Like many Democrats when I learned on
the eve of the 2024 election the Des Moines Register poll that said Kamala
Harris was going to win Iowa my faith in her victory, which had been flagging
as her lead over Trump was dropping, found new life. The Register poll
had been known for its accuracy for decades as something of a gold standard and
despite all previous polls since post-2016 having notoriously undercounted
support for Trump at a national and state level, the fact that the poll said
Harris was going to win Iowa by 47 percent to Trump's 44 percent led me to
believe the impossible.
And it should have been a sign that
I'd taken leave of my senses that I thought so. To be sure Iowa had gone for
Obama in 2012 and had elected a Democratic Senator as recently as 2006 (we'll
get to that). But I knew my history. Iowa was one of the most conservative
states in the Union one that, like its neighbor Ohio, had basically been
counted in the Republican party column since the party was founded. Even in Democratic landslides it had a
history of being an outlier. In 1940 for example it had gone for Wendell
Willkie even though FDR's newly minted Vice President Henry Wallace was a
native son of that state. It remained just as Republican in 1944, went for
Truman in 1948 and then back to in the Republican column in two FDR's
landslides and all three of Nixon's runs for the Presidency. In 1976 it went for Ford even as Carter won
the White House, Reagan carried it in both his landslides and while Dukakis
took in 1988 it didn't make much difference in George H.W. Bush's victory.
Even some of the times Democrats did
carry it there were extenuating circumstances, usually a third party candidate.
That was the case for Wilson in 1912 and Clinton in 1992 and 1996. We all seem
to have missed (I know I did) that it went for Gore in 2000 and no one seemed
to focus on it went W took it in 2004. The idea of Iowa being a swing state in
my lifetime was something I seemed to have ignored despite Obama carrying it
both of his runs for the Presidency and I certainly had set it aside in 2024.
I knew that Tom Harkin had been
represented it in the Senate for five terms with distinction and that Tom
Vilsack had been a superb governor during W's time in Office. (I had no idea
he'd been the Secretary of Agriculture under both Obama and Biden.) But after
Harkin chose not to run for reelection early in 2013 and Joni Ernst ended up
winning election in 2014 I 'd all but given up on Iowa as a hope for Democrat
prospects.
This was true, I should add, during
the 2020 election when Ernst was running for reelection for the first time. The
DNC did target her during that cycle , mainly because of Ernst's low approval
ratings and the dropping of her own popularity. In one debate she went viral
for not knowing the break-even price for soybeans, a big deal in that state.
And yet like so many other seats in 2020 the Democrats absolutely were going to
win Ernst won reelection by a fairly comfortable margin over Theresa
Greenfield, well over 6 and half percent. Greenfield only carried eight of the
state's counties. Trump carried it by a slightly larger margin, beating Biden
by nearly nine points while Biden carried just six counties.
All of this should have made me look
at the Des Moines Register poll with a veneer of skepticism. And indeed Iowa
was one of the earlier states called for Trump by CNN. He won the state by 13.2 percent by far the
largest margin by any Republican since Reagan in 1980 and the largest margin
since Nixon in 1972.
Trump famously tried to sue the
Register and the poll after winning reelection. Compared to me he was being
generous for once: I wanted the pollster to face a firing squad. And yet even
in my desolate state in the aftermath of Trump's reelection I found myself
(somewhat catatonically) surprised by how the Iowa house races were going. To
be sure the Republicans carried all four seats – but I noticed for the first
time just how close two of those races were and how long it took them to be
called.
The idea of the path to the House
going through Iowa in 2024 was not something that would have occurred to me
that year. And yet in the first and third districts two incumbent Republicans
were going through that.
The most fascinating race was that of
Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the 1st. That year she was challenged by Christina
Bohannan. I wasn't paying attention to House races the same way I did the
Senate (its notoriously difficult to get accurate polling in Congressional
districts) so I had no idea that so many political experts thought it was in
play. And indeed the result was not clear on election night or indeed for weeks
after because the race was so close a recount was called for.
Eventually Miller-Meeks won by 799
votes out of over 413,000 cast in that race.
There would be several other races that took days to be called (control
of the House wouldn't be determined until the Sunday after election day) but by
far this race was the closest and most unexpectedly so.
The third should have had by attention
as Zach Nunn had flipped the district the previous cycle with just over 50
percent of the vote. Lannon Baccam, the candidate running to unseat him was
endorsed by the Blue Dog Democrats. It took less time to figure out the winner
in this race – I believe it was called by Thursday night – but it was still
very close: Nunn only managed to beat Baccam by less than four percent.
Almost immediately Miller-Meeks and
Nunn were considered targets in 2026. But it took me a long time to get out of
my stupor and start caring about that. And even after Joni Ernst announced
halfway through 2025 that she wasn't seeking reelection my reaction was still:
so what?
And then in August something happened that changed how I thought
about the Democrats prospects in Iowa.
To be clear there had already been
many signs throughout 2025 that the Democrats had managed to recover immensely
after the 2024 election. They'd been overperforming in elections for
congressional vacancies in heavily Republican districts, even as they lost. But
at a statehouse level they'd done better then expected, flipping 25 state
Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP out of the 119 that were
resolved. (The Republicans, by contrast, had not flipped a single Democratic
seat.) They'd made gains in swing states
such as Georgia and Pennsylvania and even managed three in Mississippi.
