They say anything can happen in a low-turnout special election. And on January 28, voters in Iowa Senate district 35 elected Democrat Mike Zimmer to represent them through the end of 2026. Zimmer defeated Republican nominee Katie Whittington by 4,812 votes to 4,473 (51.7 percent to 48.1 percent), according to unofficial results.

Most Iowa political observers expected Republicans to hold the seat easily. Former State Senator Chris Cournoyer was re-elected in this district with about 61 percent of the vote in 2022. (She resigned from the legislature to become Iowa’s lieutenant governor last month.) In the most recent general election, voters living in Senate district 35 preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris by a 21-point margin, and preferred GOP incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks over Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan by a 9-point margin. The GOP has a voter registration advantage too.

Yet Zimmer performed well in every part of Senate district 35. He carried Clinton County, where most of his constituents live, by 3,411 votes to 3,169 (51.7 percent to 48.0 percent). Trump won that formerly blue county in November with 58.5 percent of the vote to 39.7 percent for Harris.

The Democrat carried the Jackson County precincts by 555 votes to 446 for Whittington (55.4 percent to 44.6 percent). Voters in the same area favored Trump by 60.3 percent to 38.2 percent in November, according to Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of the precinct-level results.

Also impressive: Zimmer nearly matched his opponent in the Scott County portion of the district, gaining 846 votes to 858 for Whittington (49.6 percent to 50.3 percent). Trump’s advantage over Harris in the same precincts: 64.2 percent to 34.1 percent.

How did the Democrat pull it off?

A PERFECT FIT FOR THE DISTRICT

The Iowa Democratic Party’s senior advisor Zach Meunier posted on X/Twitter on election night:

Mike Zimmer is a School board president, former principal, and deeply rooted in SD35.

Katie Whittington is an anti-vax conspiracy theorist who tried to campaign with Steve King.

Candidates matter and @SenateMajority is gonna get an outstanding senator.

That’s a concise summary, given the platform’s 280-character limit. But it only scratches the surface of how well Zimmer fits this district.

Here’s a map of Senate district 35.

Zimmer described his background in recent interviews with Robert Leonard and Zachary Oren Smith and provided additional details to Bleeding Heartland after the election. He has spent his whole life in eastern Iowa and has lived in each of the Senate district’s three counties.

Clinton County ties

Zimmer moved to DeWitt, the county’s second-largest city, when he was hired in 1990 to teach industrial technology and coach boy’s track for the Central DeWitt school district. He and his wife raised five children in the community. About 30 years ago he created Mike Zimmer Construction, where he worked on projects during the summer months.

Many educators and small business owners (from both parties) have served in the Iowa legislature. Those jobs are often a good springboard for candidates, because teachers get to know many students and parents, and local businesses may have hundreds of customers. Zimmer checks both boxes.

He continued to live in DeWitt while holding various positions in the Pleasant Valley and North Scott school districts, beginning in 2002. After retiring, he successfully ran for the Central DeWitt school board in November 2023. His peers elected him board president immediately, which is unusual—typically that role goes to someone who has served at least one term.

While campaigning for school board, Zimmer would have made voter contacts not only in DeWitt, but in nearby smaller towns like Grand Mound, Low Moor, and Weldon. Here’s a map of the Central DeWitt school district.

His position on the school board and prior career in education gave Zimmer credibility when he highlighted the need to fix Iowa’s public schools, one of his top issues during the short campaign. Speaking to Leonard, Zimmer described policies under the Republican trifecta as “death by a thousand cuts,” starting with the collective bargaining changes in 2017. The hits kept coming, with continued underfunding of the K-12 system, attacks over mitigation policies schools adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts to ban books, the school voucher program “shifting massive amounts of student dollars” into private schools “with absolutely no accountability whatsoever.” Last year, “the dismantling of our Area Education Agencies” dealt another blow to public schools.

Trump outpolled Harris almost everywhere in Clinton County, aside from three of the eight precincts in the city of Clinton. But Zimmer won the Clinton and DeWitt precincts by a comfortable margin in the special election.

