Democrats Playing the Economic Populist Card in Iowa Midterms

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FAIRFIELD, IOWA – Sitting in the front row of a packed, deconsecrated Presbyterian church in a small Iowa town, Bob Ferguson has no doubts: The political pendulum is swinging back, and a state long written off by many Democrats is in play again.

The state is “getting purple,” he says. “You can feel it.”

But unlike in previous political cycles, the path for Democrats to win back Iowa, a state Donald Trump carried by more than 13 points in 2024, may not run through the political center. Instead, Democrats are trying something different: an economic populism aimed directly at voters who believe that too much of the economy is controlled by corporations, monopolies, and investors far removed from the communities where they do business.

Even Trump’s attempt to blunt the momentum last week, announcing that a $15 billion low-carbon steel plant would be coming to the southeast part of the state, recapitulated the problem: The plant’s owner is Mesabi Metallics, a subsidiary of an India-based firm called Essar Group. Absentee ownership has become a major issue in Iowa.

“A populist can be a demagogue or a genuine,” says Ferguson, chief executive of a local family health products business and an at-large city council member in Fairfield. In a Midwest state like Iowa, he says, left-populist messaging can work “to the extent that it’s genuine.”

Ferguson was one of roughly 100 people attending a fundraiser for Chris Jones, a self-described populist Democrat running to become the state’s next secretary of agriculture. Jones has built his campaign around protecting clean water in a state where concerns over agricultural pollution have been heightened by Iowa’s high rate of cancer diagnoses.

The argument is spreading up from the down-ballot races. Democrats running for Senate and governor in the state are also betting that voters who have drifted toward Trump can be won back by talking less about ideological labels and more about who controls the economy.

Josh Turek, the party’s Senate candidate, is facing Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson after Joni Ernst, the Republican incumbent, decided not to seek re-election. Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medalist in wheelchair basketball and state representative, calls himself a “common-sense prairie populist.” He is running on an anti-establishment economic message combined with a culturally moderate platform.

Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor, never ends a speech without reminding voters that his campaign is about “Well fed versus fed up.” Both candidates are promising to break up monopolies and fight consolidation in agribusiness, meatpacking, and health care, while also targeting Wall Street ownership of farmland and homes.

That language is striking in a state where Republicans have spent years presenting themselves as the party of the farmer, the small-business owner, and the working class.

Iowa Republicans harnessed the state’s “populist energy” and attracted working- and middle-class voters far more effectively than Democrats after Donald Trump’s rise, says Kurt Meyer, a longtime grassroots activist and former chair of the Democratic Party in rural northern Iowa.

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But Democrats have learned from their mistakes, he says. The MAGA movement, Meyer argues, has “deserted their populist clothes on the side of the water and went swimming,” while mortgage rates and gas prices remain well above the averages of Trump’s first term.

These days in Iowa, it is not uncommon to find “I Did This” stickers bearing Trump’s face beside gas and diesel pumps, the same place where similar stickers featuring Joe Biden appeared in 2022.

“Every time you go to the pump, you say, it’s four [dollars] and a quarter [a gallon] … that’s a reminder of what people are paying once a week,” says Meyer.

Some, however, argue that the shift is less about the parties changing than about voters seeing them differently.

“Honestly, I don’t feel like Democrats really changed,” says Charles Wishman, who works at the Iowa Federation of Labor, a state labor organization that represents over 42,000 workers across roughly 280 local unions throughout Iowa. “I don’t feel like Republicans really changed. I don’t even really feel like voters really changed. But the perceptions of all of them did.”

For Wishman, Democrats’ problem is partly one of language rather than policy.

“Usually, Democrats don’t know how to talk like normal people. That’s it. That’s almost all the problem.”

The Polling Reality

Recent polling suggests the shift is more than a talking point, although the race remains volatile. A Fox News poll of likely voters conducted in late September put Turek at 49 percent and Hinson at 47 percent, while Sand led Republican Zach Lahn 53 percent to 44 percent in the governor’s race. The poll found that the cost of living was the most important issue for voters, with 6 in 10 calling it extremely important to their Senate vote, ahead of Trump, immigration, and artificial intelligence.

Other surveys have painted a similar picture, though with different margins. A Marist poll of registered voters conducted in September gave Turek an eight-point lead over Hinson, while an Emerson poll earlier in the month had Hinson ahead by five points and Sand ahead by three. The surveys consistently point to independent voters as a key source of Democratic support. Marist found Turek leading among independents by 11 points and Sand by 26 points.

That would represent a significant change for a state that has moved sharply to the right over the past decade. Trump won Iowa by 13.2 percentage points in 2024, taking 55.7 percent of the vote, after winning by 9.4 points in both 2020 and 2016. Four years earlier, Barack Obama carried the state by 5.8 points. Democrats have also struggled down the ballot. No Democrat has won a U.S. Senate election in Iowa since 2008, while the last Democrat to win the governor’s office was Chet Culver in 2006.

For now, Republicans can still count on a major registration advantage: 39 percent of active registered voters are Republicans, compared with roughly 28 percent for Democrats. Another 33 percent are registered with no party.

“If we show up, we win,” Lahn said in front of roughly 150 people during a community event in Waterloo last week, praising Republicans’ 180,000-voter registration advantage in the state. “Please show up. Get your friends and neighbors.”

Lahn has been dogged by dubious claims about being a family farmer and residency issues given that his family lives in Kansas. But his own speech illustrates just how much the language of economic populism has spread across Iowa politics.

He promises to tighten anti–corporate farming laws, prevent out-of-state investors and hedge funds from pricing out local families, and appoint “private property warriors” to the state’s utilities commission to prevent eminent domain from being used for private gain.

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Lahn is trailing in most polls but has already convinced some small-business owners in the state to vote for him, including Sam Mitchell, who attended his rally last week. Democrats, Mitchell says, “forgot about us for decades.”

“We need companies here because we need jobs, we need good-paying jobs, but we also need to make sure that they are not just extracting wealth from here and bring it overseas or other states,” he says. “I’m not a populist really myself, personally, but [Lahn has] a decent populistic proposal.”

The overlap between the parties is revealing. Both are talking about corporate power. Both are talking about outside investors. Both are talking about the economic pressures facing rural communities. The question is which party voters believe when it makes those arguments.

The Farmers

Farmers, whose votes will be key next month, are still sitting on the fence.

“I typically look for candidates who tend to be fiscally conservative, but then I’m a little bit more socially liberal, and those types of candidates aren’t common,” says Dave Walton, a soybean farmer, from his farm in Wilton, closer to the Illinois border.

The ongoing trade tensions with China and young voters’ disillusionment with the two-party system are making space for “a bit more crossover” this time after a few elections in which votes fell along party lines, he says. “There are several candidates running on an anti-establishment platform.”

Farmers are dealing with a difficult economic environment as insurance, energy costs, and food bills have risen over the past two years, he adds. Rising costs have been a problem for Iowa’s farm community for years, but tariffs and the war in Iran have accelerated the spike. Diesel is up nearly 80 percent here. Rising interest rates also make it hard for farmers who habitually use credit to finance their operations.

“The economic message really resonates with a lot of people right now,” Walton says.

However, not everyone is unhappy with the current administration.

Tim Bardole, a soybean farmer from Rippey and a longtime Trump voter, says that the president is doing “a really good job” at rebalancing the trade deficit with China, which fell 32 percent last year to roughly $203 billion compared to 2024.

“If he had carried himself like Ronald Reagan, he would be the perfect president,” he says. “Unfortunately, he just keeps poking the bee’s nest and wondering why he gets stung.”

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