Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

Essential workers. What comes to mind first for most folks are the EMTs, police, nurses, and firefighters. Then, if they think a bit more, I’ll hear about postal workers, logistics personnel like truckers and train conductors, waste management workers, and utility workers. If you badger folks again, they will mention food service workers, grocery store shelf stockers and clerks, and maybe some of the folks specific to their industry or lifestyle. You really gotta dig down a lot of times to get to folks like teachers, home health care workers, or retirement home staff. 

However, there is a profession that I consider more crucial than many of the above, because without it the others might become non-starters.

I’m talking about child care workers, in particular, early childhood education workers and day care providers.

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

There once was a time, now no longer true for Democrats, when if Iowans wanted to see, meet, probably visit with a candidate seeking to become president of the United States, you could. It wasn’t especially difficult. They came around, perhaps to your county, certainly to your region… and spoke, took questions, engaged with potential voters. For maybe a four-month period every four or eight years, presidential aspirants were about as accessible as U.S. Senate or U.S. House candidates.

As many have noted, this is largely because of a certain presidential campaign in 1976.

This is my way of introducing that, over the years, I had numerous small encounters with the late President Jimmy Carter. I chuckle at the thought, in part because in his presidential campaigns, I was never a staunch Carter supporter.

For many Iowans, myself included, Jimmy Carter’s recent death brings forth a fresh wave of memories.

“You suck, Joni! That’s just the nicest way I can summarize how we’re all feeling about your reign so far,” says Joshua Smith in the first digital ad promoting his Republican campaign for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat.

The video previews what will be an aggressive campaign by Senator Joni Ernst’s 2026 primary challenger from the right.

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

Phil Montag is a Des Moines area activist, serves on the Iowa Unity Coalition Board of Directors, and is one of the founders of Veishea Analytics.

Every election cycle produces a wealth of public data, from polling station statistics to voter turnout figures, campaign fundraising and spending data, absentee ballot requests, and audited results. This data exists not just for politicians and media outlets, but for the public as well. It provides transparency, accountability, and evidence-based debunking of misinformation that is prevalent today. With this analysis of the 2024 Iowa State House races, we are hoping to present the data in a new way that will be easy for everyday voters to understand.

In the Iowa State House races that concluded a few weeks ago, the Republican Party of Iowa was able to campaign with a serious cash advantage, although Democrats had much more success at promoting absentee ballot requests and turning out early votes.

The combined fundraising totals for Republican candidates running for the Iowa House was a little more than $12 million. For Democrats it was $6.7 million. Those totals represent what was donated to campaigns directly as well as in-kind contributions that other organizations spent on their behalf. The fundraising graphs enclosed below represent only what was raised in 2023 and 2024. Incumbent candidates whose campaigns started 2023 with cash on hand may have spent more.

State Auditor Rob Sand has urged members of the Iowa Democratic Party’s governing body to give Rita Hart another term as state chair. In a January 1 message to State Central Committee members (enclosed in full below), Sand credited Hart with getting the party out of debt and raising enough money to fund full-time communications, finance, and data staff.

He also asserted that Iowa was “more GOP than the rest of the country in 2022, then more Dem than the rest of the country in 2024.” I believe he meant to say that the swing toward Donald Trump in Iowa was (slightly) less than the national swing toward Trump this year. Iowa’s voting patterns are clearly not “more Dem” than the U.S. as a whole; the president-elect won the popular vote by about 1.5 points nationally but by 13.2 points in Iowa.

Sand pushed back against what he called “inaccurate info about the party’s performance” and Hart. In particular, he defended the party’s decision to send fewer absentee ballot request forms to voters this year than in past election cycles, saying Republican-backed changes to Iowa law made it more risky to push voting by mail and wiser to invest in other programs.

He appeared to be referring to a recent Substack post by Robert Leonard, which faulted the Iowa Democratic Party for “lost opportunities” during the 2024 election cycle. Leonard wrote, “One Democratic legislator tells me that normally Iowa Democrats send out approximately 250,000 absentee ballot request forms and this year only 40,000 were sent.” It’s important to remember that the state party was not the only entity pushing early GOTV. For example, the Polk County Democrats distributed an estimated 190,000 absentee ballot request forms to around 95,000 households in late August and early September.

