As each new year begins, I enjoy looking back at the posts that resonated most strongly with readers in the year that ended. Some things never change: actions by the Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Kim Reynolds—especially attacks on public education—inspired many of Bleeding Heartland’s most-viewed posts from 2024. That’s been true every year since the GOP trifecta began in 2017. U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, who featured prominently in two of last year’s most popular posts, makes another appearance below.

I’ve learned there is no way to predict which pieces will take off. Some of the posts linked below required intensive research and days of writing, while others took only a few hours from start to finish. One was among the longest I wrote last year (more than 5,000 words), while another was among the shortest (fewer than 300 words).

Some authors whose work gained a large following in past years made the list again. But three authors featured below were contributing to Bleeding Heartland for the first time.

This list draws from Fathom Analytics data about total views for 561 posts published from January 1 through December 31, 2024. I wrote 145 of those articles and commentaries; other authors wrote 416. I left out the site’s front page and the “about” page, where many people landed following online searches.

A half-dozen posts barely missed the top 24, by a few hundred views or less:

• This is who we are. What are we going to do about it? (by Jason Benell)
• Iowa’s most shameful ranking yet (by Kali White VanBaale)
• A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year (by Bruce Lear)
• Brenna Bird outdoes critics in building a case against her (by Herb Strentz)
• The Sauk and Fox Treaty and its aftermath in Iowa (by Rick Morain)
• “You’re gonna fake it!” Iowa GOP leader rants about Trump holdouts (by me)

For this compilation, I did not tabulate views on the Substack platform, where I cross-post approximately one article each week to my free newsletter, Iowa politics with Laura Belin. If I had combined Substack views and Bleeding Heartland visits, several posts listed below would have ranked higher, and three other pieces would have joined “You’re gonna fake it!” as part of the top 24:

• Iowa loses out on major federal grant for residential solar
• Six takeaways from Adam Gregg’s surprise resignation
• “It’s embarrassing”—Democrats slam do-nothing Iowa House environment panel

On to the countdown…

24. Unusual split for Iowans in Congress on Social Security Fairness Act

I didn’t plan to write separately about this topic. I was working on a piece about how Elon Musk and Donald Trump blew up a government funding bill that contained some high priorities for the Iowans in Congress. My draft had a section near the end about a Social Security bill, which was among the last the U.S. Senate approved before adjourning for the year.

As I read more about the Social Security Fairness Act, I wondered whether the issue deserved more attention. Not only will the bill help at least 10,000 Iowans (assuming President Joe Biden signs it next week), it divided Iowa’s all-Republican delegation in an unusual way, with all four House members voting yes and both senators voting no. I can’t say for sure that’s unprecedented, but I don’t recall seeing Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn, and Randy Feenstra enthusiastically support a bill that Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst opposed.

I slept on it. In the morning I decided to tackle this first, then finish my post about the high drama surrounding the spending bill.

Congressional coverage rarely generates as much interest as what I write about the state legislature, so I didn’t expect this post to do well. It probably helped that I published on December 23, an otherwise slow news day. Anyone looking for Iowa politics stories would not have found much else on their feeds.

23. Iowa Republicans jump on Olympic rage bandwagon

I’m a big fan of the Olympics. I don’t normally watch sports on television, but I will watch Olympic events for hours—even obscure sports I know nothing about. When I was working in Prague, I bought a television to watch the Summer Games in 1996 after living without a tv for more than a year.

I wrote this post in August after a bunch of Iowa elected officials—who otherwise said little about the Olympics—joined the stampede of conservatives using a women’s boxing match to push their anti-trans agenda. I doubt any of them could have named one female boxer before that day. If they really cared about women’s sports, they could have celebrated a bunch of history-making accomplishments by Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, and other U.S. women in Paris.

I was disgusted to see Republicans use the Olympics to play on the prejudices of their base. And it was a sick joke for Attorney General Brenna Bird to decry a “war on women.” Three days before the controversial boxing match, hundreds of thousands of Iowa women lost the right to make their own medical decisions, thanks to the near-total abortion ban Bird championed and defended in court.

22. How “Party of Destruction” is hurting Iowa’s public schools

First-time Bleeding Heartland author Steve King—not that Steve King—was a teacher in Algona for 23 years and a UniServ Director with the Iowa State Education Association, serving rural school districts, Area Education Agencies, and community colleges in northwest and north central Iowa.

