Voters cited war costs, healthcare and AI data centers
Democrats flipped Iowa’s governor’s office, a U.S. Senate seat and three of four congressional districts on Tuesday night, Rachel Leingang reported from Des Moines in The Guardian. At a Democratic watch party in Des Moines, the excitement neared a level of disbelief, she wrote. “To Iowa Democrats, we’ve had a hard few years here in Iowa, but balanced government has been restored,” Rob Sand, elected the state’s next governor, told supporters in his victory remarks.
The breadth of the Democratic result did not belong to one faction, Leingang argued. Moderates, progressives, populists and Democratic socialists all declared victory. She wrote that no single coalition could claim the result, while saying the most important thing Democrats had to be to win was, simply, not Republicans.
Leingang said the scale of the wins showed that factional divisions could not explain them. She wrote: “It wasn’t just the typical midterm backlash a sitting president’s party faces; it was a wholesale rebuke of the president’s Make America Great Again movement, the clearest sign yet that voters have had enough of Trumpism.” She also said the depth of the Democratic wins reflected Republican unpopularity that voters had been signaling all year.
Leingang also described several concerns voiced by voters. She wrote that they paid far more for gas because of a war they did not support, dropped their healthcare because they could not afford it after Congress allowed subsidies to expire, and watched data centers move into their towns, which she described as a physical manifestation of the disruption artificial intelligence could bring to their lives. Trump dismissed their concerns over these issues, claiming they essentially were not happening or represented a necessary step toward greater goals.
Leingang tied the gains to Trump’s policies, writing that he gave Democrats “the political gifts of a deeply unpopular war against Iran that led to rising prices, chaotic tariffs that devastated small businesses, farmers and international alliances, healthcare cuts, a deadly deportation scheme, self-enrichment, corruption, a never-ending debacle over a reflecting pool renovation.” She added that Trump’s popularity continued to slide as Democrats made gains up and down the ballot.
Leingang said that after a year of conversations with voters, she found deep discontent and anger on a level she had not seen before. She said the anger animated their votes and that voters of all political stripes were fed up, with their fury at the status quo above all else on their list of voting priorities. Progressive political consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio had predicted that the midterms would be decided by the “mad as hell, ain’t going to take it any more” vote, a kind of vote that often decides midterms. She said the result would not be a sudden embrace of Democrats but a “plague on both your houses,” and that the size of Democrats’ wave would depend on persuading angry and disillusioned voters to turn out. Given the blue tsunami, Leingang wrote, “it seems they were convinced their vote was worth it.”
Leingang wrote that most Democratic candidates showed up and listened, holding town halls throughout their districts and hearing the anger that punctuated politics. She described Democrats’ anger as vertical, directed at “the billionaires and elites who rule the US political system.” She said they blamed those figures for rising income inequality that left Americans feeling it was impossible to get ahead.
Voters also resisted Republican efforts to gerrymander seats favorable to the party, Leingang wrote, producing major defeats in seats Republicans should have easily carried by double digits.
Leingang said Trump repeatedly told voters to pretend he was on the ballot, believing that would rally his base and stave off huge Republican losses. She wrote that his presence was clear and backfired. In Rochester, New Hampshire, independent voter Rebecca Connors said she voted for Democrats to send Trump a message that “he’s wreaking havoc.”
After her victory, Minnesota Democratic US senator-elect Peggy Flanagan said: “All across the state and all across this country, people are saying, ‘Enough is enough,’” “You just beat Donald Trump. America did too.”
Leingang wrote, “Voters, the results showed, are done with Trump’s Republican party.” She said Trump’s coalition had all but driven out any remaining factions that publicly disagreed with him and that Republicans now needed to contend with what they would become after Trump. She asked whether the party could have run candidates committed to reining in the executive and holding Trump accountable, then wrote: “We don’t know. No one really tried.”
She also wrote: “The attempts at fearmongering – over trans people, or Arab Americans, or Hasan Piker – didn’t work.” Leingang wrote that “the fundamentals of Americans’ lives were worse” and “It was Republicans’ fault, voters decided.”
Leingang placed the Iowa results within a wider Democratic map. Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress, several governorships and multiple new state legislative trifectas. US senators from Kansas and South Carolina will join Democratic ranks; Democrats won more than one Texas race; and voters in rural districts that Democrats had previously written off showed they could be persuaded. Leingang said Democrats had competed deep in Republican strongholds that would not have made the map even six months earlier. In Texas, James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton in his Senate race; a photograph credited to Mike Segar/Reuters showed Talarico celebrating with supporters. In Maine, voters ousted a 30-year veteran of the US Senate despite a scandal-plagued Democratic candidate who was eventually replaced.
Leingang said the victories created avenues for Democrats to hold Trump accountable at all levels of government and to act as a functioning branch of government, which she said voters had said was missing in Trump 2.0. She said Democrats would also have to prove they could govern competently to sustain the momentum. Attention would soon turn to 2028, she wrote, while Democrats faced the task of using the power voters had entrusted to them to rebuild their party. Republicans, she wrote, faced even more soul-searching over what they would become after Trump.