Democrat Christina Bohannan announced on Tuesday she is running for the 1st District U.S. House seat currently held by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Bohannan was the Democratic nominee for the seat in 2022 and lost, just like every other Democrat running for the House in Iowa.
Bohannan kicked off her new campaign at the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Hall in Davenport.
“I’m running for Congress because it has never been more clear that we need change,” the candidate said in a written statement on Tuesday before the Davenport event. “Time after time, Representative Miller-Meeks has abandoned Iowa values to line up with the most radical members of her party.”
Bohannan, who represented Iowa City in the Iowa House of Representatives for one term starting in 2021, is a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. She grew up in a small town in Florida, part of a working-class family that struggled to get by after her father, a construction worker, fell ill and lost his job and his health insurance.
“We had to choose between paying for his prescription drugs and putting food on the table,” Bohannan recalled in a video posted Tuesday on her campaign Facebook page. She added, “too many Iowa families are having to make those kinds of difficult decisions every single day.”
“Not enough has changed in Washington.”
That message was central to her 2022 campaign. Bohannan also stressed the importance of defending reproductive rights, creating more affordable housing and child care, increasing investments in public education and increasing the ability of unions to organize workers and engage in collective bargaining.
Miller-Meeks proved an able campaigner in 2022. Two years earlier, she had won her seat by only six votes, but she defeated Bohannan by 7 percentage points, which represented more than 20,000 votes. Johnson County was the only one of the 20 counties in the 1st District that Bohannan carried.
Bohannan said she believes next year’s election will see a greater turnout than the 2022 election, which will increase her chances of winning.
“We know that Democratic turnout in midterm elections isn’t always as good as it should be,” she said. “And so we’re excited with this presidential election and the energy that that brings.”
On Wednesday, the Bohannan campaign sent out a news release saying the candidate had raised $276,565 in the first 24 hours since announcing her run. According to the release, 75 percent of the donations came from Iowa residents.
Bohannan is not the first former 2022 Democratic candidate in Iowa making another run for Congress. In July, Ryan Melton announced he is running again for the 4th District House seat in western Iowa. Republican incumbent Rep. Randy Feenstra defeated Melton by 37 percentage points in 2022.
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