Like many Iowans, Steve is distraught about what has happened to public education in Iowa, which used to be a model for the country.

The Party of Destruction rails about imagined problems impacting public schools. They have virtually made teachers at-will employees. They have attacked teachers in every manner imaginable. It is not a coincidence teachers are in short supply in almost all disciplines. And their answer to a shortage created by low wages, poor benefits, and poor working conditions is to lower standards for admission to the teaching profession.

But the Party of Destruction’s latest knife to the throat of rural Iowa is Governor Kim Reynolds’ school voucher plan. […]

The hundreds of millions of dollars that fund this massive giveaway mostly don’t go to rural Iowans. Most of the funds go to the urban and suburban parents who send their kids to private schools that are relatively close to where they live.

It is welfare for the wealthy.

Unrelated: the better-known Steve King posted this on X/Twitter in January, after the Iowa House chief clerk agreed to grant me press credentials following my federal lawsuit. That wasn’t on my 2024 bingo card.

21. Iowa restaurant lobby plays stupid games, wins stupid prizes

I always enjoy a good lobbying story, but for whatever reason, I didn’t write many during the 2024 legislative session. So when the Des Moines Register reported in June on restaurant owners potentially facing large fines for federal labor law violations, I decided to dig into why that happened.

I looked again at the legislative history of the child labor bill Republicans had enacted in 2023. I re-watched the state House and Senate debates on that bill. I reviewed materials the Iowa Restaurant Association prepared for its members, as well as information the Iowa Division of Labor provided to businesses. I read the U.S. Department of Labor’s messages, which made clear they would “vigorously enforce” the more protective federal child labor standards. The piece turned out to be longer than planned—nearly 4,000 words.

The title was snarkier than my usual style and presumably helped the piece gain traction. (The Substack version was my second most-viewed post on that platform last year.) As I considered several options, I asked my two Gen Z kids whether people their age would understand the phrase “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” They both said yes. One mentioned that a different expression is more common with their contemporaries. I was aware! But I wasn’t going to use “FAFO” in a headline.

20. Iowa Senate Republicans just made blood donations a partisan issue

You never know when something interesting is going to happen during floor debate.

After two days of contentious debate on high-profile bills, the Iowa Senate calendar for February 21 appeared to be stacked with non-controversial legislation. So I didn’t head down to the capitol that morning. Instead, I tuned into the live audio feed while walking my dog.

I hadn’t heard anything about Senate File 2369, an “act relating to autologous and directed blood donations.” A fascinating discussion unfolded as I listened live. State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott calmly listed concerns blood banks had raised. State Senator Bill Dotzler went on a classic rant about Republicans pushing bills “with no clue about what’s really going on. No basic science.” State Senator Janice Weiner delivered one of the shortest floor speeches I’ve heard in the Iowa legislature: “Colleagues, blood banks have no way to test for vaccines in the blood.”

Over the next several days, I was working on drafts related to seemingly more important bills. But my mind kept drifting back to the blood donations debate. I felt it was important to share with readers—not only because of the bill’s potential impact on the blood supply, but for what it revealed about legislative culture in the eighth year of Iowa’s Republican trifecta.

The Substack version of this piece was among my top ten posts on that platform during 2024.

19. Iowa superintendents sound alarm about AEA changes

The governor’s plan to gut Iowa’s Area Education Agencies (AEAs) generated a huge public outcry. Many legislators said they had never received so many emails and phone calls about a bill. Journalists working in print and broadcast media found their AEA coverage drew more readers or viewers than most other news coming out of the legislature.

My experience was similar. Five of last year’s most-viewed Bleeding Heartland posts were wholly or partly about the AEA bill.

I wrote this piece in March, after superintendents from more than 30 Iowa school districts warned state legislators that major changes to AEAs “will have grave consequences for the students we serve.”

They criticized the move to centralize control within the state Department of Education and argued that the timeline Republicans laid out “risks destabilizing our educational ecosystem.” They highlighted the value of the existing AEA model, particularly for rural school districts that “rely heavily on AEAs for critical support.” They made clear that many stakeholders were “still awaiting the opportunity to engage directly with the governor.”

The superintendents wrote ahead of the anticipated Iowa Senate debate on a new GOP proposal. They couldn’t stop the moving train; Senate Republicans approved one version of the AEA bill the same afternoon I published this piece. Three days later, House Republicans rushed to pass a 49-page amendment that turned out to be the final version. Governor Reynolds signed the AEA overhaul the following week.

