Far be it from me to offer advice to the Iowa Democratic Party. Sure, I had to join to caucus a couple times for Bernie Sanders. That hardly makes me a party member.
But let’s take a look at a fact no one – even the biggest IDP booster on Earth – will deny. The Iowa Democratic Party consistently lost almost every key statewide race in the 2010s. Yes, Obama delivered a win at the presidential level in 2012. Yes, they won some Congressional races and a State Auditor election in 2018. But look beyond that and you find one bloodbath after another.
Fred Hubbell was a dud. Theresa Greenfield couldn’t get it done. Terry Branstad crowned Chet Culver King of the Duds. Deidre DeJear didn’t bring home the win. And the less said about Bruce Braley, the better. No Democrat came close to winning a U.S. Senate seat, and Trump trounced both Clinton and Biden. Democrats failed to make gains in the state legislature, and so on.
Why? Blogs like Bleeding Heartland focus relentlessly on the question. Why has the GOP kicked the shit out of the Iowa Democratic Party from one end of the state to the other? And what can the IDP do about it?
A Less Convenient Fact for the Iowa Democratic Party
Let’s start with a much less convenient fact for the Iowa Democratic Party. What happened in the 2010s is going to happen again in the 2020s. The IDP will continue losing most statewide races for the rest of this decade. Kim Reynolds (or a Generic Republican) will probably win in 2022 and 2026. Republicans will probably win at least 2 or 3 of the 4 Congressional districts for some time to come. And somebody with the last name Grassley (likely Chuck or Pat) will probably win the next Senate race.
That’s pretty bad news for the IDP. Oh, and the Democratic Party faithful will deny it. But they’re wrong. Their faith won’t bring about a different result.
Let’s talk a bit about how they got here before talking about where they should go.
Retreads, Nostalgia, and the Rural Mirage
For convenience, I’ll divide the Iowa Democratic Party into ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ wings. No, it’s not a perfect division. Yes, we find people between the two camps. But bear with me, because the division tracks common IDP mistakes.
More moderate or conservative Iowa Democrats want to recapture past magic. That’s to say they want to recapture the people and geographical areas that voted Democratic in the 1990s and early 2000s. This includes white voters in small- to mid-sized towns who used to vote Democratic or split their tickets but now vote Republican. And they want to capture those votes by offering up fiscally and socially moderate policy ideas.
These people backed Hubbell’s campaign in 2018. But what they really want is someone like Tom Vilsack. And some of them don’t mind skipping the ‘someone like’ part and moving right back to the literal Tom Vilsack. Sometimes we see more liberal-leaning members of this group promoting candidates like John Norris in 2018.
On the whole, this wing typically wins Democratic primaries. However, its track record in actual elections is dismal. The old ‘retreads and nostalgia’ strategy doesn’t work. And if the IDP won’t learn from its own repeated failure, why doesn’t it ask how Indiana did running Evan Bayh again?
And the even bigger problem with this strategy is that it uniquely turns off the very voters the IDP needs to build a 2030 coalition. More on that later.
Winning Without Organizing
But for now, let’s take a look at the progressive wing. Progressives in Iowa seem to think elections are won simply by finding the magical combination of issues that will ‘unlock’ wins. They think they can win before organizing or even win without organizing.
That’s hardly better than the conservative wing’s plan.
Sometimes we see progressives orient this thinking around identity. Some move from seeing nominating a more diverse slate of candidates as necessary – which it is – to seeing it as sufficient – which it certainly is not. But we see it far more often around policy. Many progressives buy into the myth that if the Iowa Democratic Party just adopts the right magic bag of policies (free college, Medicare for All, or others), the voters will materialize.
This, of course, isn’t how electoral politics work. It’s amazing that anyone who saw the failures of the Cathy Glasson and Kimberly Graham campaigns could still claim otherwise.
The Iowa Democratic Party and the 2030 Coalition
So, where does all this leave the Iowa Democratic Party? I think the IDP should start by admitting the 2020s will be as bad as – or worse than – the 2010s.
And so, the IDP should build a coalition that can win in the 2030s. And it should start building that coalition now – thinking about what it will look like and organizing accordingly. Of course, Iowa Democrats can’t explicitly admit this is what they’re doing. For now, they have to keep pretending they stand a good chance of electing a Governor in 2022 or 2026. But in terms of strategy, they should build a party with the 2030 Coalition built into the party’s DNA.
The IDP should start cultivating deep relationships with people and communities that are growing. It should also start cultivating deep relationships with consistent non-voters whose material reality means they could be sympathetic to left-leaning policy.
Who am I talking about? People like: immigrants, people whose first language is something other than English, low-wage workers, tenants, black Iowans, non-black POC Iowans, and so on. The Sanders campaign put some of the pieces in place during the 2020 caucuses. Drop the gun control talk, drop the partisan minutiae and insults, and stop chasing unwinnable rural conservative voters.
Glasson did a bit of the work here in 2018, though not nearly enough. For now, the IDP should look deeper for promising statewide candidates. Why not head to Cedar Rapids and run Stacey Walker statewide, or head to Lone Tree and run Jon Green? Will they win statewide? No, at least not in the 2020s. Would they have defeated Reynolds in 2018? No way.
But either would represent at least one promising step toward a 2030 Coalition.
