The last time Donald Trump was president, Iowa Democrats had a pretty good midterm election. The party’s candidates defeated two Republican members of Congress, came surprisingly close to beating U.S. Representative Steve King, had a net gain of five Iowa House seats (and almost a sixth), and came within 3 points of winning the governor’s race.

Many Democrats like their chances of improving on that tally in 2026.

But before they get too excited, they need to understand the terrain is now much more favorable to Iowa Republicans than it was during the 2018 election cycle.

A huge GOP voter registration advantage, combined with consistently higher turnout for Republicans in midterm years, make it hard to construct a winning scenario for Democrats in Iowa’s 2026 statewide elections.

To overcome those long odds, Democrats will need not only strong GOTV and good messaging, but also a better voter registration effort over the coming year than the party has seen in decades.

“People are excited, and I think so far what we’re seeing is hunger for something different,” State Auditor Rob Sand told me on the day he announced he’s running for governor in 2026.

“The real theme across my work is I’m a problem solver,” Julie Stauch told me shortly before her campaign launch.

I interviewed both candidates about their top priorities and the case they will make to Iowa voters over the coming year. Toward the end, I discuss the biggest challenge facing each contender at this early stage.

Jon Muller is a semi-retired policy analyst and entrepreneur.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Democrats in Congress approved and President Joe Biden signed in 2022, eliminated the subsidy cliff for health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchanges through 2025. It used to be the case that your ACA health insurance subsidy disappeared with the first dollar earned over 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL).

Unless Congress acts to continue this provision of the IRA, the subsidy cliff will return in January. Thus far, Republicans in Congress show no interest in extending the enhanced subsidies for ACA health insurance plans.

The FPL in 2025 is $15,650 for a single person and $21,150 for a married couple. Thus, 400 percent of FPL is $62,600 and $84,600, respectively. A single person earning $62,600 currently pays $434/month on the Exchange for a Silver Plan. The married couple at 400 percent of FPL pays $599. The FPL increases with each dependent.

Under current law, a 60-year-old single person making just one extra dollar, or $62,601, experiences a rate increase of less than 1 penny/month. When the subsidy cliff returns in January, those premiums will go to $870/month, or an additional $5,119/year. For a 60-year-old married couple earning $1 more, the monthly premium will increase to $1,512, an annual hit of $10,953. These estimates are based on average rates for non-smoker 60-year-olds in Iowa. The increases could be more or less depending on other factors, including geography, age, and smoking status.

Josh Mandelbaum represents Ward 3 on the Des Moines City Council.

Housing is one of the most important issues facing our community and our country right now. Nationwide, we have failed to build enough new housing to keep up with demand. In places where this trend is most pronounced, housing has become increasingly unaffordable, and more and more folks are housing burdened (more than 30 percent of their income goes towards housing) or simply priced out of where they want to live.

Compared to the most extreme examples, Des Moines is a relatively affordable community. But if we continue on our current trajectory, we will become less affordable and experience problems that we have seen elsewhere.

In that context, the city is working towards our first housing strategy plan. At our May 12 Council work session, Council heard a presentation on the draft plan. Since then, I have had a chance to read the entire draft plan. The housing strategy draft falls short of a comprehensive housing strategy and instead focuses almost exclusively on how to increase existing property values. The strategy lacks vision and a comprehensive approach to make housing better quality, more accessible, and more affordable for everyone in our community.

Iowa’s 2026 U.S. Senate race had its first viral moment on May 30, when an unscripted comment from Senator Joni Ernst generated massive coverage across Iowa and national news outlets.

The words Ernst blurted out in frustration at that town hall meeting may or may not have staying power in the next Senate campaign.

But we’ll definitely keep hearing what the senator said before and after making that gaffe. Republicans around the country, including Iowa’s U.S. House members, have used the same false claims in defense of the budget reconciliation bill now pending in the Senate.

Those statements were among more than a dozen messages about Medicaid and the federal food assistance program known as SNAP that Republicans tested this spring in telephone polls. I was a respondent for one of the surveys in early May and have transcribed the questionnaire at the end of this post.

