Candidates says Iowa 1st District race all about middle class

CEDAR RAPIDS - The general election campaign in Iowa's U.S. House 1st District will be a fight for - and about - the middle class.

'We're going to talk about the issues the working families, the middle class cares about,” Republican nominee Rod Blum said as he watched the final election results trickle in Tuesday night.

Middle class families in the 20-county district that stretches from Marshalltown to the Mississippi River and Minnesota border and includes Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls-Waterloo and Dubuque 'haven't been doing well the past six years,” he said.

Democratic nominee State Rep. Pat Murphy of Dubuque agrees that economic populism is a core issue for voters that 'plays just as well in rural Iowa as it does in urban Iowa,” he said Wednesday during a conference call with other congressional candidates supported by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Murphy said his record on economic populism during 25 years in the Iowa House was a key to his win in the five-way Democratic primary Tuesday.

Raising the minimum wage was his 'first and foremost issue,” Murphy said, noting that he led the effort to raise it to $7.25 while he was speaker of the Iowa House and introduced a bill this year to raise it to $10.10.

'We ended up winning 18 out of 20 counties,” he said. 'The big part, I noticed, is the issue of the minimum wage seems to be a bigger issue in rural Iowa than in some of the urban centers.”

He also talked about paycheck fairness and the fact that while he was speaker the House, Iowa was the first in the nation to pass a state version of the Lily Ledbetter Act calling for women to receive equal pay in the workplace.

'We argued that it was not a women's issue, it's a middle class issue, because it affects middle class families, because we're taking money out of hardworking women's incomes by not treating them the same as men in the workplace,” Murphy said.

Blum believes Iowa working families are 'economically stressed.” His remedy relies less on government intervention, however, and more on policies he said will grow the economy and offer Americans more opportunity.

'I stand for a rebirth of economic and personal freedom and the prosperity that will result,” Blum said.

The issue he heard most about on the primary election campaign trail, Blum said, was the decline in family income and household net worth over the past six years - those years since President Barack Obama's election.

'From an economic standpoint, they're not doing as well and, at the same time, prices are going up,” Blum said. 'Food prices are starting to go up, gas prices are up, the cost of health care we know is up and the cost of a college education is up.”

Blum acknowledges that economic stress as well as the growing disparity in incomes is weighing on working families.

'I think America does best, I know it's at its best when we have a strong middle class,” said Blum, who talks about his lower middle class upbringing. His father dropped out of school in the 10th grade to fight in World War II and later worked in a meatpacking plant. His mother cleaned houses.

'I want to make sure youth have the same opportunity I had,” said Blum, chairman and CEO of Digital Canal Inc., a provider of home building and structural engineering software, and real estate developer. He bought into a company with five employees and growing it to 325 employees in five years.

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