Ann Selzer is stepping back from polling elections after conducting the Iowa Poll for the Des Moines Register for the last 27 years, she announced on November 17.

Top Iowa Republicans reacted by accusing Selzer of “skewing” her numbers or publishing “fake news polling”—all because her final Iowa Poll was way off the mark.

The attacks on Selzer—not from MAGA randos, but from the heart of the GOP establishment—reflect a broader Republican strategy to discredit mainstream media outlets like the Des Moines Register. They also validate unhinged behavior like President-elect Donald Trump’s call for Selzer to be criminally investigated.

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

Matthew P. Thornburg is an associate professor at Misericordia University who studies elections. His mother’s side of the family hails from Greene and O’Brien counties, and he maintains close ties to Iowa and its politics.

In precincts lying in the path of the Summit Pipeline, Randy Feenstra underperformed the rest of his district slightly. However, most voters there and elsewhere in the fourth Congressional district remained straight ticket Republicans. Much of Feenstra’s mild underperformance arose from voters in O’Brien County, home county of his Republican primary opponent Kevin Virgil.

Carbon dioxide pipelines remain the issue Iowa Republicans wish would go away. While most political issues in the state are subsumed into the greater red vs. blue polarization of the country—where Republicans in Iowa enjoy the advantage–CO₂  pipelines create an intraparty split between the Iowa GOP establishment and some in the party’s conservative wing.

Ground zero for that tension is Iowa’s fourth Congressional district, where CO₂ pipelines were a prominent issue in both the Republican primary and general election.

Second in a series interpreting the results of Iowa’s 2024 state and federal elections. This post has been updated with unofficial results as of November 8.

The successful Republican effort to knock Libertarians off the ballot in three U.S. House districts may have influenced the outcome in at least one of them.

All three affected Libertarian candidates—Nicholas Gluba in the first Congressional district, Marco Battaglia in the third, and Charles Aldrich in the fourth—indicated that they would continue to run as write-in candidates. Unofficial results show write-in votes for Iowa’s four U.S. House races this year totaled 3,616—about 0.23 percent of the 1,602,409 ballots cast for a Congressional candidate.

When Libertarian candidates have been on the ballot for recent Iowa Congressional elections, they have typically received 2-3 percent of the vote.

AN IMPORTANT FACTOR IN THE FIRST DISTRICT

In IA-01, unofficial results show Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks leads Democratic challenger Christina Bohannan by 796 votes (49.98 percent to 49.79 percent). Bohannan has not conceded, and the race has not been called. But it’s unlikely that enough provisional ballots remain to be counted for her to overtake Miller-Meeks. Iowa no longer counts absentee ballots that arrive after election day.

Kevin Virgil made waves in August when he urged supporters of his GOP primary campaign to vote for Democrat Ryan Melton in Iowa’s fourth Congressional district. But when the conservative Republican cast his own general election ballot, he wrote in his own name for Congress.

Virgil had called on voters to shock the Republican establishment by supporting Donald Trump for president and Melton in the IA-04 race. He explained in August that while he disagreed with the Democrat on many issues, “the only way that our so-called leadership is going to get the message is if ‘we the people’ demonstrate that we are no longer willing to tolerate bad candidates.” He stood by that position even as Iowa GOP leaders circled the wagons around U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra, the two-term incumbent who defeated Virgil in the primary.

But on October 24, Virgil announced in Facebook and X/Twitter posts, “I will be voting later today and will write my own name in on the congressional ballot.” He confirmed to Bleeding Heartland that he did so at the O’Brien County elections office.

Kevin Virgil, who gained nearly 40 percent of the vote in the Republican primary to represent Iowa’s fourth Congressional district, has encouraged his supporters to consider splitting their votes: Donald Trump for president and Democrat Ryan Melton for Congress.

Virgil shared one of Melton’s posts on X/Twitter on the evening of August 23, praising the Democrat for opposing “land seizure for CO2 pipelines” and “corporate capture in Iowa and in DC,” while asking “hard questions about Iowa’s sky-high cancer rates.”

“If you care about our children’s future,” Virgil wrote, “then it’s time to think about voting for a split-ticket with Trump and @melton4iowa.”

The president of the Congressional Leadership Fund (the main super-PAC aligned with U.S. House Republicans) congratulated U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks on her “resounding victory” in the June 4 primary to represent Iowa’s first district.

U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra hailed the “clear message” from fourth district voters, saying he was “humbled by the strong support for our campaign.”

They can spin, but they can’t hide.

Pulling 55 to 60 percent of the vote against an underfunded, first-time candidate is anything but a “resounding” or “strong” performance for a member of Congress.