Scott County ties

Zimmer grew up in Scott County and went to North Scott High School in the 1970s. He also spent two years as principal of North Scott High School during the late 2000s.

The North Scott school district covers almost all of the Scott County area in Senate district 35 (containing the towns of Donahue, Long Grove, Park View, McCausland, and Princeton). Here’s the school district map:

In addition, Zimmer is an active longtime member of St. Ann Catholic Church in Long Grove. He attended the church while living at home from 1973 to 1983, and his family began going there again after moving to DeWitt in 1990. He is the volunteer driver coordinator for Humble Dwellings, a nonprofit serving Scott County that was founded by a St. Ann Parish member.

Zimmer told me his construction business also worked in Scott County over the years, including projects in Park View and Eldridge (which lies outside Senate district 35).

No wonder the Democrat was able to hold his own against the Republican candidate in the Scott County precincts.

Jackson County ties

Zimmer’s first job out of college in the 1980s was in Jackson County. He was a teacher and coach (track and football) at what was then the East Central Community School District in Miles. That’s outside the boundaries of Senate district 35, but not by much.

Personal ties are always helpful for a candidate, but especially when you are trying to turn out voters in January, when most people’s minds are not focused on politics.

Imagine how many thousands of potential voters in this special election knew Mike Zimmer personally: from growing up with him in Scott County; as a student or parent who encountered him as a teacher, coach, or school principal; from church or through volunteer work, from hiring his construction company.

Whittington has lived in Clinton (the largest city in the Senate district) for ten years, and has volunteered for various local causes as well as the Trump campaign. That’s not a bad resume, but she began this race with a far smaller network across the district than her opponent. She had less than a month to make up that ground.

And unfortunately for her, the Republican Party of Iowa’s GOTV—which was quite successful during the 2024 general election campaign—wasn’t able to meet this challenge.

SUPERIOR GOTV FOR DEMOCRATS

Having a quality candidate doesn’t guarantee that voters will make the effort to cast a ballot outside of the normal campaign season. Democrats were able to beat the odds in Senate district 35 in part through a strong ground game.

Speaking to Bleeding Heartland by phone after results came in on January 28, Zimmer credited “an all-hands-on-deck effort” that involved Iowa Democratic Party leaders, Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner and other Democratic senators, and numerous volunteers.

Canvassing was a big part of the strategy. Despite the extremely cold weather for much of January, Zimmer told me it was important to meet people door to door. He and his volunteers “hit all of the Democratic doors in all of the communities once.” They went back before the election to Democratic doors where they had left campaign literature but not reached a voter in person.

On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of this week, Zimmer and his wife canvassed in some of the smaller communities, such as Calamus, Grand Mound, Lost Nation, and Delmar (all in Clinton County). Voters in small towns don’t often see candidates at the door.

According to Tyler Redenbaugh, executive director of the Senate Majority Fund, volunteers sent around 7,000 postcards to voters before the special. Zimmer, his family members, and more than 90 volunteers made an estimated 7,720 attempts at the doors and 5,636 phone calls to voters in the district.

Canvassing began on December 26, with the goal of securing two satellite voting locations. They managed to collect enough signatures for those by the deadline of 5:00 PM on Friday December 27.

Zimmer filmed videos to spread the word on social media platforms about the satellite voting opportunities in DeWitt (Clinton County) and in Park View (Scott County), and the in-person early voting option at the auditor’s offices in Clinton and Maquoketa (the Jackson County seat).

Democrats also spent money on mail and targeted digital ads on platforms including YouTube and Hulu. They did not buy radio or television advertising for this election.

Zimmer told me that it helped to be the only legislative candidate on the ballot this week, which pulled in volunteers from around the state. In a comment provided to Bleeding Heartland, Weiner hailed the race as a “great opportunity for community and county organizing to shine.”

