Iowa's next gubernatorial debate in Cedar Rapids draws interest

The state's political attention shifts to Cedar Rapids this week when Democratic Gov. Chet Culver and former Republican Gov. Terry Branstad debate at Coe College.

Those of us at The Gazette, KCRG-TV9, TheGazette.com, KCRG.com and Coe who have worked hard over the past few months to pull this off look forward to the debate. It will be from 7 to 8 p.m. Thursday at Sinclair Auditorium. You can watch it live on KCRG Local 9.2 or on either of the aforementioned websites.

Plenty of other Iowans are looking forward to this, too. We received 1,075 requests for the 540 seats made available to the general public for this event. Virtually all of those requests were for two seats. We used a lottery to determine who got tickets. These people will join supporters selected by the Culver and Branstad campaigns; students, faculty and staff at Coe; and reporters from across the state at Sinclair Auditorium.

The debate will be that night's premier political event in Iowa. We are pleased to sponsor and organize it, and pleased that Coe has been a good partner.

We chose a lottery system for distributing public tickets so that we could be as fair as possible with the requests. Big-time politics get played at the gubernatorial level, and part of that game is trying to stack the audience with as many supporters as possible. One of the candidates may have an edge when it comes to supporters in the auditorium Thursday night but only by the luck of the draw. We used a computer program that did a blind draw, doing the best we could to make the system fair.

Candidates' supporters tried their best. One person signing up for a public ticket reported being from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A follow-up e-mail from us has produced no response. A few people signed up several times. We removed duplicate names after running the lottery so, while those signing multiple times increased their odds of getting picked, they got only two tickets once they were selected.

Interestingly, two people from different cities registered with their first name and placed their last name in the address field of the online application form we used for the lottery, according to Mattie Brawner, the marketing consultant leading the ticket distribution effort from SourceMedia Group. They told Brawner when she called to get addresses that they didn't realize they had signed up for the lottery, but wanted to attend. “I'm assuming that someone signed them up on their behalf,” Brawner said.

A note is in order about four candidates running for governor: Jonathan Narcisse, the Iowa Party candidate from Des Moines; Eric Cooper, the Libertarian Party candidate from Ames; David Rosenfeld, the Socialist Workers Party candidate from Des Moines; and Gregory Hughes, of Cedar Rapids and nominated by petition.

These four candidates were not invited to Thursday's debate because we want to spend a productive hour focusing on what Iowa's next governor has in mind for the state. Including the other four candidates either would dilute a one-hour debate. Or, it would extend the debate to an unbearable amount of time.

These four historically and statistically do not appear to have a chance to be the next governor. In the last gubernatorial race less than 1 percent of the votes went to a candidate who was not a Democrat or Republican. Four years earlier produced a better showing – a little shy of 3 percent.

A Des Moines Register poll last week showed 9 percent of Iowans questioned said they would vote for someone other than Culver or Branstad. That would be the best showing in a long time but not enough to make you think this is the year a third-party candidate breaks the hold Democrats and Republicans have on the governor's  mansion.