It will take years to see how this law affects services and school districts. Early signs indicate the superintendents were on target when they said they were “deeply concerned about the proposed changes to the AEAs, especially the shift towards a ‘Fee-for-Service’ approach.”

18. Can you hear us, Governor Reynolds?

First-time Bleeding Heartland author Jenny Turner drew on her experience as a school speech therapist for this piece. She analyzed the governor’s public statements and social media posts about the AEA bill. She pointed out some problems with the report the Reynolds administration cited as proof Iowa’s special education systems were failing kids. She explained why scores on a certain national test might indicate that special ed students “are getting a more individualized appropriate education” here, even if their scores are lower than students in Texas or California.

Jenny warned,

The governor keeps talking about districts being able to choose whether they want to use AEAs, but rural districts or small districts will not have a full-time load to hire these specialists, and will likely not be able to find people to hire, as most of us live in metros.

They could use a company that provides services over the internet, possibly from out of state, for extra fees so the company can make a profit. That is my current job. I do teletherapy in a California school. All the kids I see have mild issues like speech sounds they need to fix, or learning grammatical structures. All of them can sit in front of a screen for 30 minutes. I’d still be more effective in the room with them.

During my time working for Heartland AEA, I saw nonverbal kids with a team of teachers and other AEA staff to work on behavior, communication, and routines. Playing with them at recess to elicit language was the most effective technique. Internet therapy with little contact with other professionals would not work for those kids at all.

17. Gevo plant in South Dakota will use 300 million gallons of water annually

A first for my site: a post with “South Dakota” in the title was among the most-viewed of the year.

This was one of nine contributions by Nancy Dugan in 2024. Like her other work related to Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline, this article was deeply researched, with original reporting and analysis. Nancy flagged how water-intensive it would be to use biofuels to produce aviation fuel.

Near the end, she expressed concern about Senate File 411, a bill the Senate had approved with bipartisan support in 2023. The legislation would prohibit “a county or city from adopting an ordinance, motion, resolution, or amendment that limits consumer access to an energy source or that results in the de facto prohibition of the sale or production of an energy source or the related infrastructure necessary to provide consumer access to a specific energy source within the jurisdiction of the county or city.” (emphasis added) The Iowa House didn’t bring that bill out of committee in 2024, possibly because of worries it could preclude local regulations related to CO2 pipelines.

16. Iowa’s latest hypocrisy in the name of religion

For this essay, Henry Jay Karp drew on his experience as the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He didn’t mince words:

Welcome back, Iowa, to the Middle Ages, when the rule of the church was as absolute as the rule of the king! The so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which Governor Kim Reynolds signed on April 2 at a Christian organization’s private dinner, is a prime example of Iowa’s legislative hypocrisy, enacted in the name of religion.

Advocates portrayed Senate File 2095 as a defense of “religious freedom.” But Henry spoke for many Jews when he wrote, “the First Amendment has done a great job in protecting my religious freedom and the freedom of my fellow Jews in an overwhelmingly Christian environment.”

Moreover, the First Amendment “protects all the faith groups that make up the wondrous religious diversity of America to freely practice the tenets of their religion of choice, including the freedom to choose not to practice or adhere to the tenets of any religion.”

15. Iowa state auditor asks feds to block fertilizer plant sale

Every year, at least one big surprise is lurking in my list of most-viewed posts. Who knew so many people would click on a story about an Iowa House member planning to retire (2021), or the federal government renaming six Iowa creeks (2022), or the governor refusing to act on a judicial appointment (2023)?

Scott Syroka had recently written a well-researched post on why federal antitrust regulators should block the proposed sale of a Lee County fertilizer plant to Koch Industries. It turned out to be the fourth most-viewed post of 2023, despite being published on December 28. Given the reader interest, I made a mental note to keep an eye on further developments related to the plant sale.

In late January 2024, State Auditor Rob Sand wrote to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and the top antitrust official at the U.S. Department of Justice. He asked them to block the deal, noting that big state and local tax incentives had supported the plant’s construction, ostensibly to “encourage future competition and growth for the region.”

I reached out to Scott to see if he wanted to write this up. He said I should feel free to take it, so I dashed off this post. Inexplicably, given everything going on that week at the capitol with the governor’s AEA bill, this 277-word piece took off.

I don’t write many news briefs—one perk of being my own assignment editor is the freedom to focus on deep dives. But maybe I should write more short takes.