I don’t know which GOP-aligned entity paid for the robo-poll I received, but it’s clear the memo on how to spin deep Medicaid and SNAP cuts has gone out to all Republicans in Congress.

Geoff Horsfield is policy director and Anne Schechinger is Midwest director at the Environmental Working Group. This post first appeared on the EWG’s website.

Farm subsidies already favor the largest farms. But the budget reconciliation bill the U.S. House approved on May 22 is packed with farm subsidy loopholes that would make the problem worse. 

These provisions could add tens of billions to the federal deficit and further tilt the playing field against small family farmers. 

Here are some of the worst farm subsidy loopholes and giveaways in the bill: 

“President Trump was right about everything—build the wall, end catch-and-release, and stand with law enforcement,” wrote Attorney General Brenna Bird in a May 21 post on her campaign Facebook page. She was near the U.S. border with Mexico, at a press conference organized by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The Iowa Attorney General’s office didn’t release a statement about the trip before or afterwards, and didn’t post about it on Bird’s official Facebook or X/Twitter feeds.

That makes sense, because Bird didn’t go to Arizona to perform any official duties. The trip was the latest sign that she is desperate to secure President Donald Trump’s endorsement as she considers whether to run for governor in 2026.

Bill Bumgarner is a retired former health care executive from northwest Iowa who worked
in hospital management for 41 years, mostly in the state of Iowa.

Prior to retiring at the end of 2023, I worked in hospital leadership for 41 years. For the last 24 years of that time, I served as president at two hospitals in rural Iowa.

I’ll be quick to my point and blunt. When President Donald Trump or any Republican member of the U.S. House or Senate tells you that their Medicaid budget plans are strictly focused on cutting waste, fraud and abuse, they’re lying.

All four Iowans in the U.S. House voted on May 22 to pass a federal budget reconciliation package combining massive tax cuts with deep spending cuts on health care and food assistance.

The early morning vote on the “One Big Beautiful Act” (adopting President Donald Trump’s preferred phrase) followed an all-night debate. House leaders rushed the vote before the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) could analyze a manager’s amendment released on the evening of May 21, which made many substantive changes to tax provisions and deepened the planned Medicaid cuts.

House members approved the measure by 215 votes to 214, with two Republicans joining all Democrats to vote no, and one Republican voting “present.” The one-vote margin means U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04) each can claim to have cast the deciding vote to cut taxes. They did it without waiting for a nonpartisan analysis of the costs and impacts for their constituents.

This vote will likely become a central theme for Democratic candidates in Iowa’s 2026 Congressional campaigns—and the governor’s race, if Feenstra becomes the GOP nominee. Within hours, Congressional challengers Travis Terrell (IA-01), Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-03), and Jennifer Konfrst (IA-03) blasted the vote in social media posts and fundraising emails. A video of Miller-Meeks running away from Social Security Works executive director Alex Lawson as he presses her about Medicaid cuts has gone viral on several social media platforms and will surely be seen in television commercials.

Tens of thousands of Iowans will lose their health insurance, food assistance, or both if the “big, beautiful bill” becomes law. Meanwhile, the package would raise the debt ceiling by $4 trillion and add at least $2.3 trillion to the deficit (or perhaps $3.2 trillion) over the next ten years.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com.

The Iowa Supreme Court gave citizen engagement and accessibility to public meetings a much-needed boost on May 16 when ruling on an appeal of a lawsuit against the Iowa City Community School District.

The district’s practice of posting full videos of school board meetings on the internet for on-demand public viewing was at the heart of the case.

Two Democrats launched campaigns this past week in Iowa’s third Congressional district, one of the party’s top 2026 pickup opportunities in the U.S. House. Republican Representative Zach Nunn held off challenger Lanon Baccam in 2024, winning by roughly the same four-point margin by which Donald Trump carried the district. But in the last midterm election while Trump was president, Democratic challenger Cindy Axne defeated another two-term GOP incumbent in the Congressional district anchored by the Des Moines metro area.

