- As the 2024 presidential election approaches, Iowa Democrats find themselves at a crossroads.
- Iowa Democrats have watched Republicans dominate in a slate of competitive contests in recent years.
When Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, Democrats lavished attention on Iowa, the Midwestern battleground that for years had swung back and forth between the parties on the presidential level.
It certainly helped that Obama at the time represented neighboring Illinois in the Senate, giving him the sort of regional inroads that previous Democratic presidential candidates weren't able to use to their advantage.
Obama easily won Iowa in both 2008 and 2012, a period when Democrats held several statewide offices and veteran Democrat lawmaker Tom Harkin held the state's Senate seat.
But Harkin retired after the 2014 midterms, and Republican Sen. Joni Ernst has since held the seat. In the 2016 general election, Donald Trump easily defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Iowa, and Trump once again won the state against now-President Joe Biden in 2020.
In 2022, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds won her reelection bid in a landslide and her coattails helped give the GOP a near-sweep of statewide offices. (The lone statewide Democratic officeholder is Auditor Rob Sand.)
Should Trump win the Iowa caucuses and become the Republican presidential nominee next year, he'd be the current favorite to once again win the state's six electoral votes in the general election.
How did things go so wrong for Iowa Democrats?
For one, rural voters over the past decade have moved decidedly toward the Republican Party, making it difficult for Democrats to win statewide races in Iowa. This rural realignment has also decimated Democratic competitiveness in states like Arkansas, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
Secondly, Democratic strength in cities including Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, and Davenport isn't robust enough to overcome the sizable GOP vote margins in rural areas.
And thirdly, national Democrats removing Iowa as the first-in-the-nation caucus for their party in favor of South Carolina — compared to the GOP keeping the Iowa caucus in first place — has made the Hawkeye State fade as one of the party's targeted states for the 2024 general election.
As Republican candidates begin to swarm the famed Iowa State Fair this weekend, Democratic enthusiasm in the state has cratered, a serious problem that the party knows that it must address if it wants to reverse recent statewide losses and win back seats in the state legislature.
State Sen. Claire Celsi, a Democratic lawmaker representing West Des Moines, described the state of the party in bleak terms in a recent interview with The New York Times.
"It is so bad," she told the newspaper. "I can't even describe to you how bad it is."
Celsi pointed to the Democratic minority's inability to curtail the conservative agenda of the GOP legislature and the diminished importance of Iowa in the Democratic presidential nominating process.
As Republicans have moved to enact tougher abortion restrictions in the state, while also implementing a school voucher program whose costs will be borne by taxpayers and loosening child labor laws, Democrats have been largely powerless to stop these developments.
Former Rep. Dave Loebsack, who represented a competitive eastern Iowa district from 2007 to 2021, told The Times that it was tough to find candidates to run for office given the party's deficit in the legislature and the GOP's current hold on every congressional seat in the state.
"There's no question that Democrats are at a low point in Iowa," he told The Times. "It's difficult even to recruit people to run when we're so far down."
In 2020, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks won Loebsack's seat, defeating former Democratic state Sen. Rita Hart by just six votes out of nearly 400,000 ballots cast in what was one of the closest House races in US history.
Hart is now the chair of the Iowa Democratic Party.
As she looks to upcoming races, Hart wants to reorient the party's focus from presidential politics to local concerns.
"The way the media has changed, the way people have gotten their information, we have not shifted to understanding that we've got to talk to our fellow Iowans," she told The Times. "I'm very convinced that we've got to empower our county parties to do just that."