Incidentally, Sand regularly brings up his effort to stop the fertilizer plant sale during his prepared remarks at public town hall meetings. Iowans will hear more about this episode if the auditor runs for governor in 2026, as many observers in both parties expect. None of Iowa’s other statewide elected officials tried to stop a sale that (in Sand’s words) left taxpayers on the hook for $550 million in tax breaks.

14. Iowa hospitals must stop unlawful drug testing after births

When I see a new draft by Rachel Bruns, I know I’m about to learn a lot. She originally wrote this piece for the Des Moines Register, in response to the article “What Patients Should Know About Hospital Drug Testing.” Rachel provided further context “that may help families disrupt the illegal maternal and newborn drug screening practices taking place at Iowa hospitals and clinics.”

I wasn’t familiar with the 2001 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibited prenatal drug testing without specific informed consent, or the Iowa statute requiring documented symptoms of exposure to illicit drugs in order to test a newborn without parental consent. Nevertheless, Rachel wrote, “some Iowa clinics and hospitals continue to conduct such tests, when urine is gathered for testing of urinary tract infections or to check urine glucose or protein levels. Such practices are not only unlawful, but also create mistrust of the medical system—putting the lives of moms and babies at risk.”

For one Des Moines family, a false positive drug test on an umbilical cord “led to a distressing eight-month ordeal with Iowa Child Protective Services.”

Iowans are fortunate Rachel volunteers much of her spare time to advocate for quality maternal health care.

If you liked this post, you should read Shosana Walter’s recent investigative reporting for The Marshall Project: “Hospitals Gave Patients Meds During Childbirth, Then Reported Them For Positive Drug Tests.”

13. Plan for Iowa AEAs relied on consultant’s faulty analysis

David Tilly is a former deputy director of the Iowa Department of Education. He allowed me to publish three letters he emailed to all 150 state legislators about the governor’s AEA bill, and later debunked one of the talking points used to bring reluctant Republicans on board.

This post was the second of David’s messages to state lawmakers. Whereas the first focused on flaws the governor’s proposal, this one zeroed in on the Guidehouse report that purportedly provided a rationale for the governor’s plan.

Of David’s many persuasive arguments, this one strikes me as particularly salient:

A very important point about AEA funding and services that is not considered in the report is that the AEA system was designed to be funded comprehensively. All districts pay in, and all districts receive comprehensive high quality services in return. In this system, however, small districts’ comprehensive services are subsidized by large district contributions. That is, small districts receive back in service MORE in value than the dollars they contribute. This is by design, and one of the reasons why small districts will experience reduced services if large districts are allowed to Opt-Out. The dollars they have will not buy them equivalent services to what they are receiving now. The AEAs economy of scale advantage and safety net properties will be lost.

I have heard anecdotally that this scenario is already playing out in some rural school districts.

12. How Iowa Supreme Court Justice David May has decided big cases

Iowans want to cast informed votes in judicial retention elections. I know this because my posts about the Iowa Supreme Court justices on the ballot were among this site’s most-viewed posts in 2020 and 2022. While most of what I publish attracts little attention after the first week or so, those posts continued to gain traction through online searches as election day approached.

Governor Reynolds’ newest appointee, David May, was the only Iowa Supreme Court justice on the 2024 ballot. Most of my readers likely knew only one thing about him, if they’d heard of him at all: he was part of the 4-3 majority that allowed the state to enforce a near-total abortion ban.

I wanted to provide fuller context, including how attorneys rated Justice May, relevant material from his 2022 application and interview with the State Judicial Nominating Commission. I explained where he has landed on important cases, including abortion rights, criminal law, government transparency, and other areas of interest to my readers.

I also explored how “originalism”—interpreting the Iowa Constitution based on how a group of white men understood it in 1857—has influenced some of Justice May’s noteworthy majority opinions.

The piece grew to nearly 5,300 words. Even my deep dives are rarely that long. Reader feedback was very positive, and many people shared the post with contacts having trouble deciding how to vote. My only regret was not finishing it in time for the early voting start date (I started working on it weeks earlier).

About 63.3 percent of Iowans who filled out that part of the ballot voted to keep Justice May on the high court. That was the lowest share of “yes” votes for a member of the Iowa Supreme Court since Justice David Wiggins received 54.6 percent in 2012.