And they flipped two in Iowa which
helped break the GOP supermajority in two significantly conservative districts.
I'd paid little attention to Mike Zimmer who in January flipped a district by 4
points when Trump had won by 21 points just two months earlier. In
August Kaitlin Drey flipped the second seat by ten points. That latter election
was a seat that had not gone Republican in nearly forty years. That sent up
such alarm bells that the head of the Iowa Republican party said that if this
kept happening 'Iowa was going to go blue in 2028." Considering
that Trump margin of victory less than a year ago, that was a sign of panic.
With that being said even after that I
considered Iowa relatively low as a possibility for the Democrats to flip the
open Senate seat. The House was a different story: both the first and the third
were among the districts the Democrats had planned to target and that was the
right call. But the Senate, as I knew better than most in regard to the
Midwest, is always a different story.
So when I began this series of
articles back in January I put far down the list of possibilities. Alaska and
Ohio always seemed like far better options considering how recently Mary
Peltola and Sherrod Brown respectively had held elected office. Texas I played the wait and see approach – I
knew that it was going to depend even more on the Republican nominee then the
Democratic one. Hell I was probably going to look at Florida before I even
considered Iowa. (Which, as I will write later, may not be as impossible as I thought.)
I didn't consider the state even as a
possibility until I started getting polls that showed the race far closer no
matter who the nominee was against Ashley Hinson, the Republican running to
replace Joni Ernst. For the record Ashley
Hinson had won election to represent Iowa in the second district the same year
that Miller-Meeks had won in the first. The two had been the first Republican
women to represent Iowa in the House. She managed to flip incumbent Democrat
Abby Finkenauer's district by nearly two percent. The following year she would
trade districts with Miller-Meeks in a redrawn map. In 2024 she won reelection
by nearly sixteen points.
That September she announced her
candidacy for Ernst's seat. As a
representative Hinson was no better or no worse than any House Republican
during Biden's administration and when Trump won reelection she was a big
supporter of the Big Beautiful Bill Act and voted against the War Powers act multiple
times this year. Under the old rules of politics she would have been a good
candidate for Senate and could easily win reelection in the fall, despite the
President's sinking approval numbers. I had no reason to think otherwise…until
this spring.
Then while searching various poll
sites I first became aware of quite a few polls taken in Iowa showing three
different Democratic candidates polling within the margin of error of defeating
Ashley Hinson in the general. By May this had been reduced to two candidates:
Zack Wahls and Josh Turek.
Wahls is a member of the Iowa Senate
who is the son of two lesbians. In 2011 he addressed the Iowa House Judiciary
committee in a public hearing on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay
marriage. Wahls withdrew from the University of Iowa choosing to focus on
writing a book My Two Moms and very quickly became an activist for
LGBTQ+ rights. He targeted the Boy Scouts ban on gay and lesbians as scout
leaders and launched Scouts for Equality. He would address the 2012 Democratic
Convention and would be a delegate for Hilary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic.
He would be elected to the Iowa State Senate district 37 in 2018 and by 2021 he
would be named Senate minority lead. However less than two years later he would
step down following disagreement with Democratic colleagues about firing two
long-time Iowa senate Democratic members. He declared his candidacy for the
Democratic nomination for the Senat in June of 2025.
Josh Turek is twelve years older that
Wahls. Born with spina bifida he has used a wheelchair since childhood and
began playing wheelchair basketball in seventh grade. He would play the sport at Southwest
Minnesota State University and became a four time all-American in that sport.
He would play professionally in Europe, in clubs in Italy, France and Spain. In
four Paralympic appearances starting in 2004 he would win a bronze and two
golds.
In March of 2022 he announced he was
running for Iowa's 20th House of Representative district. After a
recount by his opponent it was confirmed he'd won by six votes. He was
reelected in 2024 in a district that has voted Republican in every election
since 1968. The Iowa legislature's first permanently disabled member, he's
advocated for disability related issues, and led efforts to advance bipartisan
legislation that sought to remove Medicaid income levels for Iowans with
disability. He would also work on agricultural legislation and would co-sponsor
a bi-partisan right to repair bill, requiring manufacturers to make equipment
for farmers and mechanics available at reasonable cost. That legislation passed
the Iowa House earlier this year. He announced his candidacy in August.
Wahls was very much an activist while
Turek called himself a 'common-sense moderate' and prairie populist. While he
had commonalities with Wahls he was more moderate on Gaza, saying that Israel
was a US Ally but there should be limits to it. The biggest difference going
into the primary was that Warren was privately backing Wahls in large part
because he said if elected to the Senate he would not vote for Chuck Schumer as
Senate Leader while Turek said he would. Turek was backed by moderates such as
Maggie Hassan and Catherine Cortez Masto. The COOK Political Report described
this as which candidate would be more electable: Do you need to energize your
base more to get them to turn them out or do you need to win over the middle?
