Last week, Iowa state Rep. Andy McKean announced that he was leaving the Republican Party and joining the Democrats, a move that shaved the GOP's edge in the chamber to just a 53-47 spread. The switch by McKean, who is seeking re-election next year, should give Democrats a better shot at flipping the House next year, but as our new data shows, Team Blue still needs some good fortune to win back the majority they picked up in 2006 but lost in the 2010 GOP wave.
Daily Kos Elections has crunched the results of the Hawkeye State’s 2018 gubernatorial election, where Republican incumbent Kim Reynolds defeated Democrat Fred Hubbell, for every legislative district in the state. Reynolds only won statewide 50.3-47.5, but she carried 60 House seats compared to Hubbell’s 39. The final district, HD-60 in the Waterloo area, produced an exact tie for both gubernatorial candidates, but Democrat Dave Williams unseated Republican incumbent Walt Rogers there 51-49.
While Reynolds’ victory in 60 of the chamber's 100 seats looks pretty intimidating on the surface, there’s reason to think that Democrats still could win a majority under this map, which was drawn up by a bipartisan commission, if conditions in 2020 are favorable.
For starters, we also looked at the results of last year’s race for state auditor, where Democrat Rob Sand unseated Republican incumbent Mary Mosiman 51.0-46.4 and, in so doing, took 59 districts. Sand's performance was the best statewide by a non-incumbent Democrat last year, so he gives us a reasonable benchmark for exploring where the party could make gains when looking past the gubernatorial numbers.
Another way to look even deeper is to sort each seat by Reynold’s margin over Hubbell and see how the seat in the middle—known as the median seat—voted. Because Iowa has an even number of seats, we average the margin for the middle two seats to come up with the median.
In the state House, the median seat backed Reynolds 51.0-46.3, a margin of 4.7 points. That's about 2 points to the right of her statewide margin of 2.8 points—a hurdle for Democrats to overcome but by no means an impossible one. And if we sort the House by Sand’s margin over Mosiman, the median seat backed the Democrat 50.3-46.9, just 1.2 points to the right of Sands's margin.
The bad news for Team Blue is that they may need to spend more energy defending their seats than the GOP will. Eight Democrats, including McKean, sit in seats Reynolds carried (not to mention Williams in the tied seat), while only one Republican is in a Hubbell district. But there’s also some good news in the data: 14 Republicans represent Sand districts, while just two Democrats are in Mosiman seats.
The reddest seat in Democratic hands is in fact McKean’s HD-58 in the eastern part of the state. This district swung from 56-43 Obama to 58-37 Trump, and Reynolds’s 56-41 victory doesn’t give us much reason to be optimistic that it will shift back to the left next year. However, Sand did win here 50-47.
Excluding McKean, who won re-election last year as a Republican of course, the Democrat who prevailed in the most pro-Reynolds seat in 2018 was state Rep. Todd Prichard, who holds HD-52 around Charles City in eastern Iowa. Prichard, who spent a few months in 2017 running for governor, won re-election without opposition even as Reynolds was carrying his constituency 55-42 and Mosiman took it 50-47.
Meanwhile, the only Republican in a Hubbell seat is Ashley Hinson in HD-67, another eastern Iowa district. Hubbell and Sand won her seat 50-47 and 54-43, respectively, but Hinson held on 52-48. National Republicans tried recruiting Hinson to challenge Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer in the 1st Congressional District, but while Hinson said in January that she would take a few weeks to decide, we’ve heard nothing from her since.
We’ll also take a brief look at the state Senate, where the GOP holds a considerably wider 32-18 majority. Democrats won control of the chamber in 2006 and held it until 2016, but because only half of the Senate is up every two years, it will be very difficult for them to win it back in just one cycle. Reynolds carried 31 of the Senate's 50 seats while Sand took 29.
In the gubernatorial race, the median Senate seat backed Reynolds 51.4-46.5 (a 4.9-point margin), while Sand took the median seat 50.7-46.7 (a 4-point margin). Altogether, three Democrats hold Reynolds seats, while four Republicans represent Hubbell turf.
However, among just the 25 seats that will go before voters in 2020, the median went to Reynolds 53.6-44.0, or 9.6 points—almost twice as wide as the median margin for the Senate as a whole. Sand's median margin among this subset, meanwhile, was just 49.0-48.5, only half a point. The one bit of good news is that 19 of those 25 seats are currently held by Republicans, including three who sit in Hubbell seats (just one Democrat is in a Reynolds district). Still, that's a long way from the eight seats Democrats would need to reclaim the majority.
P.S. You can find our master list of statewide election results by congressional and legislative district here, which we'll be updating as we add new states. You can also find all our data from 2018 and past cycles here.