11. Iowa school vouchers prompted tuition hikes, researchers find

Before Reynolds decided to blow up the AEAs, she was determined to get her plan for “Education Savings Accounts” through the Iowa House. Bleeding Heartland readers love to hate on school vouchers, but it’s hard to find solid evidence (as opposed to anecdotes) about how the policy is harming public education.

Enter Princeton University doctoral student Jason Fontana and Princeton sociology Professor Jennifer L. Jennings. In April they published a working paper called “The Effect of Taxpayer-Funded Education Savings Accounts on Private School Tuition: Evidence from Iowa.” They compared private school tuition in Iowa and Nebraska. Both states enacted taxpayer-funded “school choice” programs in 2023, but Iowa implemented the policy for the 2023/2024 school year, while Nebraska delayed its start date until 2024/2025.

The research showed, “Eligible grades experience significant increases in tuition following Iowa’s ESA implementation. We observe no such patterns for Nebraska schools.”

Even more telling: they found no tuition increase for private Iowa preschools, where students were not eligible for school vouchers. They found statistically significant tuition increases for grades 1-12, where some students were eligible for the program. Tuition rose by the largest amount (25 percent) for kindergarten, where all students were eligible for ESAs.

I’m grateful to Fontana and Jennings for conducting their rigorous analysis, and for allowing me to publish their answers to “Frequently Asked Questions” about the study in May.

10. Snap out of it, Iowans: Industrial agriculture is the problem

Allen Bonini retired in January 2021 after nearly 45 years as an environmental professional, serving in various technical, managerial and leadership positions in water quality, recycling, and solid waste across the states of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois. Most recently, he served fifteen and a half years as the supervisor of the Watershed Improvement Section at the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

In retirement he can speak freely about water pollution. And he has some things to say. “The real, fundamental, root problem impacting Iowa’s water quality is industrial agriculture,” Allen writes. Don’t talk to him about “conventional” farming:

Today’s Iowa agriculture is anything but “conventional.” It is a product of the industrialization of an activity that used to be carried out by 85 percent or more of Americans not much more than 100 years ago when most people lived on farms and raised food for their own consumption and for their neighbors in surrounding communities. […]

Today’s modern industrial agriculture, which dominates the agriculture landscape in Iowa, is anything but the romantic image that industrial agricultural interests have fabricated. Most Iowa farms are privately held corporations worth millions of dollars. It’s certainly not the image that pops into people’s minds when they hear the marketing hype from commodity groups about the quaint, noble Iowa “farm family,” so overworked and burdened to try and scratch out a living on the “family farm.”

Allen signed off by saying he was moving out of state. “Good luck with your future. I’ll watch from afar to see who wins the battle—you or the 30 million pigs and their industrial agriculture overlords.” Wherever he lives, my door is open if he wants to keep writing about the Iowa environment.

9. Other state school voucher programs spell trouble for Iowa

Pat O’Donnell is a resident of Sioux Center and spent 37 years serving in Iowa public schools as a teacher, principal, and superintendent. As the first year of Iowa’s school voucher program was ending, Pat looked at how similar policies have played out in other states. He also looked at Governor Reynolds’ allies in this fight:

Who pushed Reynolds to exile fellow Republicans? During last year’s legislative session, she posed for photos several times with Corey DeAngelis, a self-proclaimed school choice evangelist with DeVos’s American Federation for Children. And Reynolds recently was named co-chair, with former Arizona governor Doug Ducey, of the Education Freedom Alliance, which promotes and lobbies for vouchers. It encourages 26 states, all under Republican legislative control, to pass universal “education freedom” policies by 2026.

With her leadership position in the Education Freedom Alliance, Reynolds exposes her real plan for education. She claims parents wanted choice and that vouchers would provide opportunity. But in reality, she was pushing an agenda from powerful, rich, far-right billionaires who want to destroy public education and create segregation by socioeconomic status, disability, language, and race.

8. Selzer’s new poll finds a remade presidential race

Dan Guild has studied presidential polling for decades and always has an insightful take on a new Iowa Poll. He wrote this piece in response to Selzer & Co’s surprising September finding: Kamala Harris trailed Donald Trump by just 4 points. That survey didn’t get as much coverage as Selzer’s final pre-election poll for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom, which turned out to be way off. But it was a big shift from the June poll showing Trump 18 points ahead of Biden.

