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This could be Dems\u2019 best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa<\/p>\n
Sarah Trone Garriott might be Democrats\u2019 best chance to flip a House seat in Iowa this year. But to do that, she\u2019ll have to get past a barrage of culture war attacks from the GOP.<\/p>\n
This week, four Iowa races were among the ten total races that Inside Elections reclassified based on recent polling, shifting them toward Democrats. The nonpartisan group reclassified the governor\u2019s race between GOP businessman Zach Lahn and Democratic state auditor Rob Sand from \u201cToss-up\u201d to \u201cTilt Democratic,\u201d and switched the Senate race between GOP Representative Ashley Hinson and State Representative Josh Turek from \u201cLean Republican\u201d to \u201cTilt Republican.\u201d The 2nd congressional district moved from \u201cLikely Republican\u201d to \u201cLean Republican,\u201d and the 3rd congressional district, where Trone Garriott, a Lutheran pastor and member of the state Senate faces incumbent Representative Zach Nunn, is now considered a \u201cToss-up.\u201d<\/p>\n
These kinds of prospects for Democrats would have seemed unthinkable in the red state even a few years ago. And the excitement from polling alone\u2014the reinvigorating effect it might have on the state\u2019s Democrats\u2014could help down-ballot candidates like Trone Garriott, said Karen Kedrowski, a professor of political science at Iowa State University. \u201cIf the Democrats are showing up to vote because it\u2019s an exciting year and they think they can flip some steep seats, and the Republicans don\u2019t share that same enthusiasm, I think that she has a real shot.\u201d<\/p>\n
To win, Trone Garriott will have to take on both Nunn and a flood of attack ads against her. Nunn is endorsed by President Trump, but his advertising has instead been emphasizing his track record of bipartisan cooperation on the campaign trail, Kedrowski explained, which could help him appeal to the district\u2019s swingy voters. That strategy changed somewhat on Monday, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth joined Nunn at the Iowa State Fair, offering remarks wherein he justified the war in Iran and used an anti-trans slur.<\/p>\n
Republicans have been attacking Trone Garriott over her support for trans people during her time in the state senate. As a lawmaker, she voted against a bill to prohibit elementary and secondary schools from letting someone use a bathroom that corresponds with their gender identity (the bill ultimately passed), and voted against a bill that based school and college sports eligibility on sex assigned at birth (that bill was signed into law in 2022).<\/p>\n
Trone Garriott has also faced attacks claiming that she officiated a satanic wedding in 2006\u2014despite the fact that she wasn\u2019t an ordained minister at the time, and thus couldn\u2019t actually officiate weddings. The attacks stem from a story she told publicly in 2023 with the Des Moines Register Storytellers Project. In 2006, she was an intern pastor at a Lutheran church in West Virginia, when the pastor training her officiated a wedding between a couple that identified as Satanists, and it fell to her to read a passage\u2014she chose 1 Corinthians 13\u2014for the ceremony. \u201cI believe my calling as a minister is to share the word of God with everyone, even the most unlikely people,\u201d she said at the storytelling event. \u201cAnd I saw the power of scripture in that moment. And I do believe it made an impact on them. And it reminded me of my calling to love my neighbor, including the neighbor I don\u2019t agree with and I don\u2019t share the same values with, and I certainly did not have the same beliefs as these people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Trone Garriott\u2019s campaign has been mostly positive, she\u2019s found ways to hit Nunn. \u201cShe\u2019s calling for mandatory town meetings. And with the exception of [Senator] Chuck Grassley, nobody has been holding town meetings because defending the Republican agenda right now is really pretty difficult,\u201d Kedrowski said. In May, Trone Garriott held a town hall in each of the district\u2019s 21 counties.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, she\u2019s also criticized Nunn over his donations from Chinese-owned companies, arguing that he\u2019s not \u201ctough on China.\u201d Between 2022 and 2026, Nunn\u2019s campaign and leadership PAC accepted $18,750 from Syngenta Corporation and Smithfield Foods.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m hearing from voters across the district who are very concerned about rising costs and the corruption in Washington. Zach Nunn is a career politician who has been in office since 2014. Instead of making Iowa more affordable during his time in Congress, he\u2019s voted to increase costs for the rest of us. He\u2019s desperate to distract from the fact that he has taken thousands of dollars from Chinese companies, and then voted to allow China to buy Iowa farmland,\u201d she said in a statement to The New Republic.<\/p>\n
Nunn\u2019s campaign has been pushing back against her characterizations, citing legislation he\u2019s supported \u201cconfronting\u201d the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n
Electorally, Nunn has proved resilient, defeating a Democratic incumbent for the seat in 2022 and winning reelection in 2024. The district voted for Trump in all three of his elections. But Democrats are hopeful that Trone Garriott is the right person to unseat Nunn, and that 2026 is the right year. She won her elections to the state senate in 2020, ran in a new district in 2022 after redistricting, and won that seat again in 2024. In 2024, the district went for Trump, yet also reelected Trone Garriott.<\/p>\n
\u201cNationally, we\u2019re seeing a lot more enthusiasm on the part of Democratic voters in terms of turnout than Republican voters, and we\u2019re seeing that in Iowa too,\u201d Kedrowski said. \u201cI think Iowa has a longer history of being a swing state than it has of being a solidly Republican state.\u201d<\/p>\n
The backlash to data centers has been very bipartisan, but Democratic candidates have typically been more aggressive on the topic than Republicans. As Molly Beck notes in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin governor\u2019s race may prove an exception. Once upon a time, it looked like the Democratic nominee was going to be championing a full data center moratorium\u2014but that was because a lot of people expected the Democratic nominee to be Francesca Hong. Then moderate David Crowley pulled off an eleventh-hour upset of Hong in the primary. Now, in the general election, while both Crowley and Republican Tom Tiffany are eager to portray themselves as tough on big tech, Crowley appears to be less aggressive than Tiffany on perhaps the biggest issue under debate, which is the state\u2019s tax subsidies. Tiffany \u201cis calling to end tax incentives outright,\u201d Beck writes, \u201cwhile Crowley said he would make it harder to get them\u201d\u2014specifically by requiring, in Crowley\u2019s words, \u201c100 percent clean power, no secret deals, real money back to the community, and no increase on consumer rates.\u201d (Worth tossing into the conversation: Depending on how all this is measured, the benchmarks Crowley outlines may be tough for companies to meet, especially at the speed the industry is currently moving\u2014so the difference between his position and outright canceling the subsidies may prove to be somewhat theoretical.)<\/p>\n