Christina Bohannan announced on Tuesday that she is running for Congress in Iowa’s 1st District. This will be the third time the Iowa City Democrat has run for the House seat currently held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. In 2022, Miller-Meeks beat Bohannan by approximately 6 percentage points. In their rematch last year, Miller-Meeks won by just 0.2 percentage points..
“Mariannette Miller-Meeks has had three terms in Congress — three chances to do right by the people of Iowa,” Bohannan said in a news release announcing her new run. “Instead, she has taken over $4 million from corporate special interests and done nothing but vote their way. And she has put partisan politics over Iowans again and again. From cutting Medicaid, to siding with DOGE’s devastating cuts to Social Security, to enabling unelected, unaccountable billionaires like Elon Musk — Miller-Meeks has forgotten about us.”
In the news release, Bohannan criticizes Miller-Meeks for supporting the budget reconciliation bill, which passed the House by one vote, her support for President Trump’s tariffs and for being a member of the House DOGE Caucus.
Bohannan joins two other Democrats already in the IA-01 race: Bob Krause, who served in the Iowa House in the 1970s, and Travis Terrrell, a first-time candidate who says he is running a “100% grassroots campaign.”
Bohannan, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, grew up in a working class family in a small Florida town. When she was in high school, her father, a construction worker, fell ill, losing his job and his health insurance. The financial burden that created for the family was a formative experience for Bohannan. As a candidate, she has always campaigned on creating quality, affordable healthcare and protecting social safety net programs. Bohannan has also been a strong supporter of reproductive rights and restoring access to abortion care.
Her first run for elected office was in 2020, defeating an incumbent Democrat who had represented Iowa City in the Iowa House for 20 years in that year’s primary. After serving for one term, Bohannan decided to run for the U.S. House instead of seeking reelection to her Iowa House seat.
Miller-Meeks appeared to be vulnerable, because she had won the open seat in what was then Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District by just six votes, after a long recount. But the Ottawa Republican proved a formidable campaigner in her first reelection bid, carrying 19 of the 20 counties in the newly redrawn 1st District. (The district was renumbered during the redistricting that followed the 2020 census.) Bohannan carried only Johnson County, the state’s most reliable Democratic county.
Bohannan had a better showing in 2024, winning three counties — Johnson, Scott and Jefferson — and garnering a larger share of the overall vote in the district. Election night totals had Miller-Meeks winning the district by 801 votes. Because of the narrowness of that lead, Bohannan requested a recount of the district, even though it was extremely unlikely a recount would change the outcome.
After the recount, the vote totals shifted by two votes. Miller-Meeks won with 799 votes.
In April, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) designated IA-01 as one of “35 competitive Republican-held districts [that] will determine the House Majority.”
Miller-Meeks has not officially announced her reelection campaign, but did say in a tweet on May 30 that her “campaign is going strong” and she “look[s] forward to winning next November to keep Iowa winning in Congress.”