The Cook Political Report and Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales see IA-03 as a “lean Republican” district for 2026, while Sabato’s Crystal Ball views this race as a toss-up.

I interviewed State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott and State Representative Jennifer Konfrst about their priorities and the case they will make to Democrats as they compete for the chance to face Nunn in November.

I’m not aware of any other Democrats seriously considering this race. State Representative Austin Baeth, who said earlier this year he might run for Congress, confirmed to me on May 8 that he will seek a third term in Iowa House district 36. Though there is plenty of time for others to join the field, they would struggle to compete against Trone Garriott and Konfrst, who are experienced candidates and fundraisers with the capacity to run strong district-wide campaigns.

“We have to take our message to the voters,” State Representative Brian Meyer told reporters on May 8, soon after his Democratic colleagues elected him to be the chamber’s next minority leader.

State Representative Jennifer Konfrst has led Iowa House Democrats since June 2021 but is stepping down from that role once the legislature adjourns for the year. She announced on May 8 that she’s running for Congress in Iowa’s third district.

Meyer will lead the smallest Democratic contingent in the Iowa House in 55 years (the chamber now has 67 Republicans and 33 Democrats). As he seeks to build back, he intends to highlight economic issues and target seats in mid-sized cities that were once Democratic strongholds. Toward that end, Meyer plans to take a “little more aggressive” approach during floor debates, and showcase a wider range of House Democrats when communicating with the public.

Raising enough money for the 2026 election cycle will likely be his biggest challenge.

President Donald Trump’s first 100 days back in the White House have brought the U.S. an economy weakened by tariffs, a depreciating dollar, and the worst stock market performance during a new presidency since 1974. Trump now has historically low approval ratings, even on his handling of the economy—which had long been his strongest public opinion metric. Economists and market analysts increasingly see a recession likely to come this year, and consumer confidence just dropped to its lowest level since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But to hear U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson tell the story, the country has experienced “100 days of WINNING under President Trump!” The Republican from Iowa’s second Congressional district told reporters on May 2 that the president is “ushering in the new era, the golden age for our economy.”

Whether she’s speaking to a national television audience, her social media followers, the press, or a hostile town hall crowd, Hinson is working hard to demonstrate her loyalty to Trump.

Her tight embrace of a polarizing president could hurt her with swing voters in 2026 but may be essential for her 2028 ambitions.

State Auditor Rob Sand hasn’t made his 2026 plans official. But a text poll that was recently in the field is another data point suggesting he will run for governor.

A Bleeding Heartland reader provided screenshots of the survey. Many of the questions test messages about Sand without naming him. Other questions seek to gauge how strongly Iowa voters feel about a series of policies or issues affecting the state.

Based on the wording, I would guess that Sand’s campaign (which closed out 2024 with more than $7.5 million in the bank) commissioned the survey. It’s also possible some other entity supporting Sand’s aspirations invested in this research. It’s not clear how many Iowans received the poll or whether the survey sample reflected the partisan make-up of the statewide electorate, or was tailored for specific groups (such as independent or swing voters).

Assuming Sand runs for governor, he will be heavily favored to win the Democratic nomination. But he may have competition in the June 2026 primary: as I first reported on “KHOI’s Capitol Week,” Julie Stauch filed paperwork on April 21 to create a committee for a Democratic candidate for governor. Stauch has worked on many Iowa campaigns, including Dukakis for president in 1988 and U.S. Representative Leonard Boswell’s 2002 re-election bid. Most recently, she was political director for Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 Iowa caucus campaign, managed Mike Franken’s 2022 campaign for U.S. Senate, and advised Kimberly Sheets, who won a 2023 special election for Warren County auditor.

Back to the text poll about Sand, which appeared on research-opinions.com.

Democrat Angel Ramirez will soon be the first Latina to serve in the Iowa legislature, after winning the April 29 special election in House district 78 by a commanding margin.

