After the votes were counted in this week’s election, it became clear that voter turnout wasn’t just bigger than it was in Iowa’s last midterm election. The percentage of registered voters was higher than it’s been for any midterm in the last 36 years.
Over 1,380,528 Iowans, 63.3 percent of registered voters, cast ballots in the election, according to the preliminary total on the Iowa Secretary of State’s site.
“I think that speaks well for Iowans trusting our voting system and believing in the integrity of our process and getting out there to make sure that their voice gets heard,” Secretary of State Paul Pate said at a news conference on Wednesday.
That massive voter turnout resulted in the first Democrat elected governor since 2010, the first Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate since 2014, three of four Democrats running in Iowa’s congressional districts winning, a Democrat elected State Auditor — the only statewide office Democrats held after the 2022 election — and a Democrat defeating the incumbent attorney general, as well as Democrats flipping a dozen seats in the Iowa Legislature. But Sec. Pate, a Republican, said it would be wrong to think of Iowa as part of the blue wave that swept across the nation in Tuesday’s election.
“I don’t think it was a Democrat wave or a Republican wave,” the secretary said. “This was a wave based on the candidates and their messaging. So we’ll watch and see how it unfolds over the next two years.”
When considering if Iowa experienced a blue wave, it’s worth noting Democrat Eric Armstrong won election to the Iowa House in traditionally Republican Pottawattamie County. That result drew national headlines, since Armstrong had dropped out of the race.
In early September, Armstrong suspended his campaign for the District 20 seat Josh Turek gave up to run for U.S. Senate. Armstrong ended his campaign for health reasons two months out from the election, but by that time the ballots had already been set. He still won 55 percent of the vote on Tuesday. In a statement Thursday afternoon, Armstrong said he was proud of the result and would accept the office.
“The voters of District 20 sent a clear message about the direction they want for Iowa, and I will make sure that message is carried to the Capitol in January … Thank you to every voter who placed their confidence in this campaign. I will continue to do my best and be open and upfront about what comes next.”
Pate was elected to a fourth consecutive term as secretary of state on Tuesday with a smaller percentage of the vote than Armstrong received. (Pate was also elected to the office in 1994, but did not run for reelection four years later.) He was one of three Republicans in statewide office reelected on Tuesday.
Secretary of State
Pate defeated Democrat Ryan Peterman, a Navy veteran and first-time candidate. In March, Pate turned over Iowa’s voter registration data to the Department of Justice, including personally identifiable information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The DOJ was seeking the data as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to force states to cut people from their voter rolls ahead of the midterm election. Only 23 states, all led by Republicans, gave the DOJ what it wanted.
In July, Pate issued a statement that said handing over the data “was not a decision we made lightly,” and “we are confident they [the DOJ] can protect this data accordingly.” Pate issued that statement after Peterman made Pate’s obedience to the Trump administration a central part of his campaign.
“As I travel all across Iowa on the campaign trail, the most common issue Iowans have raised for the past three months is their concern about their sensitive information being handed over to a partisan Department of Justice in the federal government,” Peterman said during a July 22 news conference on the steps of the Capitol Building in Des Moines. “I’ve heard from Iowans who are furious at our Secretary of State for doing this, who are worried about how their information will be used, and they’re right.”
As Peterman pointed out at the news, the DOJ had sued 16 states for failing to comply and lost every case.
Pate was reelected with 53.2 percent of the vote. Peterman got 46.8 percent.
The secretary of state’s office is one that doesn’t get much public attention, and neither do the other two statewide offices whose incumbents were reelected on Tuesday, Treasurer and Secretary of Agriculture. The highest profile state officer running for reelection was Attorney General Brenna Bird. She lost.
Attorney General
Brenna Bird has been no stranger to Iowa television viewers over the past four years. The AG frequently holds news conferences, and has courted headlines by being a reliable participant in various high-profile lawsuits brought by the Trump administration or rightwing organizations, even though the lawsuits often had nothing to do with Iowa. She used her position as attorney general to threaten companies and law firms not located in the state over their DEI policies. She used her office’s prestige and credibility to support Donald Trump when he was on trial for 34 felonies. Bird flew to New York to appear on Trump’s at a news conference outside the courthouse where he was on trial.
