Iowa emerges as key battleground in race for the House

In their fight to flip the House, Democrats are eyeing gains in what may seem an unlikely spot: Iowa.

Two GOP seats in the Hawkeye State have emerged as true battlegrounds in the final stretch of the campaign, as some election forecasters have moved Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, and Zach Nunn, in the 3rd, into their most competitive race column less than a month before voters go to the polls.  

Both GOP incumbents appear to retain a slight edge in districts won by former President Trump in 2020. But the margins are thin, and the late moves by the independent handicappers — combined with recent polls indicating Vice President Harris has cut drastically into Trump’s lead across Iowa — have broadened the front lines of the razor-tight race for the House, lending Democrats new hopes that they can pick up seats in a state that’s trended red in recent cycles.

The factors driving the shift are as varied as the districts themselves, but Democratic campaign operatives say Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket, where she replaced President Biden in July, is driving much of the ground-game energy that’s boosted their chances of unseating Iowa’s most vulnerable House Republicans. And outside experts say there’s evidence to back the claims.

“Enthusiasm for Biden would not drive the turnout that I think Democrats need in the population centers in order to make the 1st and 3rd districts competitive,” said Rachel Paine Caufield, co-chair of the political science department at Drake University in Des Moines.

David Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election forecaster that moved both Nunn and Miller-Meeks into the “toss up” column this month, delivered a similar assessment. He said Harris’s place on the ballot has energized minority voters in midsize cities across the Midwest, including Des Moines, a Democratic hub in Iowa’s 3rd District, where Nunn is facing a tough challenge from Lanon Baccam, a son of Tai Dam refugees and a veteran of the Afghanistan War.

“The largest impact here is turnout,” Wasserman said. “She’s improved the Democrats’ standing almost everywhere relative to where Joe Biden was polling earlier in the year,” he added. “She’s performing surprisingly well in more white-collar Midwestern cities, like Des Moines [and] Omaha.”

Iowa’s 1st District doesn’t have quite the same dynamics. There, Miller-Meeks is facing a challenge from Democrat Christina Bohannan, a former state representative, in a rematch of their 2022 race. That region is more rural, without a population center the size of Des Moines. But this time around, Miller-Meeks faced a primary challenge from the right in a district that one GOP campaign strategist characterized as “more of a Trumpy, populist district than it is a traditional Republican district.” Wasserman said that’s made her more vulnerable with the base. 

“She had a very close call in the Republican primary earlier this year, and there’s still a lot of Republicans who are reluctant to support her,” he said. 

Campaign funding is another major factor driving the Democrats’ hopes of success in Iowa next month. In both the 1st and 3rd districts, the Democratic challengers have outraised the GOP incumbents, allowing them a longer window to air campaign ads, particularly in the case of Bohannan.

“From the beginning, Christina and Lanon have outraised their opponents every single time. And Christina actually surpassed Mariannette Miller-Meeks in cash on hand last quarter,” said a Democratic operative. “So [that’s] a huge advantage that she didn’t have last cycle. And she was able to go on TV this time around in August, and had the airwaves to herself for [roughly] three or four weeks before Miller-Meeks was able to get on.” 

“Fundraising has been a huge part of it.”

Republican strategists, for their part, have acknowledged the Democrats’ cash advantage, in Iowa and across the country. But they say a late ad blitz will be plenty to make up the difference in the final leg of the campaign, especially in districts like Iowa’s 1st, where voters coming out for Trump are unlikely to split the ticket and choose a House Democrat downballot. 

“[With] the Democrats’ money advantage they had the ability to spend in late July [and] all throughout August, whereas on our side, we’re either not spending at all or spending at a drastically reduced rate than they are. And so we just get pummeled all August into early September, and then once we go up with our ads, we have some catching up to do,” said a House Republican strategist.

“But eventually it all rebalances,” the strategist added, “[and] the longer we get into October, the better things look for us because our ads have time to penetrate and you see voters come back home.” 

“But it’s going to be close all the way because of how close it is at the presidential level.”

Indeed, Trump won both districts in 2020, but his margins were slight: He beat Biden by 2.9 percentage points in Iowa’s 1st, and only by 0.3 percentage points in the 3rd. Fueling the Democrats’ hopes, Trump was trouncing Biden by 18 points in the state in June, when Biden was still running for reelection, but Harris has slashed that lead down to 4 points, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll released last month.

“I don’t think there are any immediate changes that are happening on the ground. I do think the Register’s polling … gave Democrats some hopes that the organizing that they’re doing seems to be breaking through a little bit, and Harris seems to be sparking some enthusiasm among Democratic voters,” said Caufield of Drake University. “And so both districts contain a good number of suburban areas that may be — may be — shifting.”

Democrats are hoping to win over those suburban voters by focusing intently on the issue of abortion, which has been front and center in Iowa, where state-level Republicans last year passed a law banning most abortions after cardiac activity of the fetus is detected — typically around six weeks after conception, but before many women are aware they’re pregnant.

 A state judge initially blocked the law from taking hold, but Iowa’s Supreme Court ruled in June that, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 repeal of Roe v. Wade, women in Iowa have no constitutional right to an abortion. That paved the way for a district court judge to greenlight the state ban in July, less than four months before voters go to the polls. 

“This is something that’s been talked about for a long time, but now it is actually in effect and impacting voters and people are seeing the real effects every day,” said the Democratic operative. “It’s just become a really top-of-mind issue in this race.”