Part of the tranche of good polling for Dems that dropped on Tuesday was a Marist poll of Iowa that suggested Democrats were well on their way to flipping the governorship, and were also poised to take back Tom Harkin’s old Senate seat after Joni Ernst’s two-term interregnum. Rob Sand was leading Zach Lahn in the governor’s race 54-42, while Josh Turek had opened up a 50-42 lead over Ashley Hinson. However, I was skeptical, since Marist polled registered voters. Last I checked, it’s long past time for pollsters to turn on the likely voter screen. Granted, Marist is among the best in the business, but until yesterday I thought polling registered voters at this stage bordered on malpractice.
But that was before BlazeMedia’s Steve Deace, one of the more notorious Iowa conservatives, made a breathtaking post on his channels suggesting that Iowa Republicans were staring down the barrel of a shellacking. He claimed that internal pollig suggests state house and senate districts that look safer than safe on paper are actually in the line of fire.
Suddenly, that Marist poll doesn’t look so outlandish. If someone like Deace, who morphed from never-Trumper to Trump supporter, and who platformed Christofascist pastor Doug Wilson, is warning that his home state’s Republicans are about to get clobbered, it’s a big deal.
It’s especially telling since I expected Deace to raise the specter of the final Iowa Poll of 2024, which famously showed Kamala Harris narrowly ahead 47-44 and leading in two of the state’s four congressional districts. Then Election Day came and–whump. Trump won the state 55-42, the biggest margin for a Republican in the state since 1972, and the biggest in decades that wasn’t a 400-electoral vote and 40-state national Republican landslide. Instead, Deace is breaking the glass.
Charlie Cook, founder of The Cook Political Report, wrote earlier this month that the most likely scenario for the GOP nationally in 2026 is somewhere between “bad, really bad, or truly horrible.” If this internal polling is accurate and R+15 state legislative seats are even potentially in jeopardy, then Iowa Republicans may be staring down the barrel of a “truly horrible” scenario where Rob Sand sweeps into the governorship with a decent, though not overwhelming, trifecta.
On the congressional side, it was already likely that Marianette Miller-Meeks in the Quad Cities’ IA-01 and Zach Nunn in Des Moines’ IA-03 were getting capsized. They’re listed as toss-ups by most pundits, but in this environment they would be among the first to go. But if these numbers are as bad as Deace says, Hinson’s Cedar Rapids-based seat in IA-02 is almost certain to flip as well. Going from a 4-0 shutout to a 3D-1R margin is the very definition of “truly horrible” for Repubs in the Hawkeye State in my book. Indeed, Cook’s successor at his namesake publication, Amy Walter, thinks that the strongest sign of a wave will be if Democrats can flip seats where Trump won by double digits, since it would be a rebuke of “unpopular policies that are felt most acutely in rural America.”
When I posted this on Threads, one commenter mentioned that Hinson and Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn have run almost exclusively on making life as hard for Iowa’s trans kids as possible. Yeah, that worked really well in Virginia, a state where the GOP base also has a strong social conservative tint. Winsome Sears tried the same tactic–and got her head handed to her by Abigail Spanberger. In contrast, Turek and Sand are pounding heavily on how farmers have gotten pinched by Trump’s tariffs. Running on the economy and affordability? What a concept.
We already knew there was going to be a wave. But from what Deace is saying, the way things are going said wave is about to crash ashore in Des Moines.