Ramirez outperformed the partisan lean of the district, defeating Republican Bernie Hayes by 2,742 votes to 721 (79.0 percent to 20.8 percent), according to unofficial results from all precincts. Voters in House district 78 preferred Kamala Harris to Donald Trump by 65.2 percent to 32.7 percent in the 2024 presidential election.

It’s the third special Iowa legislative election of 2025, and Democrats greatly improved on the Harris benchmark in all three races. According to a spreadsheet compiled by “elections nerd” Ethan C7, Democrats have outperformed in most of this year’s special elections around the country, with Ramirez, Iowa Senate district 35 candidate Mike Zimmer, and Iowa House district 100 candidate Nannette Griffin putting up the largest swings compared to the 2024 presidential results in their areas.

“It’s not about left/right, Democrat/Republicans, it’s about doing the right thing,” Kevin Techau told me on April 17, the day he launched his campaign for Congress in Iowa’s second district. “I think my record supports that that’s been the direction of my career.”

IA-02 wasn’t on either party’s target list in 2024. But Techau has potential to mount a serious challenge to three-term U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson.

This analysis assumes Hinson will run for re-election to the U.S. House. Although she has been mentioned as a possible candidate for governor, I doubt she would roll the dice on a statewide primary, where she would probably compete against a Republican with closer ties to President Donald Trump.

That said, if Hinson did seek another office in 2026, Techau’s prospects would improve dramatically. With rare exceptions, it’s easier for the party out of power to win an open seat than to defeat an incumbent. Hinson outperformed the top of the Republican ticket in 2024 and goes into this cycle with high name ID and more than $2.2 million in the bank, whereas a new GOP candidate would be starting from scratch.

Nicholas Cocozzelli is an economic analyst and founder of the Inequality Focus Substack newsletter, where this piece originally appeared.

John Deere, a major employer for Iowans, has faced severe criticism for its recent series of layoffs in the Hawkeye State. The agricultural equipment company announced in February it would be laying off 119 workers at its plant in Ankeny, Iowa. The Ankeny plant employs roughly 1,500 workers total. Over the past year, Deere has made roughly 2,000 job cuts at its plants across the state.

Deere has blamed a struggling farm economy for these cuts, but has been criticized as seeking a cheaper labor market in Mexico. Last year, when the company announced layoffs in Dubuque, Deere confirmed that it was “…shifting some production from its Dubuque Works facility in Iowa to a new facility it is building in Ramos, Mexico.”

According to Industrial Equipment News, production of mid-frame skid steer loaders and compact track loaders will be relocated from the Dubuque facility to Ramos. The Des Moines Register also noted that Deere faced scrutiny for outsourcing some lines of production from other plants across Iowa, specifically in Waterloo and Ottumwa, to Mexico.

Dr. Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at the Grand View University.

I teach at a Lutheran school in Iowa. We have a chapel on campus. Every faculty meeting and event, every major school event, starts with our campus pastor offering a prayer. There are boats hanging in the church and also in the room in the administrative building that was the first chapel on campus, because we’re a Danish Lutheran school, and both of those traditions run deep.

I say this not because you need to know about me, or about my university, but because chaplains on campus, chaplains in schools, religion and the university, is not a thing I have a problem with. We’re a private Lutheran school, and people who come here know that when they apply and enroll, and they’ve made a choice to be here, in this environment, with everything that entails.

The key word there, of course, is private. If your kids go to a Catholic school, for example, you cannot pretend to be surprised and alarmed when Catholicism is in the classroom too. But if you send your kids to public school, like most Iowans, you have a reasonable expectation that the establishment clause, the separation of church and state, will keep specific religious ideas and doctrine out of the school. In this context, Iowa House File 884, the school chaplains bill, immediately rings alarm bells.

It will take months to fully assess the fallout from Governor Kim Reynolds’ decision not to seek another term in 2026.

