Just 14 days remain in the 2018 campaign and Iowans are already casting votes by absentee ballot. At the top of the ballot are the four candidates for governor.
Republican Kim Reynolds was the long-time Clarke County Treasurer, a state senator for two years and she served six-and-a-half years as lieutenant governor. In May of 2017 when Terry Branstad resigned to become U.S. Ambassador to China, Reynolds became Iowa’s first female governor.
Reynolds went to her hometown of Osceola in early March of this year to formally kick off her campaign.
“I didn’t set out to become a governor,” Reynolds said that night, “but that’s what I love about Iowa. If you’re willing to work for it…anything is possible.”
This is her closing pitch to voters. “Iowa is working,” Reynolds said in Sunday’s debate sponsored by KQWC, KCRG and The Quad City Times. “US News and World Report says we’re number one in the country, but I say, ‘We’re just getting started.'”
In the middle of 2017, Fred Hubbell criticized the GOP agenda at the statehouse as he launched his campaign.
“They’re passing a lot of legislation that is undermining the core values of what have built our state,” Hubbell said in July of 2017 at an Iowa Democratic Party fundraiser. “That’s not acceptable.”
Hubbell beat four competitors in the June Primary to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor. Hubbell, a businessman, comes from a prominent Des Moines family and is making his first run for elected office.
This is his closing pitch to voters. “Let’s work together and put people first in our state,” Hubbell said in this past Sunday’s debate. “…For all Iowans, it’s time for a change.”
Thirty-year-old Jake Porter, a Council Bluffs business and marketing consultant, is the Libertarian Party’s nominee for governor.
“We believe in maximum personal and economic freedoms,” Porter said during a recent interview with Radio Iowa. “…The Libertarian Party has been around since 1971 and it exists because it is a unique philosophy,”
Criminal justice reform has been a top issue for Porter.
The fourth candidate for governor is independent Gary Siegwarth, a fisheries biologist for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources in Clayton County.
“I want to put the voice of the land and the common people back on top,” he said in a video recorded for the Iowa Youth Straw Poll.
Siegwarth refers to himself as a “community candidate” with the Clean Water Party of Iowa.