This State Had Been Deep Red Under Donald Trump. 2026 Looks Quite Different.

Politics Is Iowa a Swing State Again? It used to be up for grabs in every election. By 2024, it was solidly Republican ground. But a few things have happened since then. Iowa PBS Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Democrats were once ready to write off Iowa. After decades of being the quintessential swing state, it seemed the rise of Donald Trump had shifted the Hawkeye State back to being safely Republican. By 2024, there was not a single Democrat in its entire congressional delegation, the GOP had supermajorities in both chambers of the state Legislature, and a state that Barack Obama won twice had been won three times in a row by Donald Trump. That’s not the case anymore. Democrats have made a remarkable comeback in Iowa in just two years. The state that Trump won by more than 13 points in 2024 has now become the central political battlefield in the midterms. Three of its four congressional seats are in play, and its races for governor and Senate are among the most closely contested in the country. For Josh Turek, the state’s Democratic Senate nominee, Iowa was never as right-wing as it appeared to be. “People will look at us and will say, ‘Well, you’re a state that Trump carries, you know, by 12 points, and he wins by three times.’ ” However, the two-term state representative and gold medal–winning Paralympian argued, “for 30 years we elected Sen. Tom Harkin”—a liberal Democrat—“right along with [conservative Republican Sen. Chuck] Grassley. We twice voted for Obama. We have more Obama–Trump counties than any other state in the union.” Turek added: “In Trump’s last midterm, we won three of the four congressional races, 3 points away from winning all four. And things are much, much worse here in Iowa than they were then.” “I think that without a doubt, the tariffs and the war in Iran has hurt Iowa more than any other state. Gas prices have gone up more in Iowa than nearly any other state, and you’re looking at diesel prices at an all-time high at a time when farmers are going in to do their harvesting,” he argued. Turek started the cycle as a long shot in a race where the GOP had anointed Rep. Ashley Hinson as the Senate candidate to replace two-term Republican Joni Ernst. Hinson is considered a strong candidate who had previously defeated an incumbent to win election to Congress in 2020, and she has long been considered the future of the Iowa GOP. A telegenic former newscaster, Hinson came out of a Republican establishment that had dominated state politics for the better part of the last 40 years. It was one that even survived the first Trump era in good health: In 2016, during the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, Chamber of Commerce party regulars backed Donald Trump in an effort to stop Ted Cruz, who was not only backed by insurgent social conservatives but also, heretically, opposed ethanol in the agricultural state. The result was that Iowa never experienced a full Trumpist purge like some other states, as it was a state where the establishment—not the hard right—passed the MAGA loyalty test. Hinson, who wasn’t made available to Slate, is running a solid, safe campaign. The three-term congressperson, who beat an incumbent in 2020 and has shrugged off challenges since then, is painting Turek as liberal and herself as bipartisan. Her campaign’s ads feature her young sons in a food fight symbolizing Washington dysfunction and a lifelong Democrat talking straight to the camera saying he supports Hinson. Outside groups have done the work of saying Turek supports illegal immigrants. The race is a toss-up with public polling showing both candidates neck and neck. The most recent poll from Insider Advantage shows Hinson with the narrowest of leads. But even if Hinson pulls it out, Republicans are not likely to maintain their current dominance in Iowa. In the governor’s race, state auditor Rob Sand is favored to win against outsider Zach Lahn. Though the polls are tight, Sand, a two-term statewide incumbent, has a clear lead in a campaign where he long established a moderate image and emphasized his disdain for politics as usual. One Republican operative said that in a year when “people angry at the status quo and want change agents,” Sand had done an excellent job positioning himself to appeal to swing voters. The House races don’t look great for Republicans either. Republicans are already privately writing off the marginal House seat in Southeast Iowa held by three-term incumbent Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who only won by 799 votes in 2024. They’re also increasingly pessimistic about the Des Moines–based seat held by two-term incumbent Zach Nunn. The closest congressional race in the state is for the seat Hinson is vacating in Northeast Iowa. Speaking to Slate, Joe Mitchell, the Republican nominee, felt sanguine about his chances and argued that Trump was not a political obstacle for him: “If they really thought Donald Trump was going to sink me, they would put him in all the ads, and they don’t put him in any of the ads because they know he’s popular.” Mitchell hasn’t shown any inclination to distance himself from Trump either. When the president came to Sioux City, Iowa, last week, on the other side of the state from Mitchell’s district, the Republican candidate appeared and presented him with a handmade “Man of the Century” award to compensate for repeated snubs by the Nobel Committee. However, the Iowa Republican was more cautious discussing the war with Iran and the rise of gas prices. While he noted his opposition to both “endless wars” and Iran having a nuclear weapon, the Republican hopeful tried to paint high gas prices as the result of factors other than the conflict in the Middle East, with culprits ranging from Ukraine to Joe Biden. In his view, “there is a wide variety of opinions on the Iran war and cost of living, but they also understand it was far worse under Joe Biden and Democratic control less than two years ago.” That’s a minority opinion though, as polling shows most voters tend to blame the current administration for the present economic woes rather than his predecessor or an Eastern European country that was invaded by its much larger neighbor. Republicans acknowledge privately that the national environment has been a drag. The GOP operative even argued that without the Iran war and the resulting rise in gas prices, Hinson would be ahead beyond the margin of error in the Hawkeye State. Overall, as George Pickup, a Democratic state House candidate in a rural district near the Mississippi River, said, there was a different vibe in his district as he went door-to-door: “There’s a little bit of different thought going right now than it was in 2024. … Trump’s not getting the supporters, and people are backing away from him.” In contrast, Mitchell argued the national environment would actually help him. In his view, independents in his district saw figures like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani rising on the left as “too radical and openly embracing socialism.” The Republican thought that this distaste for the left was motivating voters to support him. The typical voter’s view, he said, is that “even if I don’t agree with Republicans 100 percent of the time and think they have people that I strongly disagree with, at least they’re not openly embracing” socialism. Mitchell cautioned that Iowa voters view state races differently and are able to compartmentalize the vote for governor from their vote for federal office, a sentiment that operatives in both parties shared as they looked at polls where Sand ran notably ahead of Turek in the state. Still, as even Nate Willems, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, acknowledged, Iowa is still a Republican-leaning state. But he said it’s neither red nor purple but “maroon”—a bit of color-wheel analysis that put the state more red than purple but short of full-on red. But Willems thought voters in Iowa were not just frustrated with Trump in Washington but with Republicans who had dominated state government for over a decade and were looking for a check. “We’re not talking about a Democratic takeover of the state government. We’re talking about just having balance, just trying to bring Iowa back to a state where both parties have to work together to come and find agreement.” Democrats Donald Trump Elections Republicans Iowa 2026 Midterms