When he was convicted on all 34 counts, she denounced the trial and its result. For his part, Trump not only endorsed Bird for reelection, but had her as a special guest at his pre-election rallies in Sioux City and Dubuque.
Nate Willems, who had served two terms in the Iowa House starting in 2009, is an attorney specializing in labor law and representing workers and unions. He criticized Bird for spending too much time on Republican priorities outside Iowa, instead for focusing on protecting the interests of Iowans.
“Brenna Bird has made a mess of the attorney general’s office, and Iowa families are paying the price,” Nate Willems, said in campaign ad called “Birdsh*t” [sic]. “Corporate polluters who poison our air and water need to be held accountable, not given a free pass or a sweetheart deal … Iowans know a mess when they see one and they’re ready for an attorney general who’s willing to clean it up.”
Willems started his campaign in May 2025 with little statewide name recognition. But by February, two polls showed him within just a few points of Bird. Those polls may have reflected public dissatisfaction with the much better known Bird, as the AG’s fundraising record in this election also suggests.
Very little of Bird’s campaign money was donated by individual Iowans. The vast majority of it came from one Washington D.C.-based Super PAC, RAGA Action Fund. It’s the political arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), an organization Bird serves on the executive board of. Between Jan. 1 and July 15, RAGA Action contributed $5,025,000 of the $6,888,052 Bird raised during that period. In August, RAGA announced it had started the biggest campaign spending in its 27 year history, targeting 13 states. Iowa was one of them.
Willems beat Bird by almost 24,000 votes.
Auditor
Republicans had hoped to win the Auditor’s Office this year after two straight losses, because incumbent Rob Sand was running for office. Those hopes were dashed when Democrat Taylor Wettach beat Lt. Gov. Chris Cournoyer, winning 50.2 percent to 49.7 percent.
Wettach, who grew up in Muscatine, is an attorney who specialized in national security law. He had a job at a prestigious Washington D.C. law firm, but quit last year after it became one of firms to offer millions in free legal services to the Trump administration. After moving back to Iowa, Wettach launched a campaign for Congress in Iowa’s 1st District, before changing to the Auditor’s race in January.
Wettach, like Sand, comes to the office with a legal background, rather than an accounting background. For Sand, being a lawyer allowed him to bring a new perspective to an office already staffed by accountants. But when Sand was first running for auditor in 2018, Iowa Republican leaders said Sand wasn’t qualified because he wasn’t a CPA. It was even suggested it wouldn’t be legal for Sand to serve as auditor, even though nothing in state law required the auditor to be a CPA.
That concern, however, only seemed to apply to Sand. The 2022 Republican candidate for auditor was Todd Halbur, who owned a school supply distribution company and was a licensed realtor.
This year’s Republican candidate, Chris Cournoyer, isn’t a CPA, or an type of accountant, either.
Cournoyer was born in Texas and earned a degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. In Iowa, she started her own business as an independent website designer and developer. She’s also worked as a substitute teacher and a reserve sheriff’s deputy in Scott County. She was in her second term in the Iowa Senate when Gov. Reynolds appointed her lieutenant governor in December 2024, after Adam Gregg suddenly resigned to take a lucrative job as president and CEO of the Iowa Bankers Association and, he said, to spend more time with his family.
Cournoyer won the Republican primary in June, defeating Abigail Maas, a member of the Iowa County Board of Supervisors, who owns a flooring company and a horse boarding stable. Maas’ campaign slogan was “Make Accounting Great Again.” She is not a CPA.
Treasurer
Incumbent Roby Smith defeated Democrat John Norwood, 50.3 percent to 49.6 percent. Norwood, a business consultant from West Des Moines, ran on a platform of protecting IPERS, the state’s retirement system for public employees.
Last year, a task force appointed by Gov. Reynolds that she said was inspired by Elon Musk’s DOGE recommended preventing new state hires from enrolling in the IPERS system current employees and retirees rely on, and giving them a 401(k)-style plan instead.
