Here in Iowa City, the votes are in. And just as in last month’s primary, Oliver Weilein won big! He won despite strong efforts to defeat him by housing industry interests and Iowa City moderates. And, to boot, he won despite spending very little money and most Democratic officials endorsing his opponent.
Of course, our city council elections are non-partisan. That helped a great deal on the final point.
I’m very glad Oliver won. He brings a much needed perspective to the council. But I’ve already said some words about all that.
In this post, I’ll sketch out the big picture by drawing a deeper comparison from Oliver’s win to our 2015 city election.
2015 and 2025: Two Realignments
The 2025 Iowa City special election reminds me of the 2015 city council election. In that one, a group of 4 candidates ran as a slate. They donned the name ‘Core Four,’ and they swept out of office a conservative (for Iowa City!), pro-housing industry council.
The Core Four combined social progressivism with pared down, pro-growth policies. Former Mayor Jim Throgmorton wrote a book called Co-Crafting the Just City to cover this, and I discussed the book a few years ago. For purposes of this post, I’ll point out that the Core Four grounded its politics on social justice and racial equity grants, an Affordable Housing Action Plan, and more restrictive TIF usage.
That all might sound bland today. But at the time, it formed a strong departure from previous policy.
By 2025, Core Four politics had come under pressure from the ‘left.’ In fact, it came under pressure from a couple of kinds of ‘lefts.’ One kind of left shows up in the form of ‘ultra-progressive‘ or ‘radlib‘ politics that pushes the city more narrowly on social and racial justice. Another kind of left, not entirely distinct from the first, pushes it to make deeper commitments to social democracy. The Core Four had come up short, however, for both of them.
To that, we can add a new sense of urgency and outrage arising from the second Trump administration.
These forces combined to push Oliver across the finish line. And in a broader sense, this was quite an achievement. In short, Oliver wasn’t an electable candidate in Iowa City even a few years ago. His win came in the form of a realignment – just as 2015 was a realignment.
Iowa City Politics in 2025 and Beyond
So far, the 2025 version has hit only one election. Laura Bergus and Mazahir Salih are a couple of other city councilors who, at times, show signs of following this realignment. But Oliver Weilein is, thus far, its clearest example. It remains to be seen whether 2025 was a one-off or whether it continues.
The fact is that we don’t yet know what will happen in the next couple of city council elections. It depends on whether progressive outrage over Trump continues and for how long. It also depends on whether and how Oliver gets things done in office. And, just as important, it depends on whether and how his colleagues work with him.
For now, though, I’ll say that Iowa City politics has taken a promising turn since the 2023 election. In that election, which I wrote about here, we saw Iowa City voters come down decidedly against working-class candidates.
We saw a different result today. A working-class candidate soundly defeated his professional class opponent. And there was no ambiguity here. Oliver sounds like a person who works a regular job helping people with disabilities. He sounds like that because that’s who he is. He wasn’t hiding anything.
The electorate didn’t hold that against him in the way they’ve held it against other candidates in the past. Perhaps, dear readers, we’ve seen the electorate scale down its biases.
A Word on Candidates
Finally, as with any non-partisan local election, results also depend on candidate quality. I wrote last year about Mandi Remington’s win in the county supervisor race. She won, in part, because she faced a bad opponent.
Oliver faced Ross Nusser, who wasn’t as bad an opponent as Mandi’s. At the same time, he wasn’t as strong a candidate as Josh Moe or Bergus in 2023.
On paper, Ross is a professional class guy with a long resume of service to the community in volunteer and non-profit board roles. My sense is that Ross saw the role of city councilor as another non-profit board position. In this sense, he looked like a pre-2015 city council candidate, but one with some ‘Core Four’ spice added.
There’s nothing morally wrong with this approach. But it’s not my preferred way of doing politics. Nor does it fit the mood of the Iowa City electorate in 2025.
However, the biggest problem with Ross’s campaign is that his supporters badly misplayed their criticism of Oliver’s social media posts. Some of Ross’s supporters, particularly (though not exclusively) Matt and Maka Pilcher Hayek, inadvertently won Oliver a fair number of votes with their frantic and gross behavior. And as the campaign wore on and got ugly on both sides, Ross began to come off as angry and embittered.
None of that helped him.
The upshot?
This was a realignment election. But the individual factors of the race leave me uncertain as to how deeply the realignment will go. Continuing outrage at the Trump administration – and demand for bold action from local government – could continue to propel it for some time.
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