But one thing’s for sure: State Auditor Rob Sand’s chances of winning the next governor’s race are substantially higher now than they were before April 11.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Many politicians can persuade you to believe in them. That’s a commonly reached feat. But the defining leaders, elected officials like Tom Harkin, Robert Ray, Henry Wallace, and Harold Hughes, are able to summon the inspiration to get Iowans believing in themselves, their own worth and futures.

More than any other contemporary active Democrat, State Representative Josh Turek has the potential to earn the mantle in the ongoing—and now desperately needed—legacy those Iowans with surpassing public-mindedness built.

We are in an era in the United States that can be described as The Great Deconstruction. We are broken. The anger in the streets at “Hands Off!” protests and in other arenas, in real life and online, is fierce and urgent. Soon, and at a more accelerated political pace than is traditional, Democrats will begin vetting candidates for the U.S. Senate race in 2026, a contest with the politically formidable Joni Ernst. The two-term Republican senator has a rare cultural connectivity; her journey as a farm girl and combat veteran carries enormous appeal across the state.

Sometimes debate on a low-profile bill reveals a lot about how the Iowa legislature operates.

So it was on April 9, when the Iowa Senate took up House File 363, “an Act relating to the final disposition of remains.”

The bill was one of ten non-controversial measures (often called “non-cons”) that senators approved that day. But don’t be fooled by the 47-0 vote for final passage. The debate on this bill showed the Republican majority’s intensely partisan approach to legislating.

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ campaign has a staffer on the ground again in Iowa. No, the senator from Vermont isn’t getting a head start on the 2028 caucuses.

In an April 3 telephone interview, Evan Burger described his focus and early work as Iowa organizer for Friends of Bernie Sanders.

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, working for the Des Moines Register and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He covered the oil and gas industry while in Texas and was the Register’s agriculture reporter before his retirement in 2013. He lives in Ankeny.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ March 31 visit to Iowa had the appearance and vibe of a high-ranking officer sent to the front line to boost the troops’ morale before the next assault.

Rollins visited all the strategic strongholds of Iowa agriculture: an ethanol plant, a hog farm, a feed processing operation, and a suitably big (Republican-leaning) farm operation just west of Des Moines, handing out plenty of morale-raising attaboys to the soldiers in the trenches.

But even as Rollins addressed the “Ag Leaders Dinner” in Ankeny—assembling some 500 people and Iowa’s agricultural royalty such as Governor Kim Reynolds, U.S. Senator Joni Ernst, and Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig—Iowa’s economic earth was beginning to shake.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

The State of Iowa unfairly targeted hundreds of potential voters during last year’s election, and it released more evidence to prove it.

Two weeks before the 2024 election, Secretary of State Paul Pate ordered local election officials to challenge the votes of about 2,200 people who were placed on a secret list. At some point in the past, those people had told the Iowa Department of Transportation they were noncitizens. But they were now registered to vote, and the state was worried they might not be eligible.

At the time, there was clear evidence Pate was using flawed data. The DOT database is a notoriously unreliable tool for finding noncitizen voters, which we already knew was a rare occurrence, anyway. But in the heat of a contentious election and shortly after a conversation with Governor Kim Reynolds, Pate used the power of his office to target hundreds of potential Iowa voters.

On March 20, Pate admitted that only 277 of the 2,176 people on his list were confirmed to be noncitizens.

Peggy Huppert retired in 2023 following a 43-year career with Iowa nonprofit organizations, including the American Cancer Society and NAMI (National Alliance for Mental Illness) Iowa. She is also a long-time progressive political activist.

It does not surprise me, but disappoints me greatly, that the Iowa legislature is poised to adopt a policy requiring “able bodied” Medicaid recipients to work at least 80 hours a month in order to stay enrolled.

This is nothing new. Some Republicans tried to implement this in Iowa during Donald Trump’s first administration. As the head of NAMI Iowa, I successfully helped fight this legislation for four years before a reprieve during the Biden administration. Now, with an even larger majority in both the Iowa House and Senate, encouragement from our governor, and a green light from the new Trump administration, there is nothing holding the Republican majority back.

