Perhaps no state in the country had Republican candidates do better in 2022 than Iowa. The GOP won up and down the ballot. For the first time since the Eisenhower administration, there wasn’t a single elected Democrat at the federal level. Iowa, which had once been the quintessential swing state, seemed on the verge of becoming safely Republican.
Two years later though, Iowa seems to be trending slightly more purple. It is one of a handful of states with two toss-up House seats in a shrinking congressional battlefield. Both competitive districts, out of Iowa’s four House seats, feature vulnerable Republican incumbents and spectacular sums of money being spent on the television airwaves.
The southeastern 1st Congressional District resembles the platonic ideal of the industrial Midwest. It includes much of what was the Democratic heartland of the state — a long strip of mid-sized industrial cities running up and down the shores of the Mississippi River. Voters there for generations backed pro-union Democrats. So did Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, which grew more liberal as the rest of the state trended rightward. In between, traditionally Republican rural voters are scattered in the district where former President Herbert Hoover was born 150 years ago.
The Republican incumbent, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA), first won election to Congress in 2020 by six votes. A state legislator who had lost three previous bids for the House of Representatives, Miller-Meeks finally won by an extremely close margin amid the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Miller-Meeks won reelection in 2022 against first-term state Rep. Christina Bohannon. This fall features a rematch in what’s turning out to be a tight race. The House Democratic campaign arm released an internal poll recently that showed Bohannon up by a narrow margin.
Bohannon, a University of Iowa law professor, has emphasized abortion rights on the campaign trail in a state where a six-week abortion ban recently took effect. She also benefits from Miller-Meeks’s shaky standing with the Republican base in a district where the MAGA wing of the GOP is strong. The congresswoman had a surprisingly weak performance in the Republican primary, winning only 56% against a poorly funded, much more conservative opponent who railed against Miller-Meeks for voting to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election and her support for same-sex marriage.
Compared to Miller-Meeks winning her first election by six votes, her counterpart in the southwestern 3rd Congressional District, Rep. Zach Nunn (R-IA), won his first election by a landslide. Nunn, a former Iowa state senator, beat Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne by about 2,000 votes out of nearly 311,000 cast in 2022. It proved to be one of the closest races in the midterm election cycle.
Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, though, is very different than its neighbor to the east. Centered on Des Moines and its suburbs, it is prosperous and features a dense concentration of the type of suburban voters who have abandoned the Republican Party in the era of former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee. The voters of well-to-do communities such as West Des Moines have as much in common with those who live in subdivisions in places such as Scottsdale, Arizona, or Cobb County, Georgia, as they do with those in the struggling factory towns such as Fort Madison and Keokuk in southeastern Iowa.
It is one of the few parts of the state where Democrats have managed to pick up state legislative seats as Iowa has moved to the right. It was President Joe Biden’s best Iowa district in 2020. He lost by only about 1,500 votes in a state that was not heavily contested in the presidential election — Trump beat Biden in Iowa about 54% to 45%, after easily prevailing over 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
Nunn, in his first reelection bid, faces Lanon Baccam, a military veteran and longtime Democratic staffer, in the district in what has always been expected to be a tight race. As one Washington operative noted, the seat has been “constructed for all eternity to be decided by 1 point.” It’s also one where abortion has been emphasized as both candidates try to compete to appeal to centrist suburban voters.
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As much as Republicans romped in Iowa in 2022, it may have been a political high-water mark for the GOP in the state. It’s not that Iowa is somehow secretly Democratic or has even returned to its swing-state status from the turn of the 21st century. Instead, it just may not be that Republican. Rob Sand, the Democratic state auditor who was the only Democratic elected official to win reelection in 2022, told the Washington Examiner, “I think the most underreported story about Iowa is just how purple it is has remained.” After all, he argued that his two fellow statewide Democratic incumbents who lost in 2022, still received 49% of the vote and that a significant chunk of Iowa voters are still willing to split their tickets.
Even if Democrats win one seat of the two, it won’t herald a massive political shift in the state but merely an incremental gain. But, with Democrats needing to net four seats to promote current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to speaker, an incremental gain in the Hawkeye State may be all that’s required to transform Washington next year.
Ben Jacobs is a reporter in Washington, D.C.