Dan observed,

Trump’s level of support has varied little since February, when Selzer found him ahead of Biden by 48 percent to 33 percent in Iowa. The change is in the Democratic number. Harris has consolidated the Democratic base, and the 43 percent she receives in this survey is close to the 44.9 percent vote share for Biden in the 2020 election.

Dan also looked at what he calls the “implied national lead,” which he calculates “by subtracting a poll’s current margin in that state against the results in 2020.” In September, most state polling showed little change from the 2020 Biden-Trump numbers. But Harris was down by just 4 in this poll, even though Trump carried Iowa by about 8 points against Biden.

“By this metric, Selzer’s Iowa Poll from June was much too pessimistic, and perhaps the latest poll is overly optimistic from a Democratic perspective,” Dan wrote.

It sure was.

7. Trouble down on the farm

Dan Piller was a business reporter for more than four decades, and his last beat before retirement was covering agriculture for the Des Moines Register. This essay was typically thought-provoking. He began by recalling the 1980s film Country, “a hard-edged look at the farm crisis that gripped the Midwest during the decade.” Dan warned,

The opening scenes of the 21^st century version of Country already are running. Corn and soybean prices have fallen almost 40 percent. Iowa farmers are enduring a drop in income of more than 25 percent since 2002. The effect isn’t limited to the countryside; the closing of Tyson Foods processing plant at Perry as well as a sequence of layoffs at Deere & Co., Firestone, and other implement plants have cost almost 2,000 Iowa manufacturing workers their jobs.

Longtime agricultural banker Terry Hotchkiss, chairman of the American Bankers Association agricultural and rural bankers committee, said farm lenders “feel like they are looking over a cliff with regards to the agricultural economy.”

Dan wrote this piece in September, before it was clear Trump was heading back to the White House. The returning president’s immigration and tariff policies are unlikely to help farmers or rural Iowans who voted Republican in large numbers.

6. They’ve done enough damage

The author of Bleeding Heartland’s most-viewed post from 2022 had two commentaries in the top ten for 2024. Bruce Lear worked as a classroom teacher for eleven years, then spent 27 years as an Iowa State Education Association regional director. So more often than not, he writes about public education, a perennial hot topic for my readers.

Bruce noted that this year, “the education community agreed there should be a comprehensive study with all stakeholders involved as decision makers” before changing Iowa’s AEAs. Instead, Republicans “rammed through a 49-page bill that few had read, and most Iowans opposed. Those 49 pages included surprises and possibly mistakes. The governor refused to make any corrections. She recently told reporters she’s ‘absolutely not’ open to fixing the AEA law.”

Republicans added raises for teachers to the AEA bill, “so they could run attack ads labeling Democrats who opposed the legislation as voting against raises for teachers. It’s cynical and false advertising, but expect to see it beginning in September or October.” He was right.

5. Chuck Grassley rewrites history of his role in smearing Joe Biden

Iowa’s senior senator is well known for lamenting the lack of history on the History Channel. Early this year, he engaged in revisionist history about his role in spreading false allegations against President Joe Biden.

Grassley spent months publicizing claims that the president and his son Hunter Biden took bribes from a Ukrainian businessman, even though FBI officials had warned him and other Republican politicians the bribery had not been verified.

I wrote this piece after the original source of the allegations, a Russian informant, was charged with lying to the FBI and other felonies. (He pleaded guilty to several charges in December.)

Grassley sought “to set the record straight” about the document he had released, claiming he “didn’t promote or vouch for the allegations in the 1023 as the truth.” But as I showed in this post, the senator certainly promoted the allegations, sharing details about a supposed “high-stakes bribery scheme” in Senate floor speeches and other public statements, including interviews on national television networks.

4. Iowa’s governor has jumped the shark

Bruce Lear’s starting point for this essay was a classic “Happy Days” episode. It spawned a new idiom, referring to when something “has reached its peak and starts to decline in quality.”

“That’s what’s happening in Iowa,” Bruce wrote. “But it’s not a sitcom that’s past its prime—it’s Iowa’s beloved public education system. Public schools have suffered from long-term neglect and three attention-grabbing attacks, which remind me of how Fonzie jumped the shark.”

I believe this piece resonated with so many readers because like Steve King’s commentary mentioned above, it tapped into a sadness many Iowans share. “For decades, our state was a national leader in public education. In the 1990s, Iowa was ranked in the top five states in reading and math. […] Teachers with Iowa credentials were top picks for any classroom in the country.”

That’s no longer true, and everyone knows it.

