This essay is part of Beyond the battlegrounds, a special opinion series from MS NOW that digs into a number of lesser-known elections to watch, which will each nonetheless impact the national balance of power in important ways.
After being written off as a red state for a couple of election cycles, Iowa is back at the center of the battle for power in Washington.
Republicans have held all four U.S. House seats in the Hawkeye State since 2023. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd Districts, however, could flip on Nov. 3, meaning the path to a Democratic majority runs through Iowa. National forecasters have upgraded Democratic prospects in all three races since Labor Day. It’s no surprise, then, that despite relatively low advertising costs in Iowa’s media markets, those three campaigns rank among the top 30 congressional races for outside spending.
National political observers were slow to pick up on the close race brewing in the 2nd District, covering northeast Iowa.
In the 1st District, covering much of southeast Iowa, GOP incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks is in trouble. Her first victory, in 2020, was the closest U.S. House race in the entire country: a six-vote margin out of about 394,000 ballots cast. Two years ago, she won a third term by 799 votes — less than 0.2 percentage points — in a district Donald Trump carried by about 8.5 points.
Democratic groups immediately signaled Miller-Meeks would be a top target for 2026, and she is again facing Democrat Christina Bohannan, who nearly unseated her in 2024.
Bohannan has tied rising costs for working Iowans to Miller-Meeks’ votes to allow Trump’s tariffs and war in Iran to continue. The strategy seems to be working. After pouring millions into boosting Miller-Meeks’ campaign this year, some GOP-aligned super PACs recently cut their ads in the district, redeploying funds to other Iowa races. Independent candidate Michael Bridgford, running as a centrist in the Joe Manchin mold, may be pulling more support from Miller-Meeks than from Bohannan.
The best hope for Miller-Meeks lies in the district’s half-dozen smaller working-class cities, which have trended Republican during the Trump era. All year, the incumbent has emphasized her vote for no taxes on tips and overtime. This month, she has tried to take credit for a proposed $15 billion steel mill near the state’s southeast corner.
Bohannan, for her part, will get a boost from the strongest “get out the vote” effort that Iowa Democrats have seen since Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. She will need particularly high turnout in the deep-blue Iowa City metro area and the swingy Quad Cities along the Iowa-Illinois border.
While the 1st District was long expected to be competitive, national political observers were slow to pick up on the close race brewing in the 2nd District, covering northeast Iowa. The seat is open because three-term GOP incumbent Ashley Hinson is running for U.S. Senate. Since Hinson has typically outperformed the top of the ticket, many people mistakenly saw the seat as safely red.
The 3rd Congressional District, anchored in the Des Moines metro area, has been a battleground almost every election for the past two decades.
The trend lines still favor Republicans: Trump carried the district by about 10 points in the last presidential race. Several northeast Iowa counties saw swings of 40 points or more from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2024.
But Trump +10 is only slightly redder than Iowa’s 1st District. And this year’s GOP nominee Joe Mitchell lacks deep roots in the area, having just moved there before launching his campaign last September. In contrast, Hinson spent about a decade as a TV reporter and anchor in the Cedar Rapids market before running for the state legislature and later for Congress.
Mitchell is running on an unconventional platform, backing term limits and denouncing corporate PAC contributions and congressional stock trading. Unlike some Republicans in swing districts, he has embraced Trump. He even gave the president a “man of the century” award at a rally last week.
Democratic nominee Lindsay James is a state lawmaker from Dubuque, much like Abby Finkenauer, the Democrat who flipped northeast Iowa’s House seat in 2018. An ordained Presbyterian minister and chaplain, James has highlighted her faith values in her campaign messaging. James will need big margins in the largest counties, containing Cedar Rapids, Dubuque and Waterloo, to counteract the Republican edge in rural parts of the district.
And if the race is very close, two other candidates on the ballot — independent Dave Bushaw, who is running a progressive populist campaign, and libertarian Rick Stewart — could peel off enough voters to change the outcome.
The 3rd Congressional District, anchored in the Des Moines metro area, has been a battleground almost every election for the past two decades. The previous version of the district went from red to blue in 2018. Zach Nunn flipped it back to the GOP column four years ago.
I’ll be watching results closely in Wapello County, the 3rd district’s third-largest county. A Democratic stronghold for generations, the county has trended Republican over the past 15 years.
I have long felt this district was poised to flip again this year. It is the the least Republican-leaning of the state’s four districts, and Nunn does not have a track record of overperformance. He barely defeated incumbent Cindy Axne amid poor Democratic turnout in 2022. Two years later, voters re-elected Nunn by a 4-point margin, about the same as Trump’s advantage over Kamala Harris in the district. Every recent Iowa poll suggests the president’s approval is underwater statewide, which suggests he is deeply unpopular in the 3rd District.
Nunn needs strong turnout from voters on the right, who still back Trump, while not alienating constituents who have soured on the president. The result is an awkward balancing act. On one hand, Vice President JD Vance headlined a rally for Nunn in May, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared with him at an August fundraiser. But Nunn switched his vote on a war powers resolution in September and now emphasizes his bipartisan work in TV ads and public appearances.
Democratic challenger Sarah Trone Garriott is both an ordained Lutheran minister and a tenacious campaigner. She has won three state Senate races in suburban districts that voted for Trump. Her top issues include access to healthcare, taking on Washington corruption and showing up for voters. Trone Garriott often mentions that Nunn has not held a single public town hall during his four years in Congress, while she has held public events in all 21 counties.
About 75% of the votes in the 3rd District will come from Polk and Dallas counties, which cover Des Moines and most of its suburbs. Democrats are well-organized in both counties. Nunn needs to run up the score in the rest of the district. I’ll be watching results closely in Wapello County, the district’s third-largest county. A Democratic stronghold for generations, the county has trended Republican over the past 15 years. But the closure of an internal medicine in Ottumwa, attributed to Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, has been a major local news story that won’t help Nunn.
The competitiveness of these districts also offers a lesson for other states. Iowa has three districts in play, yet in many larger states, the districts are all but foregone conclusions. Even when Iowa hasn’t looked much like a swing state at the top of the ballot, we’ve always had some targeted U.S. House races.
Why? Because in the 1970s, Iowa adopted one of the best redistricting systems in the country. By state law, “No district shall be drawn for the purpose of favoring a political party, incumbent legislator or member of Congress, or other person or group, or for the purpose of augmenting or diluting the voting strength of a language or racial minority group.” The law has guardrails to prevent “cracking,” “packing” and other partisan games.
If every state drew political maps the Iowa way, dozens more House seats would be up for grabs. Millions more Americans would have a chance to determine which party controls Congress. For now, Iowans will continue to punch above their weight.
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