CEDAR RAPIDS - Tom Fiegen is hoping lightning strikes - a second time.

The Cedar County Democrat who hopes to stop Sen. Charles Grassley's re-election next year will model his campaign on the game plan Mount Vernon college professor Dave Loebsack used to defeat 30-year Republican incumbent Rep. Jim Leach back in 2006.

"We'll do some things differently, but we'll use his campaign as a model, the way he built it from the grass roots," said Fiegen, who practices bankruptcy law in Cedar Rapids.

Fiegen knows he can't raise as much money as Grassley, but with elbow grease, shoe leather and social media networks, Fiegen believes he can compete with Grassley's money.

Shaded from the midday August sun by a locust tree in Greene Square Park in downtown Cedar Rapids on Friday, his supporters outnumbered by media, Fiegen promised a bare-bones campaign that would rely heavily on social media networking.

"I think they were helpful to Dave Loebsack," he said, "So we're going to take what he did, what Howard Dean did, what President Obama did and we're going to try to use that on an Iowa level."

Fiegen, who joins Bob Krause of Fairfield in seeking the Democratic nomination, said his first priority will be to raise campaign cash. He'll start with the people who supported his Iowa Senate campaigns.