As a mental health advocate and family member of loved ones with serious mental illness, I would like to see the phrase “able bodied” (just like “It’s all in your head”) permanently retired from our lexicon.

Dave Price had the scoop for Gray Media on March 28: State Senator Zach Wahls is “certainly listening” to those who have encouraged him to run for U.S. Senate in 2026.

Wahls is the first Democrat to publicly express interest in this race. Two-term Senator Joni Ernst has not formally launched her re-election campaign but is widely expected to seek a third term.

Wahls told Price he will decide whether to run for higher office after the Iowa legislative session. But he’s already criticizing Ernst, most recently in a March 26 news release that tied the senator to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s “reckless mishandling of military plans” in a Signal group chat.

Matt Chapman serves on the board of Manufactured Housing Action and has been fighting for fair housing laws in Iowa for five years.

By copying the laws that govern manufactured housing parks, some Iowa legislators are trying to make illegal lease provisions legal for all Iowa rentals.

To get a good understanding of what is happening, we will start with some laws Iowa has already enacted, which are harmful for homeowners in Iowa’s manufactured housing parks. They have been inundated with private equity and vulture capitalists who want to extract as much wealth as possible and then move on.

The same trends are affecting single and multi-family rental housing, which is a much bigger sector in Iowa. This is why passing bills like Senate File 412 (or the similar House File 973) would make staying housed much harder and would cause more Iowans to suffer.

Jeff Morrison is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and the publisher of the Between Two Rivers newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at betweentworivers.substack.com and iowahighwayends.net.

COVID-19 whacked the Iowa newspaper industry hard.

Between March 13 and June 15, 2020, a combined 30 days’ worth of issues across sixteen Iowa communities vanished.

However, 2019 had seen its own share of print reductions. Over the past six years, national and local publishers have made difficult decisions to reduce print pages or cease printing altogether. It didn’t matter whether they had newspapers nationwide or one paper in one town.

This timeline lays out the publishing changes that could be tracked down in Iowa newspapers between January 2019 and February 2025, either in decreasing frequency of multi-day papers or weeklies that were discontinued or merged. Dates were collected from news stories of the time, Advantage Preservation websites, and the Internet Archive. Some papers produce an “e-edition” that is like the print product, in the same format, on non-print days, and those are so noted. The online version of this newsletter may be updated for new information or unintentional omissions.

John Hale and Terri Hale own The Hale Group, advocating for older Iowans and people with disabilities. John worked for the Social Security Administration for 25 years in its Baltimore headquarters, Kansas City regional office, and in multiple Iowa field offices. Contact: terriandjohnhale@gmail.com

The Social Security program is 89 years old. Seventy-two million Americans currently receive a monthly benefit. Some 185 million Americans pay into the system and plan to receive benefits someday.

According to the Social Security Administration, some 687,630 Iowans receive monthly Social Security benefits, which total more than $1.2 billion ($1,235,464,000 to be precise) every month—in Iowa alone.

Americans depend on Social Security to be there for them. Recent events raise serious questions about whether it will be.

Charles Gaba is a health care policy wonk, advocate, and blogger who mixes data analysis with snark at ACASignups.net, where this article first appeared. You can follow him on Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Spoutible, or X/Twitter.

Over the past couple of months I’ve compiled a master spreadsheet breaking out enrollment in Affordable Care Act plans (Qualified Health Plans and Basic Health Plans), Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage (both traditional and via ACA expansion) and Medicare (both Fee-for-Services and Advantage) at the Congressional district levels.

With the pending dire threat to several of these programs (primarily Medicaid and the ACA) from the federal budget proposal House Republicans approved in late February, I’m going a step further and am generating pie charts which visualize just how much of every Congressional district’s total population is at risk of losing health care coverage.

All four Republicans who represent Iowa in the U.S. House voted for the budget blueprint.

The only Iowa Republican in Congress who did not receive Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement!” in 2022 has been working hard to demonstrate her loyalty to him.

U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks has stuck close to Trump—literally and figuratively—as she prepares for what could be a tough 2026 primary campaign in Iowa’s first Congressional district.