The results were an overwhelming
triumph for the latter: Turek would beat Wahls by nearly 25 percent of the
vote. And almost immediately the polls have shown the two essentially tied.
Hinson still has the advantage but most political sites rank it as a toss-up
which is something I didn't believe possible even at the start of 2026.
Nor does is that the end of Democrats
potential good news in the Hawkeye State. The last time a Democrat won the
governorship in Iowa was in 2006 when Chet Culver did. Culver's father
represented Iowa in the Senate for one term before losing to Chuck Grassley –
who's still there before losing to Terry Branstad, a once and future governor
of Iowa. Running as his Lieutenant Governor was Kim Reynolds who would go on to
succeed Branstad when he stepped down to become ambassador to China under
Trump.
Reynolds has been such an unpopular
governor that even though she could in 2025 she didn't consider running for
reelection this year. In the Republican primary Congressman Randy Feenstra was considered
the frontrunner after Trump endorsed him late in the game. Even with his
popularity at its nadir Trump's endorsement had proven throughout the midterms
more than sufficient to prove as kingmaker across the Republican primaries.
But in the Iowa republican primary it
proved not to be the case. Zach Lahn managed a narrow win over Feenstra, by
less than one percent. Trump has since endorsed Lahn for governor but he faces
many problems not the least of which that he has spent most of this time living
in Kansas which has already labeled him a 'carpetbagger' by many Iowa
publications – and in previous midterms this has proven to be the kiss of death
for Republicans far more often than Democrats.
Rob Sand is the Democratic nominee the current
auditor of the state. He considered running against Reynolds in 2022 but opted
to run for reelection and was the only Democrat elected to a statewide office
in Iowa that year. In 2020 an audit conducted by Sand found that Reynolds
misspent $21 million on COVID relief fund, leading them to return the money. Almost
as a line of attack the legislature passed a law designed to limit the power of
the Iowa state auditor which Sand claimed was done to target the only statewide
Democrat left in office.
Sand is running on a policy of 'common
sense reform' pointing to the declining economy of the state and the exodus of
college educate students. And as of this writing he is a slight favorite to win
the governorship with the polls showing him ahead by as an average of 4 points.
For that matter Hinson's decision to
run for the Senate has led to a possibility for further Democratic growth.
After leaving the second district Joe Mitchell was nominated to run to fill
Hinson seats in the November election. Lindsay James became the Democratic
nominee. Hinson won this district by 15.6 percent two years ago yet multiple
election sites now rank it a tossup something that would have been unthinkable
in 2024. So there is possibility – dim but still probable – that in November,
Democrats will have won the Governorship, three of the four House Seats and one
of the Senate Seats. Shifts of this kind of leadership, particularly in a
leftward direction, have been rare in any state government in the 21st.
That it may happen just two years after Trump managed a double digit sweep of
the state is something that not even the most die-hard Democrat would have
considered possible.
That the media has paid comparatively
little attention to the Democratic possibilities in Iowa is understandable. The
race to defeat Susan Collins was always a perennial story even before all of
the carnage that has befallen the Democrats there and considering the attention
the Democrats have focused on Texas is the past decade in particular the battle
between James Talarico and Ken Paxton was always going to get more
coverage. And given the sudden passing
of Lindsey Graham earlier today attention will justifiably be focused on Annie Andrews
in South Carolina, despite the far more remote chance of a Democratic triumph
there.
In truth any attention to Iowa will
almost certainly only happen after election day and depend on just how
successful the Democrats are in that state overall. And even if the Democrats
manage that trifecta it may not be clear whether this is part of a general
trend or by how big a margin of victory Sand has as governor. The idea of 'coattails', once prominent in
national politics, has become increasingly hard to measure in this era of
polarization and it was always trickier in midterm elections then Presidential
ones. Combined with the massive unpopularity of the President as of this
writing it will remain to be seen if what happens in Iowa is part of a trend for
the Democratic Party going forward or an outlier that in a few years is
repudiated by the end of the decade.
We shall have to wait and see how
things play out. If the Democrats do manage the sweep in Iowa it will overwhelmingly
be a triumph for moderation and will almost certainly lead to a path forward in
the Midwest and in red states overall.
If they don't the progressive wing of the party will continue to reject
it as a strategy and the party itself may yet again shift its tactics.
And even if it is effective there is no guarantee
it will last beyond the moment. As I've written in regards to Ohio the
Democrats thought they had a strategy to take the state back for the party after
the 2006 midterms and while Obama held it the state itself would reject the
progressivism as a state level by the time of the Tea Party movement. The Midwest
has always had an uneasy relationship with the Democratic party, tending to go with
it when Republican leadership gets too inept or economic times are bad. Both of
these factors are certainly in play in Iowa this cycle and while the state has
been friendlier to the Democrats in the 21st century in some ways,
there are no guarantees.
Still there is clearly at least a
possibility, even a probability, for an unprecedented political realignment in
Iowa this cycle. Whether it means long term for success for the Democrats will
not be seen long past November. But it might mean that going into 2028 if the
Des Moines Register says the Democrats will carry Iowa I'll have more reason to
think the pollster knows what they're talking about then I did when it came out
four years ago.
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