We had county parties from Scott, Clinton, Jackson and Jones working directly on the ground and coordinating throughout. The Eastside Dems from Johnson County and the Johnson County Democrats worked with their membership to bring multiple canvassers to DeWitt and Clinton, as well as make calls. The Polk County Dems made phone calls and wrote postcards. Indivisible Iowa helped with postcards, as did a group in Dubuque. The trade unions helped get out their voters, state senators and other elected officials helped knock – and key to it all was IDP Chair [Rita] Hart helping us recruit an A+ candidate – candidate quality matters.

Hart has lived in Clinton County for decades and represented much of this area in the Iowa Senate from 2013 through 2018.

Whittington’s campaign Facebook page shows several appearances at events in January. But everyone at the Jackson County or Clinton GOP Central Committee meetings was already going to vote for the Republican candidate. It’s not clear how many volunteers she had knocking on doors, making calls, or sending postcards to mobilize supporters.

We don’t yet known how much each party invested in this special election, because campaign finance disclosures published on January 24 don’t include expenditures from the final week of the campaign. Costs surely ran well into five figures on both sides.

Whittington’s filing from the Friday before the special election shows no in-kind spending by the Iowa GOP, even though Republicans clearly paid for mail and advertising. One ad promoted Whittington as a “pro-family voice for Iowa” and a wife and mother of four. The spot said she would “fight to reduce the cost of living, confront illegal immigration and crime, build new career opportunities, and strengthen our schools.” Those expenditures should show up in the Republican’s post-election filing, which is due in mid-May.

The GOP also did an absentee ballot mailing, but that went out before Whittington won a special district nominating convention, so it may not be reported as an in-kind expenditure for her campaign.

QUIRKS OF A SPECIAL ELECTION

Most of the time, I believe parties benefit from competitive primary campaigns. They can sharpen candidates’ skills and generate free media coverage for the eventual winner. But in this case, the three-way battle for the GOP nomination may have hurt Whittington’s chances.

Local Democrats quickly united behind Zimmer and were already knocking doors for him before he was officially nominated at a December 30 district convention. Republican delegates chose Whittington at a convention on January 4. Presumably backers of the other two contenders—State Representative Tom Determann and Clinton County farmer Dennis Campbell—were less motivated to get out the vote for someone else.

Whittington made a few missteps. As Zachary Oren Smith reported for Iowa Starting Line, she planned to appear at a “MAGA MEETUP” with former U.S. Representative Steve King in mid-January. King has a lot of baggage that a little-known candidate doesn’t need. (Whittington scrubbed that event from her Facebook page and seems to have canceled the meetup.)

The Republican didn’t show up for a candidate forum in DeWitt—a supporter said she was sick—and didn’t respond to the Quad-City Times’ interview request or emailed questions. When you’re not well known and the election is less than a month away, you can’t afford to turn down free publicity.

Several factors outside of either candidate’s control may have contributed to Zimmer’s upset.

Some election analysts from around the country saw Iowa Senate district 35 as an example of how the party out of power tends to do far better than expected in special elections. The Downballot noted, “we last regularly saw massive overperformances like this during Trump’s first term in office.”

Another election nerd highlighted the “ancestrally Democratic” nature of this area.

In addition, the realignment of the past decade has changed each party’s coalition. Democratic candidates now do better among voters with higher education levels, who also are more likely to cast ballots in a lower-turnout environment. Voters cast 9,304 ballots in the January 28 election. But when Cournoyer was up for re-election in 2022, voters cast 24,266 ballots in the Senate district 35 race.

Special election wins aren’t always correlated with good outcomes for that party in the next general election. However, Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight.com observed, “historically, when one party *consistently* overperforms base partisanship in special elections, it tends to do well in the next general election.”

Senate district 35 will be a top-tier race in 2026, when Zimmer will presumably seek a full four-year term. Republicans will hope that a longer campaign and higher turnout will lift their candidate in this Trump-friendly area. Expect a more costly race, since the GOP typically spends hundreds of thousands of dollars in targeted Iowa Senate districts on television advertising alone.

For now, Democrats will celebrate the win, which puts the GOP majority in the upper chamber at 34-16. Before Governor Kim Reynolds picked Cournoyer for lieutenant governor, Republicans were poised to hold a 35-15 majority for the next two years.