Do not be surprised if two of Iowa’s other three (currently Republican) districts flip to the Democrats in November.
So much attention has been paid over the summer to high-stakes Senate races in states like Texas and Maine that it’s easy to forget that the entire country will be voting during the November midterms for a whole slate of federal and statewide offices. And if primaries can be properly interpreted as omens of the November to come – and I believe they can – then a dark message is emerging from the quiet cornfields of Iowa, where the GOP faces the threat of being wiped out nearly wholesale in a state that voted solidly for Donald Trump in three straight presidential cycles. A Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, and all four congressional districts are up for election this year, and Democrats — long pushed to the side in a state that turned hard on the Obama/Clinton legacy in 2016 — look like they could win nearly all of them.
Far too many out there seem not to want to believe this. In my experience, Trump partisans believe that Iowa is now permanently “MAGA country,” and that ever since Ann Selzer embarrassed herself by predicting a competitive presidential race in 2024 there’s no need to even think too hard about how the state’s voters might be reacting to the economy in 2026. Trump himself has certainly governed that way — as if he can bank on the loyalty of an electorate that has clearly swung right over the last decade.
And now a potential disaster is brewing in the Hawkeye State. Here’s one way of putting just how dire the situation is: It is entirely possible that come November, every single member of Iowa’s four-man congressional delegation will be replaced. Randy Feenstra — from Iowa’s 4th congressional district — is already gone, because he stepped down from his seat to run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. He will be replaced in Congress by Republican Chris McGowan in this safe R+15 district.
But do not be surprised if two of Iowa’s other three (currently Republican) districts flip to the Democrats in November: at R+4 (both Iowa’s 1st and 2nd Districts) and R+2.5 (IA-3), they will be among the lowest-hanging fruit for Democrats to pick off in a national wave. In Ashley Hinson, the Republicans got their best possible candidate in the Senate race to replace the retiring Joni Ernst, but the Democrats also got theirs with Josh Turek. The open seat still leans Republican — Iowa really has shifted to the right overall — but is now on the map as a competitive race.
And the Iowa governor’s race is in an even more parlous condition. Iowa is in many ways ground zero for the deleterious effects Trump’s economic and foreign policy have had upon everyday American voters: Its agribusiness based economy has taken a beating under Trump’s wildly fluctuating tariff regime and ongoing trade wars, while the Iran war has raised the cost of unleaded gasoline by over 50 percent (from $2.59 to $3.90) and — in the land of threshers and combines — diesel by 42 percent. In light of this, outgoing Republican Kim Reynolds has been the most consistently unpopular governor in America for two full years now.
And last night a rather telling thing happened: Iowa Republicans rejected Donald Trump’s candidate for governor. Remember how I said Randy Feenstra had departed his House seat for the governor’s race? He did so with every reason to believe he had a golden ticket to the nomination, because he had Trump’s endorsement. Instead, he lost by less than a point to an upstart outsider named Zach Lahn, 37.2 to 38. Lahn ran a campaign based around “MAHA” (RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again”), focusing specifically on the theory that Big Ag was secretly giving cancer to Iowans through their use of industrial chemicals. (To give you a sense of how seriously he takes this — and how seriously you should take him — here he is sitting down with Tucker Carlson for an hour and a half to discuss the subject.) He is going to have a hard time running against State Auditor Rob Sand, who presents the sanest possible face for the Democrats and is running a campaign themed around “making Iowa truer and better, not bluer or redder.”
Outlets such as the New York Times have already seized upon the surprise rebuke to Trump by Iowa Republican primary voters, eager as they forever are to write a narrative about Trump “losing his hold” on the party. But I think they are misinterpreting the true meaning of these results. This is not a story about rebellion against Trump so much as it is frustration with whoever is perceived to be the “Establishment,” and Feenstra was the embodiment of that. (Recall that he got to D.C. by defenestrating the egregious Steve King in the 2020 primary.) The lack of unity on the Republican side in the GOP primary suggests to me a state party on the verge of pulling itself apart internally, and when parties do that — it’s more common than you think! — it is almost always in the face of anticipated disaster. When things are going great, nobody complains.