Fifteenth in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections.

Nick Conway is a Geographic Information Systems Technician who lives in Seattle, Washington. He is a graduate of Grinnell College. Follow him on X/Twitter @Mill226 or on Bluesky @conwayni2.bsky.social.

Iowa has experienced one of the nation’s most dramatic political transformations since President Barack Obama carried the state for a second time in 2012. While Obama won 52.0 percent of Iowa’s presidential vote to Mitt Romney’s 46.2 percent (a roughly 6-point margin), by 2024 the state had become solidly Republican, with Donald Trump securing 55.7 percent to 42.5 percent for Kamala Harris (a 13-point margin).

Iowa’s 19 percentage point swing in presidential voting from 2012 to 2024 was the second-largest shift toward Republicans among all 50 states, surpassed only by Obama’s childhood home of Hawaii.

The transformation was particularly striking at the county level. Nearly a quarter of the 100 counties in the U.S. that showed the largest GOP gains from 2012 to 2024 are in Iowa.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer.

I’m sure many readers can look back at their careers and think of certain years which stand out in red letters. 2008 is one of those years for me.

At that time our bank’s trust department held several commercial buildings in downtown Waverly in a fiduciary relationship. On June 9 I went downtown in my knee-high rubber boots. I was able to get into one of the buildings through the glass side entrance doors. The corner office was rented to a professional group, and I joined them in carrying files upstairs to the mezzanine. 

Every time we went out into the lobby to the stairs the water was a little higher on those glass entrance doors. It was eerie. We worked as long as we could.

A strong Democratic ground game wasn’t quite enough to overcome the partisan lean and spending disparity in Iowa House district 100.

Republican Blaine Watkins will be the next representative for the district covering most of Lee County, after he won the March 11 special election by a surprisingly narrow margin.

Unofficial results indicate that Watkins received 2,749 votes to 2,574 for Democrat Nannette Griffin (51.5 percent to 48.2 percent). Voters living in this area preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election by 62.2 percent to 35.4 percent, according to Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of precinct-level results.

THE WINNING FORMULA FOR WATKINS

Griffin carried the early vote and two of the six precincts where polls were open on March 11: one in Fort Madison, where she has owned and operated a business for many years, and one in Keokuk. Watkins carried the other four election-day precincts by margins large enough to overcome Griffin’s advantage in absentee ballots. His best precinct was in Donnellson, where he grew up.

The only Iowa Republican legislator to lose his 2024 re-election bid has landed a job in the Trump administration—and he won’t need to move to Washington, DC.

Former State Senator Brad Zaun will be the administrator of the Small Business Administration’s Region 7, he announced to LinkedIn followers on March 6. In a statement published by the Des Moines Register, Zaun said he was “dedicated to boosting small businesses in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska by cutting red tape, expanding our reach, and providing essential resources.” He added, “My goal is a streamlined, ‘America First’ SBA that fuels free enterprise and regional prosperity.”

Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” continues to slash the federal workforce, but there will always be room for political appointees—especially those on good terms with President Donald Trump.

Third in a series on the new Iowa law that removed legal protection against discrimination for transgender and nonbinary Iowans, as well as any path for the state to officially recognize their gender identity.

Given the choice, most legislators will not cast a potentially career-ending vote—especially when they know the outcome isn’t riding on their decision.

But on February 27, five Republican members of the Iowa House voted against Senate File 418, the bill that laid the groundwork for future discrimination against transgender Iowans and others. A sixth GOP lawmaker (who left the capitol during the floor debate) later put a note in the House Journal to confirm he would have voted no.

These lawmakers come from different political backgrounds but have a couple of things in common. All represent heavily Republican areas, not swing districts—which means they are at greater risk of losing to a GOP primary challenger than to a Democrat in a general election. In addition, all have opposed at least one other high-profile bill the House approved during the past few years.

