With the 2022 election a couple of days behind us, it’s time to take a look. And the look runs parallel to last time: the GOP blew it.
They more or less had a House and a Senate majority in the bag. And while they probably (barely) managed the former, they’ve probably missed the latter again. In most parts of the country, they performed worse than the polls suggested and far worse than they could have done with better candidates and messaging.
I won’t say much else about national elections in the rest of this post. But read on for ballot initiatives and the state of things in Iowa!
Ballot Initiatives
Leading up to the election, I pointed out four ballot initiatives worth following. How did they do?
For the most part, they did really well!
Nebraska voters passed a $15 minimum wage. Illinois voters placed collective bargaining rights in the state constitution. And South Dakota voters expanded Medicaid. As of my time of writing, the Oregon ‘right to health care’ initiative hasn’t been fully counted. But, as I wrote earlier, that initiative seems to have been unclear and poorly worded.
The gist of it is that voters mostly handed victories to the left when it comes to issues. We see much the same in the various abortion ballot initiatives.
Iowa Elections
And then there’s Iowa, which tells a very different story. Much as I suggested they might, the GOP swept the state clean of statewide Democratic officeholders. If readers want the short version of the story, it’s this: while Kim Reynolds still isn’t very popular, she successfully portrayed the Democrats as a bunch of elitist scolds.
Democrats criticized Reynolds harshly, and often even accurately. Many people – myself included – thought Kim dropped COVID restrictions too quickly in the summer of 2020. But Democrats predictably overplayed their hand, coming up with childish nicknames for her (e.g., ‘COVID Kim,’ ‘Killer Kim,’ and so on) for a pandemic that most voters perceived as something well outside of her control. And they’re not exactly wrong about that.
Next Steps for Iowa?
In a previous post, I advised Iowa Democrats to build a 2030 coalition. My idea there, in a nutshell, was this: there’s little Democrats can do to win statewide or federal offices in Iowa in the short term. Maybe they get lucky and win one, but that will be due to national conditions, not to anything Iowa Democrats do on their own. And so, they should focus on rebuilding the party for the future. They should focus efforts on younger voters, left-leaning voters, members of marginalized communities, and other growing populations in the state. It won’t help them win now, but it will help them win later.
Did they do this? For the most part, no. The candidate list was a bit less bad, and they even nominated a black woman for governor. But the campaigns themselves still offered mostly bland, inoffensive moderate fare and pitches to a (mostly) older, (mostly) suburban target electorate. It didn’t work in 2018. It didn’t work in 2022. And it’s not going to work in 2024, 2026, et al. either.
Furthermore, the longer Iowa Democrats keep doing this, the longer it will take them to dig out of their hole and build a future electorate. The next time I talk about the ‘2030 Coalition,’ I may have to start calling it the ‘2040 Coalition.’
