the government’s violence. That’s my measuring stick.”
As Iowa Public Radio’s Zachary Oren Smith pointed out, Teague as well as councilmembers Shawn Harmsen and John Thomas, who did not run reelection, all donated to Taylor’s campaign. Bergus did not receive contributions from any of her fellow councilmembers.
Bergus not only won the District A seat, she increased her winning margin from 58 percent of the vote in primary to 66 percent of all the ballots cast in the race on Tuesday.
“I want to keep doing what we’re doing,” Bergus told KGAN after the vote totals were announced. “I’ve been really proud of my first term on city council. I’m really happy with our very progressive strategic plan, and I think the margin in this race show that Iowa City wants that too.”
Bond issues go both ways
There were many bond issues on ballots around Iowa on Tuesday, but the two most high-profile ones were in Polk County and the Cedar Rapids Community School District.
In Polk County, voters were asked to approve a $350 million bond issue that would be used to expand and upgrade the Des Moines International Airport, and did so, with about 80 percent voting in favor of it.
The outcome was very different for a proposed $220 million bond that Cedar Rapids Community School District officials said was vital to making needed renovations at existing schools and would have funded construction of a new middle school. Sixty-one percent of voters rejected it.
School board elections show a clear trend
In Johnson, Linn and Polk counties, voters elected school board members who support LGBTQ rights and oppose book bans, rejecting candidates backed by rightwing groups like Moms for Liberty and endorsed by Republican politicians.
On Wednesday morning, One Iowa Action, which advocates and lobbies on behalf LGBTQ Iowans released a statement on the election results.
“Last night, Iowa voters told us what we’ve always known,” executive director Courtney Reyes said. “We know that book bans and censorship violate the principles of free speech. We know that extreme positions targeting children for exclusion and bullying are unacceptable. Most importantly, we know that kids deserve a safe, inclusive learning environment regardless of who they are or where they come from. That’s what this election was about, and that’s the undeniable message that they sent to politicians across our state and across the country.”