This post is mostly about the six Republicans who took a public stand against Senate File 418. I also discuss eight of their colleagues, who signaled they were uncomfortable with discrimination against transgender Iowans but eventually fell in line.

Second in a series on Iowa’s wide-ranging law that removed legal protection against discrimination for transgender and nonbinary Iowans, as well as any path for the state to officially recognize their gender identity.

Iowa Republicans made history in the worst way last week.

Effective July 1, 2025, the Iowa Civil Rights Act will no longer prohibit discrimination in employment, housing, education, public accommodations, or credit on the basis of gender identity. The state of Iowa also will stop issuing birth certificates that reflect a transgender person’s gender identity, and will officially recognize separate-but-equal accommodations as lawful.

Republicans sped up the legislative process to pass Senate File 418 in both chambers on February 27, only seven days after the bill text became public.

The Iowa Senate approved the bill on a party-line vote of 33 to 15. Less than an hour later, the House passed the bill by 60 votes to 36, with five Republicans joining all Democrats in opposition. Governor Kim Reynolds signed Senate File 418 on February 28.

Forthcoming articles will analyze this law’s impact on Iowans and the inevitable court challenge over some potentially unconstitutional provisions.

For now, I want to highlight a selection of compelling appeals the majority party ignored: six from Iowans whom this law will directly harm, and six from allies of the trans community.

All of the videos enclosed below came from either the floor debates or the Iowa House public hearing held on the morning of February 27. It was very hard to choose just a few testimonies. You can watch the entire public hearing here or here, the full Iowa Senate floor debate here, and the Iowa House debate here.

With a promise “to provide leadership to our country,” Republican David Pautsch officially kicked off his second campaign for Iowa’s first Congressional district on February 27 in Des Moines. Touching on many of the topics he discussed in a recent interview with Bleeding Heartland, he repeatedly contrasted his steadfast conservative beliefs with the “vacillation” of the GOP incumbent, U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks.

I was unable to attend the campaign launch, as I was in the Iowa House chamber covering floor debate on a bill revoking transgender Iowans’ civil rights protections and legal recognition. The Iowa Standard’s Jacob Hall recorded the event and posted the video on Facebook.

Jesse Parker is a concerned citizen with an educational background in history and politics.

Donald Trump’s return to the White House is a reminder that the Democratic Party needs to recruit, revitalize, and inspire a younger voter base. Over the span of twelve years, Iowa flipped from a swing state that voted for Barack Obama to a solid red state. This year, Democrats must begin the work to flip the colors back.

While Iowa voter turnout hovered around 74 percent for the recent presidential election, young Iowans mark a problematic demographic with disappointing voter participation. Iowans aged 18-24 had an abysmal turnout rate of 29 percent in the 2022 general election, while 25–34-year-olds were only slightly more likely to participate (33 percent turnout).

Although these figures present a common trend among young voters in the nation, 2025 presents a strategic opportunity to engage with young progressives across the state.

UPDATE: Following committee passage, this bill was renumbered House File 583. The companion legislation is Senate File 418. Both chambers approved the bill on February 27, and Governor Kim Reynolds signed Senate File 418 into law the following day. The law will go into effect on July 1, 2025. Original post follows.

Republican members of the Iowa House and Senate have introduced dozens of bills targeting LGBTQ people since the GOP gained full control of state government in 2017. But the latest bill to drop broke new ground in several ways.

House Judiciary Committee chair Steven Holt introduced House Study Bill 242, “an Act relating to sex and gender,” on February 20. He intends to put it on a fast track to Governor Kim Reynolds’ desk. A subcommittee meeting is scheduled for Monday, February 24, at 11:00 a.m. Republican State Representative Brian Lohse posted on Facebook that the plan is for the full Judiciary Committee to consider the bill on Monday afternoon, and for leaders to bring it up for a House floor vote on February 27.

On its face, the bill would ensure that transgender and nonbinary Iowans have no legal protection against discrimination and no official recognition of their gender identity.

In addition, the bill’s impact could extend beyond the LGBTQ community to threaten civil rights protections for other groups.