Sand asked members of the governing body to unite behind Hart and her “Forward Victory: 2026” plan, saying it would be “positive change for the IDP” to keep a chair for more than one term. Since Michael Kiernan stepped down for health reasons in 2010, nine people have led the party: Sue Dvorsky, Tyler Olson, Scott Brennan, Andy McGuire, Derek Eadon, Troy Price, Mark Smith, Ross Wilburn, and Hart.

The Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee will meet on January 4 to elect a new chair. Three candidates are expected to be nominated: Hart, Tim Winter, and Alexandra Nickolas-Dermody. Dexter Merschbrock announced in December that he was seeking the position but endorsed Nickolas-Dermody this week.

UPDATE: Hart won the election by 38 votes to ten for Winter and one for Nickolas-Dermody. Kim Callahan was also nominated during the January 4 meeting but did not win any votes.

Julie Russell-Steuart served two terms as chair of the Iowa Democratic Party’s Disability Caucus (2020-2024) and is a disability rights advocate, rural organizer, and artist creating community and power through creativity. Founder of Power of the Press Iowa printing workshops. IGs @Caveworks and @PowerofthePress

Organizing, as I define it, is the practice of bringing people together in solidarity for mutual benefit. The Iowa Democratic Party’s current chair, Rita Hart, recognized in her action plan that this is the keyword going forward for Democratic success: “The first goal for all organizing in 2025 should be more people doing more things—rural, urban, suburban—everywhere.”

This is a belated goal, honestly. The IDP had no dedicated, paid organizers on the ground in the last election cycle, and it was a consequential decision on resources. I got emails from the party asking for donations of $2.00, $1 per targeted race and every time I thought, “Why can’t we ask for four bucks to send the second and fourth Congressional districts a dollar each too? Why is my state party laser focused on complying with national Democrats’ goals, instead of Iowa Democrats’ actual organizing needs?” 

I don’t know about you, but I found those emails disappointing. They represented lost opportunity and misplaced loyalty.

Charles Bruner is a former Democratic Iowa legislator (1978-1990), was the founding director of Iowa Child and Family Policy Center (1990-2015, now Common Good Iowa), and is national director of the InCK Marks Initiative’s Child Health Equity Leadership Group.

PREFACE

Between 2008 and 2024, about one in ten voters in Iowa shifted from voting for Democrats to voting for Republicans. Over those eight elections, the overall shift in Iowa’s rural, white, working-class counties and communities was closer to one voter in five. From being bluish-purple, Iowa now is considered a solid red state. If Democrats are to become competitive in 2026 and future elections, they must regain trust with and win a good share of these voters back.

Bleeding Heartland has done a public service in publishing the statements of the three candidates seeking to be Iowa Democratic Party chair and rebuild the Democratic party and its brand. (Editor’s note: here are the statements from Rita Hart, Tim Winter, and Alexandra Nickolas-Dermody.)

I hope these statements receive broad review, and people will look at them as more than either-or statements for selecting a party chair. Hopefully, they will serve as a basis for dialogue and activism among Democrats on how to move forward.

I am a Democrat because I believe in the values Democrats hold and seek to place into public policy—one recognizing that government must play a positive role in ensuring broadly shared and sustainable prosperity for its residents and their families. I am a policy wonk when it comes to operationalizing those values into specific policies (and there is a role there – see below for a beginning iteration), but I believe key to restoring the Democratic party is a much more concerted articulation of these values. Moreover, I believe there is substantial consensus among Democratics, whether considering themselves moderate or progressive, on those values and the policy agendas that advance them.

Bleeding Heartland set yet another record for guest contributions in 2024, with 416 posts involving 146 authors. (The previous record was 358 posts that more than 125 people wrote for this site in 2023.) I don’t know of any state-based political website that provides more quality coverage and commentary by guest contributors.

This year’s guest authors covered a wide range of topics, from public schools to local government, major employers, CO2 pipelines, notable events in Iowa history, and of course wildflowers.

They wrote about President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, Governor Kim Reynolds and her administration, Attorney General Brenna Bird, and of course former and future President Donald Trump.

During the legislative session, guest authors highlighted flaws in the governor’s plan to overhaul Area Education Agencies and the report that sought to justify it. They shared their own personal or professional experiences with AEAs. They covered other education proposals and explained why the state’s official school voucher numbers were misleading. They also covered bills that received less attention but could change many Iowans’ lives for better or worse.

During the 2024 campaign and its aftermath, guest authors wrote about presidential polling in Iowa and nationally, profiled candidates, and analyzed the election results from several angles.

