Palo mayor squeaks by 19-year Linn Supervisor Jim Houser

CEDAR RAPIDS - No one in Linn County politics on Tuesday could readily recall the last time a Republican defeated an incumbent Democrat in a Linn County race for supervisor. That's changed.

Palo Mayor and Republican John Harris, who personally campaigned little while recovering from a bout with cancer, last night defeated Democrat Jim Houser, a 19-year veteran of the Board of Supervisors, in Supervisor District 5. It was a squeaker - a 167-vote margin from 16,741 votes cast.

“I'm just blown away,” Harris, 57, said from home late last night. “I had a great campaign crew. They went everywhere for me and did everything I asked of them.”

The razor-thin defeat caught Houser, 56, by surprise.

“You know, I put everything into this race and everything into this job,” he said late last night from home. “I don't know what to make of it. … I've always given 100 percent. More than 100 percent. … It's been a good run.”

At the same time last night, veteran Linn County supervisor Lu Barron, 56 and a Democrat, won her race handily in supervisor District 1, defeating 53-year-old Republican challenger Dennis Petersen, 57 percent to 43 percent. All of District 1 is in Cedar Rapids.

Harris's victory, in truth, comes in a still-new landscape of Linn County politics, in which supervisors since 2008 have run in one of five districts rather than countywide. District 5, which comprises parts of western Cedar Rapids, small towns from Walker to Fairfax including Harris' home of Palo, and rural areas of western Linn County, seemed to hold out some promise for a Republican, which Harris now has delivered on.

Houser and Harris both said they will have to look at the precinct-by-precinct results to see where their votes came from and didn't come from.

Harris said he figured he would be able to win the rural parts of the district, and he said his campaign worked hard on the west side of Cedar Rapids to try to win votes there.

“That was where our challenge was,” Harris said of the Cedar Rapids precincts.

From her Cedar Rapids home last night, Barron, who has held office for 14 years, said she was pleased residents in District 1 continued to have confidence in her and came out and showed their support.

“I'm looking forward to a lot of things - rebuilding our community, keeping our Triple-A bond rating, securing funding for home-and-community-based services for our seniors and people with disabilities and revitalizing Czech Village and New Bohemia. Those things are really important to me.”

Petersen, a Cedar Rapids area Realtor, noted earlier Tuesday that District 1 had 4,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans. He said he thought an anti-incumbent mood might help swing the election against Barron and to him.