Neither Smith nor Reynolds acted on the recommendation to change IPERS, which is widely popular and considered well managed.
Norwood was the Democratic candidate for Secretary of Agriculture in 2022. He lost to incumbent Republican Mike Naig, who won with 59.4 percent. This year’s race for Ag Secretary was much closer, and even though the Democrat lost, he was still one of the most influential candidates this year.
Secretary of Agriculture
“Change can happen,” Chris Jones told his supporters at a watch party at Iowa Taproom in Des Moines on Tuesday night. He had just conceded.
“We should not be despondent or despairing,” he continued. “Change can happen. I did my best to make it happen.”
Jones spent his career as a research scientist focused on water quality. His writings published on the internet and in his 2023 book, The Swine Republic, have made him one of the leading voices on Iowa’s water quality crisis. He ties the crisis directly to the state’s dominant agricultural system, with its focus on maximum production of just two crops, corn and soybeans, as well as its industrial-style CAFOs, filled with animals and their astounding amounts of shit.
Jones was running on a 28-point plan to fundamentally change Iowa’s approach to agriculture and address the water crisis. Mike Naig, the former head of lobbying in Iowa for Monsanto, was running a platform of doing more of the same things he’s done during his eight and a half years in office.
Jones had been encouraged to run for ag secretary in 2022 by admirers of his work, but declined to do so. He said during his speech on Tuesday night that this time, former state representative Chuck Isenhart made a particular persuasive argument.
Isenhart told Jones, “The Democratic Party will never embrace this stuff, until somebody runs on it and actually wins.”
“So I thought, OK, let’s do that experiment,” Jones recalled.
“It turns out he was wrong, because every candidate in the state was running on this by the time the election came around,” Jones continued. “We didn’t even wait to see if someone could win on it or not.”
“I take some satisfaction in that.”
Jones has said he considered himself “a sacrificial lamb” when he formally launched his campaign in January. But by this fall, he’d seen it gain momentum, even as big agribusiness was pouring money into Naig’s reelection bid.
In the end, Naig won with 52.6 percent of the vote, compared to Jones’ 47.2 percent. Still, Jones got almost 22,000 more votes in the midterm than Zach Lahn, the Republican candidate for governor, did.
In his speech, Jones told his supporters about a training session he attended when he was a laboratory supervisor at the Des Moines Water Works. The person leading the session showed the supervisor a video of a crowded beach. One man on the beach suddenly stood up and started doing a ridiculous dance. People stared at him like he was out of mind. He stopped.
But then a second person got up and did the same dance. Soon people all over the beach were joining in. The trainer asked the attendees who the leader that got people to dance was.
“Almost everyone says it’s the first person,” Jones said. “It’s not. It’s the second person.”
“I’m the first person. I’m the crazy guy who started doing the dance. So, we can only hope that maybe some of these people we see on the screen tonight are going to be the second people that can take it up, and take the ball over the goal line.”
“So that’s the hope we have to have.”
In his victory speech on Tuesday night, Sen.-elect Josh Turek said he was committed to attacking the state’s cancer crisis and, “I’m going to fight to address the root cause of that cancer crisis, which is our water quality crisis.”
Throughout his campaign, Rob Sand also talked about improving water quality and making some changes to ag in Iowa. But the changes Sand talked about were ones Jones would consider incremental.
Big complex systems like Iowa’s dominant corn/soybean/CAFOs and ethanol model are changed through incremental action, Jones told his supporters. Change comes when the people profiting from those systems realize circumstances are changing in a way that won’t allow them the profits they want from the old ways because fundamental things around the system have changed.
“And when that happens, then these systems tend to change very rapidly,” he said.
He cited work by historians like Heather Cox Richardson and Howard Zinn to buttress his point.
“But I really fear that these corporate agribusinesses are so commingled with our government, with both parties, that this is going to be a heavy, heavy lift,” Jones said. “The only way this will change is through grassroots demands.”
“We’re going to have to demand change at the grassroots level. That’s going to have to continue for years, if not decades, for this to happen.”
