A gubernatorial race in deep-red Iowa, which President Donald Trump won by 13 points in 2024, is now considered a toss-up.
The designation for the governor’s race has been changed from “lean Republican” to toss-up by the Cook Political Report, making the Hawkeye State the latest to turn purple amid MAGA 2.0’s chaos and warmongering.
“The battle for Iowa’s governorship is officially a barnburner,” the report wrote on Thursday.
The report notes that the Democratic candidate, Rob Sand, has a cash advantage of $10 million over his likely opponent and is “among Democrats’ strongest recruits of the cycle.”
It adds that the 41-year-old’s “perch as state auditor has burnished his reputation as a foe of fraud in government, giving him bipartisan credibility and a broadly palatable anti-corruption platform.”
The report based its designation in part on “internal polls from sources in both parties.”
Iowa has not elected a Democrat governor since 2006, when Chet Culver won in an election that swung heavily blue during George W. Bush’s second term. Culver did not win re-election in 2010, and the state has been led by Republicans ever since.
Sand’s ascension to be competitive in Iowa is part of a national trend favoring Democrats, as independents are fleeing Trump and his party of sycophants. A CNN poll last month found that Trump is more unpopular with independent voters than any other president in recorded history, including Bush and Richard Nixon. His net approval with that group is an astounding -45.
Trump’s tanking popularity has already hurt his party in state and local elections.
Just last week, Democratic and liberal candidates either won or performed better than expected in elections across Wisconsin, Georgia, Missouri, and Oklahoma.
There have even been warning signs for Trump in his own backyard. In December, Eileen Higgins became the first Democrat to win a Miami mayoral race since 1997. This year, the city of Boca Raton, just 30 minutes south of Mar-a-Lago, elected its first Democratic mayor since 1993, and the Democrat Emily Gregory captured the Florida State House seat that includes Mar-a-Lago.
Silver Bulletin, a poll tracker run by statistician Nate Silver, gives Democrats a 5.5-point lead over Republicans in nationwide voter intention ahead of the midterms. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris writes that the number could reach nine points if current patterns hold.
Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket also project a blue wave this fall.
Both sites give Democrats an 87 percent chance of recapturing a majority in the House.
Polymarket gives Democrats a 53 percent chance of flipping the U.S. Senate to a Democratic majority, while Kalshi pegs the odds of that happening at 50-50. Last fall, before Trump spiked gas prices across the country with a deeply unpopular war with Iran, Democrats had just a 17 percent chance of flipping the Senate on both platforms.
Flipping the Senate will be a tall task for Democrats. Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats while Democrats hold 45, plus two independents who caucus with the party.
The Cook Political Report lists four Senate races as true toss-ups: Georgia, Maine, Michigan, and North Carolina. Only two of those seats are currently held by Republicans, meaning even a Democratic sweep of those seats would not be enough to deliver them a majority.
That means Democrats will have to flip seats the Cook Political Report considers “leaning” red, including in Alaska and Ohio, while not being upset in any of their own vulnerable states, like in New Hampshire.
