Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We’re lucky to be talking about all of this with Rita Hart, the Democratic Party chairwoman in Iowa. Chair, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So Iowa radio host Steve Deace, who’s pretty thoroughly MAGA now, dropped this bombshell on X. He said this:
Chair, if Trump or GOP plus-15 districts are within the margin, and plus-10 districts are underwater, that means a double-digit swing toward Democrats, maybe a 15-point swing toward Democrats in Iowa. And this is a place Trump carried by 14 points. Do you think that’s where things are right now?
And things have only become even more in our direction, especially when we look at the fact that we’ve been under rule by the Republicans for ten years, and under the direction of Kim Reynolds, who is, you know, the most unpopular governor in the country, and has been for a while.
These are all things that have caused people to say, you know what, if I want things to change, which I desperately need them to change, then I’m going to have to vote for some Democrats and wake these Republicans up.
And then there’s Iowa’s Third, represented by Republican Zach Nunn, which Trump won by four points. Can you describe the demographic makeup of these districts? How rural are they? How working-class are they? What’s their makeup?
The Second District, we’re talking, again, a lot of rural counties, along with the city of Dubuque and Cedar Rapids, so there’s an urban-rural mix there. The largest city in the Third District, of course, is Des Moines, which is very urban, and so that is probably the most urban of the four districts, but it also includes some rural counties as well in that Third District.
He actually compared this to the COVID lockdown and the bank bailout in terms of unpopularity, and those things were not popular in Iowa, or anywhere else. And he said this: “Here in the cheap seats, it feels like another Middle East war quagmire, regular folks are paying for on both ends all over again.” Chair, what’s your reaction to that? Is that how you think voters are seeing it?
But the vast majority of people have never understood the rationale behind this war. They don’t understand exactly why we went into it. And it’s understandable why they don’t, because the story has changed too much.
They’re telling us that we can count on one or two dry days, and then it’s going to rain again. A wet harvest is really difficult, takes longer, it’s more discouraging, and it costs more. And so farmers are really under the gun, and that puts our entire economy in jeopardy. So there’s a lot of reasons why, again, people are not happy about the Iran war, they’re not happy about the tariffs and the costs that they’re going to bear.
Hart: Sure. So Christina Bohannan is a candidate who is smart, who has run great campaigns. This is her third time to run in this district. She knows this district well, and she is determined, as is evidenced by that, to represent the members of the First District in Congress.
Our Third District is Sarah Trone Garriott, also a very scrappy woman, who has won in Republican districts and has taken on some incumbents with a lot of clout and managed to win those districts.
Sargent: Well, we’re getting a lot of leaks from Republicans right now. Politico reports that Republicans may be giving up on the Georgia and North Carolina Senate races. I bring those up because they’re places with a lot of red rural areas in them, just like Iowa.
Can I ask, though—Iowa is sort of a different kind of place. It’s much redder than either Georgia or North Carolina. It’s one of Trump’s real success stories. He turned it into a much more red state.
Hart: I guess I would tell you, Greg, you never know. I’m—you have to understand that I am somebody who the polling was really high on before election day, and then we ended up losing that race by six votes. So I never take anything for granted. We don’t know what people are going to do until they enter that voting booth. But what I can tell—I’m going to push it back on you a little bit, Greg, on saying that Iowa is not as red as you might think, right?
And that’s what I’m counting on, is that the average voter in Iowa is going to recognize that the Democratic candidates are going to make a difference if they just give them a shot. Because that’s what they look for.
Sargent: Well, so it seems like, on paper, the ingredients are in place for Democrats to win some of these areas that Trump won, again, by ten points, one of the districts, 8.5, another one of the districts. The two main ingredients seem to me to be, number one, deep, deep dissatisfaction with Trump and a big collapse in support for Trump, including among rural voters, including among non-college whites—the MAGA coalition essentially breaking up. That’s ingredient number one.
Is that something you’re seeing kind of on a day-to-day basis? Are voters who normally just tune out Democrats—they think of Democrats as culturally alien—are those voters opening their ears to what Democrats are saying now?
Iowa Democrats are not the extreme folks that we sometimes see in the national news. So our strategy has been that we’ve got to get our ordinary Democrats, who have so much in common with any other Iowa voter, to get to the doors, to talk to folks, to let them know that there’s much more that we agree on than we disagree on, and that there’s been an overemphasis on the social issues.
So we’ve got an organizational plan that gets folks to the doors, that has these one-on-one conversations, so that we recognize, again, that it’s time for change. Things have not gone well here in Iowa because of the result of one-party rule for 10 years. Democrats understand they’re prioritizing the issues that are most important to the average Iowa voter. And that if we work together, we can start to turn this state around. So it’s time to vote for change.
I’ve not seen an opportunity like this open up in my lifetime for Democrats to regain ground in rural America. So are Democrats leaning into this enough right now? Beyond just winning these immediate races, is there the potential for something really significant to happen in terms of repairing some of those relationships?
And I would like people to take Donald Trump up on his challenge to say, vote like Donald Trump is on the top of the ticket right now. Because he has not made good decisions for Iowa. He has not made good decisions for the people. He has benefited from this personally, financially. His family has done that as well. This is a corrupt administration, and people are tired of being taken advantage of.
Sargent: Do you think that your candidates right now are ahead in all those three races?
Sargent: And is the money there? Donald Trump’s own super PAC, or at least its affiliates, are spending money—investing in, or reserving time in—at least two of these Iowa districts. Two of them, the ones that are Trump plus 8.5 and Trump plus 10, his super PAC is putting money into those districts. Are you getting outspent in these places?
I think it’s a good sign for us that they’ve been pouring these millions of dollars in, and yet the polls still keep us in the game. That’s a good sign for us. I think that people are smart—especially as they see these negative ads, and they see how many lies are in these negative ads, they are smart enough to reject that and say, what is really happening here? And give our candidates a chance.
Sargent: Are you going to have enough, or do you need financial reinforcements right now?
Sargent: Chairwoman Rita Hart, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck out there.
Hart: Thank you. Good luck to all of us.
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