A week after the midterm election, which ensured the end of Iowa’s one-party government after 10 years come January, the shape of the new administration and legislature are taking shape.
The Republican leadership of the Iowa House and Senate will not change. The Republican caucuses in both chambers met on Friday and reelected their current leadership. In the House, Pat Grassley will remain speaker, Bobby Kaufmann will still be majority leader, and John Wills and Henry Stone will continue as speaker pro tem and majority whip, respectively. In the Senate, Amy Sinclair was reelected Senate president and Mike Klimash was elected to a second term as majority leader.
Republicans will control the Iowa House 56-44, and the Senate 32-18, in the 2027 legislative session, which starts on Jan. 11.
Grassley told reporters on Friday there’s no plan for a lame-duck special session to try to restrict the powers of the incoming governor, as Republicans did in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina when their party lost the governor’s office, and which they are currently trying to do in Ohio before Democrat Amy Acton is sworn in.
Grassley focused his comments on the coming session.
“If there’s issues that we believe are good for the state of Iowa, that can move the state forward, we’re willing to have conversations with Gov.-elect Sand,” he said. But he added that Republicans were “not going to be afraid to draw the line if there are things we think go too far or start to compromise our principles.”
According to Grassley, “We’ll be a backstop if needed, if there’s policies proposed that make us look like Minnesota or Illinois.”
Throughout the campaign, Zach Lahn warned that electing Rob Sand would turn Iowa into Minnesota or Illinois (or, less frequently, California), as did the Republican candidates in the primary and politicians supporting Lahn. Sand won the election by 11 percentage points.
On Friday’s Iowa Press, the governor-elect was asked if the size of his win over Lahn meant voters gave him a mandate.
“When you consider the swing from 2022, it’s hard to argue anything else, I think,” Sand said.
In 2022, Gov. Kim Reynolds defeated her Democratic challenger Deidre DeJear by 18 percentage points, meaning this year’s gubernatorial race saw of a swing of 29 percentage points.
Sand said he believes part of this mandate is “to do the stuff that we talked about in the campaign, and what I plan to do is what I talked about in the campaign,” which he described as “a lot of policy that is common sense that both parties can get behind. Returning to our history of being a state leader in good government reform.”
Sand’s answer at his first post-election news conference on Monday when asked the lesson of Tuesday’s election was similar.
“I think we’re all pulling the same lesson from Tuesday, which is that Iowans want us to work together and do common-sense stuff that is good for everybody in Iowa,” he told reporters at the Iowa State Capitol Building.
As for what changes he might make to the leadership of state agencies, Sand said he wants to have in-person meetings with department heads before making those decisions.
“You want to make sure you have public servants in these positions, and my assumption is going to be that I might have some alignment with some of these people until I know that I don’t,” he explained on Iowa Press. “And I can’t do that unless I have those doors open and I’m able to have those conversations with people.”
At Monday’s news conference, Sand said those meetings had not started yet, but “the sooner we can have those meetings, the better.”
There are two department heads he already plans to replace: Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulson and McKenzie Snow, the director of the Iowa Department of Education. Sand explained why he’s removing Snow during the Iowa Press appearance.
Last year, Snow approved “the state doubl[ing] the pay of the private company running the state’s voucher program, with no other amendments to that contract whatsoever. That process skipped the normal process of approval.”
Sand said Snow “just literally gave away millions of taxpayer dollars for nothing in return.”
“That, to me, is disqualifying.”
Sand was also asked during the program about the budget he plans to present to the legislature next year. He said he and his team are currently working on it, with the assistance of Randy Bauer, who was Gov. Tom Vilsack’s budget director. Any budget Sand proposes will have to take into account the massive budget deficits Iowa has been running in recent years. This year’s deficit was $1.3 billion.
“I’m pretty sure that I’ll have a proposal that’ll at least cut that in half,” Sand said.
“We should put a cap on income for qualifying for the state [school] vouchers program,” he said, when asked about his budget cutting measures. “We should treat cannabis the way that we treat alcohol. That’s year one, a smaller figure, maybe $54 million. But after that, hundreds of millions of dollars. We should have data centers paying all of their taxes.”
Sand also said he wants to make local governments adopt the Public Innovations and Efficiencies (PIE) program he established as State Auditor to reduce costs.
All those changes, as well as any budget proposal, will require approval by the Republican-controlled House and Senate. But on the campaign trail, Sand regularly spoke about a change he could make through executive action as governor: ending the privatization of Medicaid.
Asked at the Monday news conference if he still plans to reverse Medicaid privatization, Sand said, “it’s a process.”
“This is not a thing that we can do overnight,” he continued. “But my intention is that that process begins on day one.”
The news conference on Monday was brief, less than 15 minutes, and Sand’s prepared remarks were mostly about adding a registered Republican and a registered independent as advisors to his transition team.
As he was concluding those remarks, Sand reminded people that his transition team has set up a website, Iowa For All. The governor-elect said anyone interested in serving on a board or commission, or getting a job in his administration, should go to the site and fill out the appropriate form.
Sand said he hoped the site would attract a diverse range of people, because he wants his administration to have “the broadest stroke of Iowans that you can find.”