Guest authors sounded the alarm about Iowa’s near-total abortion ban, unlawful drug testing at hospitals, and climate change impacts. They suggested ways to protect water and air quality, and flagged transparency problems in state and local government. They reviewed books that would interest many Bleeding Heartland readers.

They reflected on the lives of those who passed away this year, including Iowans Marcia Nichols, Bobby Washington, and Jim Leach, as well as Tim Kraft, who played an important role on some Iowa campaigns.

While many guest authors criticized Republican policies and politicians, some offered advice or constructive criticism to Democrats following the Iowa caucuses and another disappointing general election.

As noted below, some contributions by guest authors were among the most-viewed Bleeding Heartland posts of the year.

Alexandra Nickolas-Dermody is Vice Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, a longtime election strategist and organizer, and a lifelong Iowan. On December 31 she emailed this message to members of the Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee, who will elect a state party chair for the next two years on January 4. Bleeding Heartland has not edited her text in any way.

Dear Central Committee Members and Iowa Democrats,

I hope this email finds you well. As a lifelong Democrat, Central Committee Member, and Vice Chair of the Progressive Caucus, I have had the privilege of working alongside many of you to build a stronger, more inclusive party. Today, I am reaching out to ask for your support in my candidacy for Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party.

Who I Am

For those I haven’t had the opportunity to meet personally, I’m Alexandra Nickolas-Dermody — a caregiver, election strategist and organizer, former non profit director, and working class Iowan. I’m a proud lifelong Iowan who has dedicated my life to empowering working-class folks, young voters, and marginalized communities. My work advocating for affordable housing, workers’ rights, LGBTQ+ equality, and reproductive freedom has prepared me to take on the challenges we face as a party.

Tim Winter recently resigned from the Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee after being elected three times to serve on that body. Last year he chaired the State Arrangements Committee, the SCC Small Dollar Donor Work Group, and ProIowa 24. He is the former chair of the Boone County Democrats. Born and raised in southwest Minnesota, he is a farm kid whose family was originally from heritage farm outside Boyden, Iowa. He earned a BS degree in Agricultural Business and Agronomy from Iowa State University. He has worked as an executive for several large agribusiness companies and now owns and operates a landscaping business and specialty crop farm. 

Editor’s note from Laura Belin: The State Central Committee will meet in Ankeny on January 4 to elect an Iowa Democratic Party chair for the next four years. Tim Winter emailed the following action plan members of the party’s governing body on December 31 and shared the text with Bleeding Heartland. As with Rita Hart’s plan, I have not edited the text in any way. All words in bold or underlined were that way in the original document. You can download Tim Winter’s plan as a pdf here.

UPDATE: Hart won the election by 38 votes to ten for Winter and one for Nickolas-Dermody. Kim Callahan was also nominated during the January 4 meeting but did not win any votes.

Happy New Year’s Eve to you and your family.  Today, I am announcing my candidacy for Iowa Democratic Party (IDP) Chair.  Along with this announcement, I have included my paper on What is happening in the Iowa Democratic Party.  

The proposals I have read from those who are interested in running and are running, all have one big thing in common.  Iowa Democrats are losing badly and the SCC must be reorganized.  They believe the SCC must be decreased in size.  Your power, involvement and representation are to be taken away and then centralize the power with staff.  They all state that we need a field organizing force, however, few ideas are given to help implement this or they drop the responsibilities on an overworked staffer.

My plan is different.  We don’t decrease the strength of the SCC.  We change the roles so members have more responsibility and potency, dramatically increase our volunteer force and rebuild our County Party Organizational System.  We concentrate on organizing activities in the field!

The Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee will meet in Ankeny on January 4 to elect a state chair for the next four years. Rita Hart, who has served in that role since early 2023, is seeking another term. She emailed the following action plan (“Forward: Victory 2026”) to State Central Committee members on December 23. The Iowa Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus shared the document on Facebook on December 30.

Bleeding Heartland has not edited the text in any way, other than to move two sentences from a footnote to square brackets alongside the relevant phrase (for formatting reasons). All words in bold or italics were that way in the original document. You can download Rita Hart’s plan as a pdf here.

UPDATE: Hart won the election by 38 votes to ten for Tim Winter and one for Alexandra Nickolas-Dermody. Kim Callahan was also nominated during the January 4 meeting but did not win any votes.

