Dems Break GOP Supermajority in Iowa Statehouse with 20-Point Swing in Trump District

Democrats have broken the GOP stranglehold over Iowa's statehouse with a resounding win in a special election for the state Senate on Tuesday.

In the Sioux City-area district that Donald Trump carried by more than 11 points in 2024 and which had been won by Republicans for 13 consecutive years, Democrat Catelin Drey is projected to have won a convincing 55% of the vote over her Republican opponent, Christopher Prosch.

By taking the vacant seat, Democrats not only added to the mounting evidence for a coming anti-Trump backlash in the midterms, but also ended the Republican supermajority in Iowa's state Senate, which has allowed the GOP to spend the past three years curtailing abortion rights, stripping civil rights protections from transgender people, and chipping away at public education.

Additionally, the Democrats have thrown up a barrier to Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who needs a supermajority to confirm appointments and will now require some measure of bipartisan approval.

Like other successful Democratic candidates, Drey's message focused on affordability, with a special emphasis on the cost of living for families. Her slogan was "Iowa's Senate needs more moms."

"She has highlighted issues of particular importance to young parents," wrote Laura Belin for the progressive Iowa politics site Bleeding Heartland. "Affordable housing, childcare, and healthcare, strong public schools, and bodily autonomy."

Drey seized on outrage toward Republican attempts to defund public schools. Teachers, she said in one ad, "shouldn't have to rely on GoFundMes just to do their jobs."

"One takeaway from the Iowa special election: don't listen to centrist Democrats on education," said Jennifer Berkshire, an education writer for The Nation and the New Republic. "Catelin Drey made defending and funding public schools a focal point of her campaign and called for rolling back Iowa's controversial school voucher program."

Drey's victory adds to the already mounting pile of evidence that backlash towards President Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have skidded to near-record lows in recent weeks, will manifest at the ballot box next November.

G. Elliott Morris, a political data journalist, wrote Wednesday in his Strength in Numbers newsletter that "there have been plenty of special elections" this year, with "all of them suggesting a pretty sizable leftward shift in the electoral environment since November 2024."

Citing data from The Downballot's special election tracker, Morris wrote:

On average in 2025, Democratic candidates in special elections are running about 16 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris’s margin versus Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. That is 5-6 points higher than the average Democratic overperformance in 2017.

These crushing results, Democratic strategists say, are the reason behind Republicans' frantic efforts to ratchet up gerrymandering in states like Texas, where they control the state legislature.

"If you're wondering why Republicans are gerrymandering the fuck out of red states," said Democratic fundraiser Mike Nellis, "Democrats just flipped a Trump [+11] Iowa Senate seat. That's what they're afraid of."

With Drey's victory, Iowa Democrats have now won four consecutive special elections held in the state, flipping two other Republican-held seats. Riding that wave of optimism, they now have their sights set on a greater target: Iowa's two-term senator Joni Ernst, who comes up for reelection in 2026.

Defeating Ernst would be a significant boost to Democrats' efforts to regain control of the Senate in 2026. That effort may have been helped along by Ernst herself, who responded to questions at a town hall earlier this year about her support for savage cuts to healthcare in the GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill Act by callously remarking, "Well, we are all going to die."

An internal poll published Tuesday showed Democratic state senator Zach Wahls, one of many Democrats vying for the party's nomination, edging Ernst out in a hypothetical general election. Other polls show the race to be within the margin of error.

In a video posted to X, Wahls said Tuesday's Democratic victory is further evidence that "the state is in play," after not having elected a Democratic senator since 2008.

"Iowans are sick of the inability of the current administration and politicians like Joni Ernst to deal with rising costs. They are sick of the corruption, and they are ready for change," Wahls said. "We are going to flip this US Senate seat, the exact same way that Catelin Drey flipped her state Senate seat."