Iowa Democrats are targeting those who don't normally vote in midterm elections along with first-time voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 in the push for early voting, which began Thursday in Iowa and lasts for 40 days.

"Tomorrow is Election Day in Iowa," Iowa Democratic Party Chair Sue Dvorsky declared Wednesday. "Iowans will be able to vote early; they'll be able to vote by mail; they'll be able to vote early in person at their auditor's offices. We have been preparing for Election Day tomorrow since last year, and we are very excited to get ready to kick it off."

As of Friday, Iowa Democrats had requested more than twice as many absentee ballots as Republicans - 40,632 compared with 16,286 - according to the Iowa secretary of state's office. There have been a total of 69,376 requests for absentee ballots.

Even before the June primary election, it was obvious a Terry Branstad/Chet Culver contest would mainly consist of sarcastic, distorted, personal, accurate, and not-so-accurate attacks.

Despite serving five terms as governor combined and a term as lieutenant governor and two terms as secretary of state respectively, neither 2010 candidate has published detailed plans on how he would lead the efforts to fix the problems that plague Iowa: spending, taxation, education, and governance.

So it is no surprise the two took their "fried eggs" and "cooked books" televised warfare live to the stage of the Orpheum Theatre in Sioux City on Tuesday, September 14.

Given the density of Jonathan Narcisse's ideas and plans, he's smart to dispense the easy-to-grasp metaphor or example.

"Imagine you have a kid who hasn't cleaned his room for six months," Narcisse said in a phone interview last week. "And you can try to go in and you can try to clean the room. Or you can get some heavy-duty garbage bags and just go through that room and basically throw everything away, except the bed, the dresser, and a couple other things."

The 47-year-old Narcisse, a former member of the Des Moines school board, is running an independent candidacy for Iowa governor, appearing on the ballot under The Iowa Party banner. And he wants to approach Iowa state government with some heavy-duty garbage bags in hand. (Full disclosure: River Cities' Reader Publisher Todd McGreevy is a co-chair of Iowans for a Fair Debate, which is pushing for Narcisse to be included in gubernatorial debates.)

Narcisse's proposals are radical in the sense that they have no respect for the status quo. Narcisse thinks the two major-party candidates - Governor Chet Culver and former Governor Terry Branstad - are like parents who think a light cleaning is good enough. He disagrees: "We just literally wipe out the massive bureaucracy, because at the end of the day, we spend that money wiser."

In total, Narcisse is proposing cutting state and local taxes by $1.5 billion to $2 billion a year, with the caveat that equivalent spending reductions must precede tax cuts. For perspective, the Iowa Revenue Estimating Conference in March put the state's Fiscal Year 2011 general-fund receipts at $6.6 billion.

That type of bold plan has the potential to connect with voters who are dissatisfied with government and politicians.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's stunning decision to step down at the end of this term has at least temporarily sucked almost all the oxygen out of Illinois politics and focused just about everyone's attention on an extremely rare open-seat contest.

There hasn't been an open seat race for mayor since 1947, when Ed Kelly stepped aside so the Machine could endorse reformer Martin Kennelly. Richard J. Daley defeated Kennelly in the 1955 primary, and the rest is history. This upcoming open-seat race is just about the rarest Illinois political event most of us have seen in our lifetimes.