Dear SCC members, Leaders, and fellow Democrats,

The 2023-2024 election cycle for IDP combined two ideas that are hard to hold at the same time. First, I am proud of the work our team has done to rebuild IDP as an institution. When I was elected, IDP had laid off all but 2.5 staffers. We did not have full-time Finance, Communications, or Data staff. We were $100k in debt. Over the last two years, despite challenges including a hostile DNC, a complete turnover in staff, and a cancer diagnosis, we have stabilized IDP and built a team that can execute an off-year plan starting in January 2025.

However, it clearly was not enough and we have a great deal more work to do. Two years ago, I wrote to you: “…serving as IDP Chair has never been an ambition of mine, but I care deeply about the success of Iowa Democrats. As a teacher, a farmer, a state senator, LG and congressional candidate, I have seen time and time again how the policies our leaders implement affect every day Iowans. My focus is squarely on helping our party begin winning elections again.” It is cold comfort that Iowa swung to the right less than the rest of the country (6 points nationally vs. 5 in Iowa) or that Christina Bohannan had one of the strongest overperformances in the country. We need to win.

Henry Jay Karp is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanuel in Davenport, Iowa, which he served from 1985 to 2017. He is the co-founder and co-convener of One Human Family QCA, a social justice organization. This essay first appeared on his Substack column.

When folks like me call out what we see as a profound danger to our society, as it appears that our government is turning against entire segments of our community, stripping or reducing the rights of select groups of people who are our neighbors, there are those who claim we are alarmists sowing discontent; that we are modern day “Chicken Littles,” going around declaring that the sky is falling.

On December 27, the Quad City Times published its list of “top 10 Iowa stories of 2024.” One look at the list offers more than ample justification for the warnings I and so many others have offered about the current state of our state and the troubling prospects of what lies ahead for Iowa and the nation over the next four years. A whopping seven out of these ten top stories are matters of serious concern for Iowa’s social justice advocates.

A new nonprofit organization, Mid-Iowa Community News, will soon launch the Ames Voice, a digital newsroom “dedicated to being the primary source of news and information for the Ames area.” Douglas Burns, one of the organizers of the effort, announced in a December 30 post on The Iowa Mercury newsletter that Ames Voice has “been in the works for a year.” Its mission: “local, local, local coverage. Just the facts. Full coverage of life in Story County, home to Ames and Iowa State University.”

Ames is Iowa’s ninth-largest city, with more than 65,000 residents, and home to the Iowa Department of Transportation as well as Iowa’s second-largest state university. Story County is the ninth-largest of the 99 counties, with more than 98,000 residents.

Although the area has long had a newspaper, The Ames Tribune (part of the Gannett group) has eliminated most of its newsroom staff in recent years. The paper now publishes far more content from the Des Moines Register than original reporting.

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com   

Imagine a basketball team where players are paid a bonus per basket, rebound, or steal. Would the five players work together to win, or would the game be about individual statistics and earning the biggest paycheck? Now imagine only two of the five players can earn a bonus. How would the other three starters and the bench react? 

In November, Governor Kim Reynolds and the Iowa Department of Education announced an $8.5 million competitive grant program to recognize teachers who accelerate student learning beyond one year of learning. Districts would be able to provide $2,500 in supplemental pay to the top 10 percent. Total district awards will vary based on the number of teachers in the district, up to a maximum of $500,000.

Reynolds called this program a “Teachers Accelerating Learning grant.” It’s funded through federal dollars from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan.

No matter what she calls the concept, it’s still just merit pay.

Jack Hatch, Joe Enriquez Henry, Peggy Huppert, Anne Kinzel, and Ralph Rosenberg sent the message enclosed below to members of the Iowa Democratic Party’s State Central Committee on December 18.

Hatch is a business owner and builder of low income housing, a former state senator, and was the Iowa Democratic nominee for governor in 2014. Joe Enriquez Henry is a community and Latino activist, and chair of the Southside Democrats in Des Moines. Peggy Huppert has been a Democratic activist for 42 years and has served as Polk County co-chair and a nonprofit executive staffer. Anne Kinzel is a policy specialist, former lawyer, and Democratic activist. Ralph Rosenberg is a former state senator, lawyer, former director of the Youth Law Center, co-founder Iowa Environmental Council and former director of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission.

To Members of the IDP State Central Committee, 

We all know this was a bad year for Democrats. Elections are about winning; winners get to make policy and law. Iowa Democrats — leaders and rank and file alike — have failed in this truism.

