The Democratic National Committee badly needed some good news and it got it on Tuesday night with a giant upset win in Iowa that cost the Republicans their supermajority in the state Senate. In a special election called because the Republican incumbent died in June, Democrat Catelin Drey won an estimated 55 percent of the vote against a GOP candidate who believe rape and incest victims should be compelled to carry resulting pregnancies to term.
Democrat Catelin Drey defeated her Republican opponent, Christopher Prosch, in a special election in the Sioux City area to fill the seat of a GOP lawmaker who died of cancer in June.
Trump won the 1st Senate district by 11 percentage points in November, so Drey’s margin of victory, currently about 10 points, represents a significant over-performance for Democrats in a state once seen as a top battleground, but which has trended Republican for the last decade.
The DNC made a major investment in the race which had about 24 percent turnout. This is now being used an excuse for defeat by Iowa Republicans.
Iowa Republican leaders downplayed the Democratic victory, with state GOP chairman Jeff Kaufmann saying: “National Democrats were so desperate for a win that they activated 30,000 volunteers and a flood of national money to win a state Senate special election by a few hundred votes.”
Polling is nice to get a sense of where things stand, but there is no substitute for actual elections to get a read on reality. I just read a headline that President Donald Trump has reached a new high in the polls, with AP-NORC poll finding him at 45 percent approval rating nationwide — “the best approval rating Trump has received from the AP-NORC poll in either his first or second term.”
That seems like an outlier, and it certainly was not substantiated by the results in Iowa. There seems to have been a rapid turn against Trump in the Hawkeye state since the November 2024 election. In January, the Iowa Democrats won a special election Senate race there in a district Trump had just carried by 21 points. In March, the GOP held onto a House seat by under 200 votes that they had won in November by almost 5,000.
Incumbent Republican U.S. Senator Joni Ernst is seeing the headwinds in recent polls. But, again, polls mean little compared to actual results. What’s happening in Iowa may not be fully transferrable to higher turnout elections like the 2026 midterms but the Democrats are currently demonstrating a much higher inclination to turn out to their polling places.
That’s going to be important to maintain because the Republicans are pulling out every stop to win the midterms before the voters get a chance to make their choices.
When a society is as far down the road to fascism as the US is today, one of the challenges for pro-democracy forces is maintaining some sense of balance.
It’s simultaneously true that every victory, no matter how small, matters *and* that no single victory matters much in the grand scheme of things. We eat the elephant the only way it can be eaten: one bite at a time.
The Iowa state senate win is a good bite.
A win is a win, and a true measure of voter sentiment is more valuable than any poll.
A win is a win, but this is expected now with the Dem coalition being the one that performs well in low turnout affairs. It does not extrapolate to the higher turnout elections, which is exactly why the specials of 24 had no correlation with the results of the general. Voter suppression actually helps Democrats now.
I am still optimistic about the midterms though, but only because of macro forces like tariffs and a likely AI bubble pop, and potentially loss of Fed board independence sending inflation soaring. There’s a long time for things to go South
Joni Ernst saw enough to not seek reelection.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/29/politics/joni-ernst-iowa-senate