3. Exclusive: ISU acquired $5 million plane for athletics

In 2016 and 2017, I did a lot of reporting on the multi-faceted airplane scandal involving then Iowa State University President Steven Leath. So when I learned in early 2024 that ISU had acquired a $5 million Cessna 560XL airplane, I thought it was newsworthy.

ISU did not announce the purchase or its plans to upgrade the university’s aircraft. Nor did the Iowa Board of Regents publicly discuss or approve the purchase. That’s because the ISU Foundation paid for the plane, and unlike most university equipment costing $2 million or more, foundation purchases don’t require board approval.

The 2014 purchase of ISU’s King Air was handled the same way, with the ISU Foundation using “discretionary funds” designated for the Athletics Department, and no formal approval by the Iowa Board of Regents.

A few days after I published this post, ISU President Wendy Wintersteen spoke to members of the Iowa House Education Appropriations Subcommittee. She began her prepared remarks by explaining that the King Air required costly repairs, including a new engine, making it more economical to purchase another plane. She emphasized that taxpayer funds were not used for the Cessna, which will be available to other university officials but will mainly be used by athletics staff.

2. Highest and lowest-rated judges on Iowa’s 2024 ballot

After the 2022 election, I realized that many of my readers wanted to know more about the judges on the back side of the ballot. So this year, I decided to cover the other judges up for retention in addition to Justice May. I knew little about most of them, so I relied on the 2024 Judicial Performance Review, published by the Iowa State Bar Association.

Of the four Iowa Court of Appeals judges on the 2024 ballot, Samuel Langholz received the lowest marks on the performance review by far. I wasn’t surprised. When he served as the governor’s senior legal counsel in 2019 and 2020, I learned firsthand that Langholz sometimes puts political considerations above following the law and the constitution.

For most of my life I have voted to retain all judges on the ballot, even conservative ones. But I explained in this post why I was voting no on Langholz and on Polk County District Associate Judge Rachael Seymour. (An attorney who has practiced before Judge Seymour later submitted this piece defending her professionalism and critiquing the bar association’s survey.)

Most days, online searches account for a small percentage of Bleeding Heartland’s total page views. This post was an exception, as voters looked for information about the unfamiliar names on the back side of their ballot.

All Iowa judges up for retention in 2024 kept their jobs. Seymour received about 63.7 percent “yes” votes in District 5C.

As for the Court of Appeals members, Judge Langholz received the lowest number of “yes” votes (734,532) as well as the lowest vote share (64.9 percent). Judge Mary Tabor did the best (804,390 votes, 70.8 percent), followed by Judge Mary Chicchelly (785,925 votes, 69.3 percent) and Judge Tyler Buller (769,806 votes, 68.1 percent).

1: New Iowa law criminalizes life-saving treatments for kids

I was in the Iowa House chamber for the debate on House File 2605, which regulated hemp consumables, and I covered that bill on my weekly radio show. But with so much other legislative news happening in April, I never finished a Bleeding Heartland article about the issue.

After the governor signed the bill, ignoring pleas from affected families, I invited Erin Farquhar to write this piece. She has vast knowledge and personal experience.

“Proponents described the law as an effort to limit the amount of THC in the intoxicating products being sold in our state to protect kids, but that is not what the bill does,” Erin wrote.

Unfortunately, HF 2605 was written in a way that has very far-reaching consequences. It does the opposite of what the bill proponents said by banning access to nonintoxicating consumable hemp products used for medical purposes and maintaining access to intoxicating products, like THC infused drinks, used largely recreationally.  

The bill even makes it illegal for me to provide my son the consumable hemp medication he has used for the past nine years to remain seizure-free.   

One product used by many autism and epilepsy families “is sold in all 50 states with no restrictions and is a non-psychoactive consumable hemp product.” Erin and her husband can no longer legally purchase it or administer it to her son.

“Where are my freedoms, and why can’t I protect and care for my child?”

Erin wrote so clearly, and with such emotion. This piece not only generated the most views in 2024, but edged out my scoop about State Senator Adrian Dickey’s arrest during RAGBRAI to become Bleeding Heartland’s most-viewed post of all time.

Thank you so much to all who read or shared work published here. Your support helped the site reach approximately 1 million unique users and 1.4 million page views last year without a marketing budget or staff dedicated to promotions.

Special thanks to the guest authors who wrote thirteen posts on this list and more than 400 other articles or commentaries in 2024.