For Iowans, the results have been devastating. For activists and everyone associated with our party, the result is demoralizing, with a loss of power and influence. If we believe that our Democratic Party values can improve the lives of Iowans now and for decades to come, we must question what our Party and our Legislative Caucuses are currently doing. We need to first make the necessary structural changes to allow Democrats to challenge the Republicans. Anything less will keep us where we are, politically irrelevant and failing Iowans.  

A years-long effort to expand the federal judiciary faltered this week when President Joe Biden vetoed the Judicial Understaffing Delays Getting Emergencies Solved Act of 2024. The JUDGES Act would have increased the federal district court bench by about 10 percent over the next twelve years, adding 63 new permanent federal judgeships in thirteen states, along with three temporary judgeships in Oklahoma. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa was slated to receive one of the first eleven positions to be created in 2025.

The veto leaves Iowa’s Northern District with two District Court judges (Chief Judge C.J. Williams and Judge Leonard T. Strand), along with Senior Judge Linda R. Reade and two magistrate judges. That number hasn’t changed since 1990, when the last major expansion of the federal bench allocated a third judgeship to Iowa’s Southern District. The 1990 law also assigned a judge who had previously divided his time between the state’s two districts to the Northern District on a permanent basis.

Biden may not have the last word on this subject, given the Republican Party’s commitment to putting more conservatives on the bench.

Central DeWitt School Board president Mike Zimmer announced on December 23 that he will seek the Democratic nomination in Iowa Senate district 35, where voters will choose a successor to Lieutenant Governor Chris Cournoyer on January 28. In a statement enclosed in full below, Zimmer promised to “champion Eastern Iowa’s public schools, working families, and our middle class” by fighting for “stronger public schools, better wages, and opportunities that foster real financial stability.”

According to a guide from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office, candidates have until 5:00 PM on January 14 to file nominating papers with the secretary of state. Before then, Democrats and Republicans will hold nominating conventions, where delegates from the 36 precincts across the Senate district will choose a nominee. Third-party or independent candidates need to collect at least 100 signatures from eligible voters residing in the district, and submit those petitions with their nominating papers.

While others could compete for the Democratic nomination at the special convention, Zimmer’s proven electoral track record would give him an advantage.

Chris Gloninger is a meteorologist and climate communicator with 18 years of broadcast experience, AMS dual certifications, and a master’s in Emergency Management, specializing in making complex climate topics accessible. He first published this essay on his newsletter, Weathering Climate Change.

As 2024 comes to a close, it’s clear something extraordinary—and unsettling—has been happening in Des Moines. With just five days to go, the city is tied for the second warmest year on record. Highs in the 40s and lows in the 20s ensured the year would cement its place in the top three warmest years since record keeping began in 1879. But this isn’t just a story of numbers; it’s a narrative about change—rapid, undeniable, and deeply concerning.

Weather records in Des Moines stretch back nearly 150 years, offering a rich tapestry of data that helps to understand long-term climate trends. In a stable climate, one might expect the warmest years to be evenly distributed across time—half occurring before 1951 and half after. But that’s not what’s happening. Of the top ten warmest years in Des Moines, seven have occurred since 1951. Even more telling, six of those years have happened since 2010. That’s not just a trend—it’s a flashing red warning light.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

“We recognize as a board and as a district that the lives of many of our students and their families will be impacted because of immigration policy,” said Des Moines Public Schools board member Maria Alonzo. “We felt making this statement was important.”

That quote comes from Samantha Hernandez’s story for the Des Moines Register on the Des Moines Public Schools’ new policy statement about the immigration concerns of students and their families. It appears to be an effort to resist President-elect Donald Trump’s plan (endorsed by Governor Kim Reynolds) to conduct mass deportations of undocumented migrant children and their families.

I commend the school district for releasing this statement, which recognizes the precariousness of students whose parents (or themselves) are here from another country and possibly lack documentation.

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.

In early 2021, Democrats in Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which among other things dramatically expanded and enhanced the original premium subsidy formula of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The changes brought the financial aid sliding income scale up to the level it should have been in the first place more than a decade earlier.

In addition to beefing up the subsidies along the entire 100 percent to 400 percent of Federal Poverty Level income scale, the ARPA also eliminated the much-maligned “Subsidy Cliff” at 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. Before 2021, a household earning even $1 more than that amount had all premium subsidies cut off immediately, requiring middle-class families to pay full price for individual market health insurance policies.

COMPARING THE ORIGINAL ACA SUBSIDIES WITH ENHANCED SUBSIDIES

Here’s what the original ACA premium subsidy formula looked like compared to the current, enhanced subsidy formula: