Donald Trump won Iowa in a landslide, as he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election. This was Trump’s third run for president, and he has won Iowa each time. Each time he has also increased the margin by which he won the state. According to unofficial vote totals from the Associated Press on Tuesday night, this time Trump won Iowa with 55.9 percent of the vote.
Trump carried 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Unsurprisingly, Harris had her strongest showing in Johnson County, where she won 68.4 percent of the vote. Harris also won majorities in Story County (58.2 percent), Polk County (54.8 percent) and Linn County (54.2 percent). Harris also won Black Hawk County by a plurality, with 49.9 percent of the vote in the unofficial total.
Trump had been expected to win Iowa, and had led both President Joe Biden, when he was still the Democratic candidate, and Harris in every poll conducted in the state, except for a surprising Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines Register on Nov. 2, which showed Harris with a 4 percentage point lead.
“Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time,” Trump told his supporters at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home/country club, when he declared victory. “There’s never been anything like this in this country.”
The former and future president was right that there’s never been anything like his 2024 campaign in American history. He’s the first major party presidential candidate to be convicted of 34 felonies. (Trump has not yet been sentenced for those crimes.) He’s also the only winning presidential candidate ever found civilly liable for sexually assaulting, and then later defaming, someone. (Trump was ordered to pay his victim $83 million.) In a different civil case earlier this year, a judge found Trump had routinely committed frauds that “shock the conscience” as part of his real estate business, a first for an ex-president or presidential candidate. (Trump was fined more than $325 million.)
Trump had previously made history in 2016 by being the first presidential candidate to run for office while facing a class action lawsuit accusing him of fraud. (Trump settled the lawsuit for $25 million, after winning the 2016 election.)
Trump is also unique among presidents-elect in that he is currently under federal indictment. The indictments in one of the cases involve crimes Trump allegedly committed while trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (Regardless of whether his actions were actually crimes, no other former president has engaged in Trump’s sort of election denial.) On the campaign trail this year, Trump promised to gut the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies that have investigated him, eliminate the independence of the Justice Department and use it against those who have investigated or prosecuted him. (It should go without saying that no other presidential candidate has made those sort of campaign promises.)
None of this dissuaded a majority of Iowans from voting for Trump. On Tuesday night, Iowa Republican leaders celebrated his victory.
“We are just so excited about what’s happening all across this country,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird, the first statewide official to endorse Trump in this year’s Iowa Caucus, said at an Iowa Republican Party watch party in Des Moines. “And we’re not going to let anybody forget it started right here in Iowa.”
Republicans incumbents reelected to Congress
As was expected, the Republican incumbents in Iowa’s 2nd and 4th Congressional Districts won reelection easily. In the 3rd District, which the national Democratic Party had hopes of flipping, incumbent Zach Nunn defeated first-time candidate Lanon Baccam, with 51.9 percent of the vote.
The candidates, the national parties and outside interest groups spent heavily on ads in the 3rd District. According to Axios Des Moines, as of Oct. 31, almost $23 million had been spent on ads in the race, with about $500,000 more spent by Nunn backers.
The race in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District saw even more money spent on ads, with a total of approximately $24 million. But in this district, Democratic spending outpaced Republican spending by about $4.5 million.
According to unofficial result reported by the AP on Wednesday morning, Miller-Meeks beat Bohannan by 0.2 percentage points in the district. Miller-Meeks has declared victory, even though the AP has not yet called the race, because Washington County has yet to fully report its votes. Bohannan has not conceded.
At midnight, Bohannan posted on social media, “Right now, the race remains too close to call. We owe it to Iowa voters to ensure every vote is counted and every voice is heard.”
This was Bohannan’s second time challenging Miller-Meeks in the 1st District. In 2020, Miller-Meeks defeated Bohannan by 20,173 votes, with Bohannan winning only Johnson County. According to Wednesday morning unofficial vote totals, this year Miller-Meeks is winning by a little over 800 votes. This time, Bohannan won three of the district’s 20 counties. She carried Johnson by 42 percentage points, Jefferson by 3 points and Scott by 2 points.
Selzer speaks
The Iowa Poll conducted by Selzer & Co. for the Des Moines Register and Mediacom has earned its reputation for being the state’s most accurate opinion survey. The last time pollster J. Ann Selzer got a presidential election in Iowa wrong was 2004, when incumbent George W. Bush defeated Democrat John Kerry even though Selzer’s final poll in the race had Kerry ahead. This year, Selzer’s final poll of the election got things very wrong.
The poll conducted Oct. 28-31 found Harris winning by 4 percentage points, Baccam beating Nunn by 7 percentage points and Bohannan crushing Miller-Meeks by 16 percentage points. The poll was taken very seriously, because Selzer is known for producing outlier polls that prove to be accurate once the votes are counted.
“Tonight, I’m of course thinking about how we got where we are,” Selzer said in a statement on Tuesday night.
“The poll findings we produced for The Des Moines Register and Mediacom did not match what the Iowa electorate ultimately decided in the voting booth today. I’ll be reviewing data from multiple sources with hopes of learning why that happened. And, I welcome what that process might teach me.”
Republicans gain more seats in the Iowa Legislature
Iowa Republicans also had a good night at the state level on Tuesday, increasing their majorities in both Iowa House and Senate. According to the unofficial vote total on Wednesday morning, Republicans won one additional seat in the Iowa House and three more seats in the Iowa Senate.
“We may have to add onto the Capitol so there’s a room big enough to hold all the Iowa House Republicans that we’re going to have this upcoming session,” House Speaker Pat Grassley said in a news release.
Aime Wichtendahl makes history
Aime Wichtendahl made history on Tuesday night by defeating Republican John Thompson in Iowa House District 80. Wichtendahl will be the first transgender person to serve in the Iowa Legislature.
House District 80 covers Hiawatha, Robins and part of Cedar Rapids. The seat came open when Democratic incumbent Art Staed decided to run for the Iowa Senate instead.
Wichtendahl first made history in 2015, when she was elected to the Hiawatha City Council, becoming Iowa’s first transgender elected official. She was reelected to her council seat twice, first in 2019, then in 2023.
“You deserve a government that works to bring good high-paying jobs to Iowa, that values education and enables you to live the American dream,” Wichtendahl said in a video when she launched her Iowa House campaign last December. “Iowans deserve a government free from the corrupting influence of dark money, that respects their private medical healthcare choices, and that lives the values on our flag — our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain.”
The environment wins one in Johnson County
President-elect Trump has declared climate change to be a “hoax,” promising to increase fossil fuel production and eliminate green energy programs, but in Johnson County, voters still overwhelmingly support environmental programs. A $30 million bond to fund the work being done by the Johnson County Conservation was approved on Tuesday with more than 77 percent of the vote.
“I call it an investment,” Johnson County Conservation interim director Brad Freidhof told Little Village last month in an interview about the bond. “It’s you investing for your kids, your grandkids, for future generations.”
