Correction added at 9 p.m.

An expectedly close vote in the fourth Congressional district never materialized Tuesday, as Tom Latham was re-elected to an eighth term.

Latham received the vote over challenger Becky Greenwald. An independent poll last week showed that Greenwald was within five points of Latham. The 60-year-old, former Iowa State dropout said he didn’t lose any sleep or feel nervous all day.

“I never felt it was as close as what people were talking about, and I’ve always felt very confident,” Latham said. “Rarely do people in Iowa vote straight ticket, they will look at each race individually.”

Latham has won comfortably in each of his past seven elections, but Greenwald was thought to have cut into the incumbent’s stronghold.

“The biggest problem was just the political environment we were in,” he said. “The second term president is always difficult for the party that has the White House, just like it was eight years ago, after Clinton.”

A poll conducted by Research 2000 on Oct. 27 showed that Greenwald trailed by just 5 percent. The poll had a margin of error of +/- 5 percent, although Latham’s campaign members disputed the numbers.

In 2002, Latham won by 12 percent (24,646 votes), while he won by 14 percent, or 30,518, in 2006.

Latham’s campaign members disputed the numbers, citing polling by The Tarrance Group — a Republican polling firm — from the previous week that showed a 22 percent lead, with a 5.8 percent margin of error.

Greenwald’s campaign was fueled by the general discontent with the current political establishment that helped presidential-elect Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., win by a landslide. Time magazine listed Iowa’s fourth district race as one of the top 12 to watch in the country.

The fourth district represented a mixed constituency, which stretches through Ames, Des Moines suburbs, Fort Dodge and Mason City. In the 2006 election, the district had 6,166 more registered Republicans than Democrats. But an Oct. 1 tally by the Iowa Secretary of State’s office showed that the balance had shifted, as Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 8,964 voters.

Registered independents were in the majority, with more than 37 percent of the vote.

Greenwald’s stated ideals mirrored Obama, and her campaign labeled Latham as a Republican partisan calling him a “rubber stamp for George Bush,” who voted with the party 94 percent of the time, according to the Des Moines Register.

However, Greenwald knew it wouldn’t be easy to beat a four-year incumbent.

“We knew it was an uphill climb, and I just want to say that we did everything with the resources we had, but what makes my heart warmest is all the people who have stayed with me throughout this entire campaign,” Greenwald said.

Latham gave a sign of bipartisanship recently, voting against the $700 billion Wall Street Bailout Plan twice. He is the only Iowan on the House Appropriations Committee, which allots the financial expenditures of the government.

CORRECTION: This article mistakenly stated that The Tarrance Group, a Republican polling firm, conducted two polls, including one that showed challenger Becky Greenwald was within five points of incumbent congressman Tom Latham. That poll was actually released by Research 2000. The Daily regrets the error.