At a political event in rural Cedar Township one attendee said to me Phil Hemingway had a good chance of winning the supervisor election in District 2 of Johnson County. The Republican may win that township. Trump won the area in 2024, and Mariannette Miller-Meeks won there in 2022, including in my precinct, also located in the northeast corner of liberal Johnson County. There is more to the story.
Hemingway has run for office so many times I lost count. He hasn’t changed much, if anything in his policy positions and campaign rhetoric. I’m confident Republicans like him for that, yet his brand of what I will call “doctrinaire consistency” indicates he is out of touch with Johnson County voters. This is evidenced by his repeated losses while running for supervisor.
If he were a serious candidate, there would be some evidence of modifying his message to accommodate voter feedback. Instead, he relies upon a familiar set of policy positions and critiques of government that remained unchanged over multiple campaigns.
Things do change in Johnson County. Not least of the changes was a law Republicans like Hemingway helped craft that divided the county into supervisor districts. The idea was rural parts of the county would get better representation. While he may have made his colleagues happy by his contributions to bringing this policy idea into law, there is little evidence it will work, based on the districts created by the Legislative Services Agency.
The precinct level voting across District 2 show a consistent pattern in both 2022 and 2024. (Data is publicly available on the Johnson County Auditor website). While Republican candidates perform strongly in rural townships—Cedar, Fremont-Lincoln-Lone Tree, and Big Grove-Solon Annex—the margins are not large enough to offset overwhelming Democratic advantages in Iowa City precincts. In other words, all the work done by Hemingway and others to create this supervisor district election was for naught.
A review of Hemingway’s public record—especially in light of his 2021 defeat to Jon Green—shows a political persona defined more by consistency than evolution. Across multiple campaigns and in his earlier service on the Iowa City school board, Hemingway maintained a stable set of themes, rhetorical habits, and political positioning. What has changed since 2021 is limited.
The Cedar Township event attendee next said to me, “Well, he was elected to the school board.” Indeed he was. I first encountered Hemingway at the Iowa City Community School Board meetings where I was a reporter for the North Liberty Leader. I remember him as something of a gadfly who liked to hear himself speak and frequently asked questions at the public meeting. I saw no questions of his had substantial impact on the board’s actions.
I was finished at the North Liberty Leader when Hemingway was elected to the school board. There is some public record of his proposals related mainly to budget. Sometimes he made vague assertions about policy, as many Republicans do. Because his was a minority view, the board continued to do their work without taking him seriously. I would like to know how many 6-1 votes there were with him being the one. Others tell me there were more than a few.
Data and math kill his chances in the upcoming supervisor election.
The distribution of votes across District 2 raises a structural problem for a candidate like Hemingway. His base of support is geographically concentrated and numerically limited, while the opposition vote is both larger and more efficiently distributed across the district. Under these conditions, repeating the same campaign strategy is unlikely to produce a different outcome.
Hemingway continues to use the same tools he has from his earliest campaigns, expecting different results. He should put away his hammer if he wants a chance at winning because every problem is not a nail.
The creation of supervisor districts was intended, in part, to amplify rural representation. However, District 2 illustrates the limits of that approach. Even with rural precincts grouped together, the inclusion of multiple high-turnout Iowa City precincts creates a built-in advantage for Democratic candidates. The result is not a competitive balance, but a district where electoral outcomes are relatively predictable.
I predict the winner of the June 2 primary between Democrats Jessica Andino, Janet Godwin, and Jon Green will also easily win the November general election.
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