Democrat Lanon Baccam announced on Thursday he is running for Congress in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District. Baccam is the first person to launch a campaign challenging Republican Zach Nunn, who is in his first term representing the district.
“We can all sense and feel our country is incredibly polarized,” Baccam said in a video posted online Thursday morning. “People are moving apart. And people are divided in their political camps. Nowhere is that more true than the U.S. Congress, and Zach Nunn is part of the problem.”
“I’m ready to serve Iowans. Let’s bring this country back together and rebuild our communities.”
The 42-year-old Baccam was born and raised in Mount Pleasant, where his parents settled after coming to the United States as part of the group of Tai Dam refugees who immigrated to Iowa from Laos following the Vietnam War.
It was their memory of that war that made them reluctant to give their permission to let him join the Iowa National Guard when he was 17, Baccam said in the video. But they eventually did because “they knew I was determined to serve.”
After 9/11, Baccam’s guard unit was activated and sent to Afghanistan, where he served as a combat engineer. Baccam told Iowa Public Radio his experience in the National Guard would inform his approach to office.
“Politics wasn’t the first thing we paid attention to. It was a shared brotherhood and experience and a camaraderie that can be rebuilt,” he said. “If a bunch of guys from across the political spectrum can build a brotherhood to defend this country, we can do that again in Congress and I plan to do that when I go up there.”
Baccam is a graduate of Drake University, and lives in Des Moines with his wife and daughter. He worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture under Secretary Tom Vilsack during the Obama administration, and rejoined the department after President Biden appointed the former Iowa governor as secretary in his administration. At the USDA Baccam worked on programs that assisted veterans’ transition into jobs in agriculture, and on the expansion of broadband service to rural areas.
This is his first run for office, but Baccam is not new to politics. In 2020, he was the deputy state director for the Biden campaign in Iowa. And as the Des Moines Register reported, he has previously “worked in state government and for several other Iowa Democrats, including former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, former Gov. Chet Culver and former U.S. Reps. Leonard Boswell and Bruce Braley, as well as then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.”
On his campaign site, Baccam says he’s running for Congress to ensure Iowans have “access to good-paying jobs, affordable health care, the ability to retire with dignity” and to protect “women’s reproductive freedoms.”
The 2024 race in Iowa’s 3rd District is frequently cited as being very important to efforts by the Democratic Party to retake control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nunn defeated two-term incumbent Rep. Cindy Axne in 2022, a strong year for Republicans in Iowa. Nunn won with 50.35 percent of the vote, getting slightly over 2,000 more votes than Axne out of the approximately 310,000 cast.
Two other Democrats, Tracy Limon and Melissa Vine, have filed the necessary paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run in the district, but have not made any campaign announcements yet.
