G. Elliott Morris writes about the Iowa race that flipped a red seat blue last night, opening the post with this little bit of positivity (which I needed after reading this earlier today.)
One of the things I promise paying members of this newsletter is day-after updates on key election outcomes. Although it is an off-year, there have been plenty of special elections to write about, all of them suggesting a pretty sizable leftward shift in the electoral environment since November 2024.
On average in 2025, Democratic candidates in special elections are running about 16 percentage points ahead of Kamala Harris’s margin versus Donald Trump in last year’s presidential election. That is 5-6 points higher than the average Democratic overperformance in 2017. Here’s my interview with Paul Krugman and The Downballot’s David Nir about these specials in June.
This shift (firmly in the territory of a “blue wave”) was repeated on Tuesday, August 26, with a Democratic victory in Iowa’s 1st Senate District — a seat Trump won by 11 points in 2024, according to The Downballot’s special election big board. Here’s their coverage of the race. Democratic candidate Catelin Drey defeated Republican Christopher Prosch by a margin of 10 percentage points, flipping the seat to the Democratic column and breaking the supermajority that Iowa Republicans had in their state legislature.
The rest is behind the paywall but in a nutshell he says that Drey, like many of those who flipped a seat so far in these special elections, ran on “affordability.” To be more specific her platform was “funding for public schools, making housing and childcare more affordable, and decreasing prices in general.” Here’s the viral ad that illustrates it:
Morris says that this issue has been key in one way or another in most of these off-year elections so far and that it’s becoming even more salient as people sour on Trump’s economy.
He points out that this is a non-partisan “throw the bums out whoever they are” issue that will likely benefit Dems in 26 and 28 just as it allowed the criminal tyrant to win in 2024.
I happen to think that Democrats can talk about a lot of things over the next year and have an obligation to call out Trump’s despotism along with everything else. People may care the most about their own stretched bottom line but it’s incumbent upon leaders to educate and lead on the bigger issues that confront us as a country. People won’t be able to afford much of anything if we continue to sink into banana republic politics where billionaires and tech utopians hoover up most of the nation’s wealth while the rest of us spend our time trying to evade goons who are tasked with keeping us all on line.
As this person said on BlueSky:
He further points out that in 2021, Republicans were charging Biden with screwing up Afghanistan, screwing up COVID and screwing up inflation among other things. Nobody knew then which would be the most salient issue in 2024 but they were out there making the case for all of them. In the end, it was inflation that got him (and being old) because affordability was at the top of people’s minds. But all those attacks on Biden for screwing everything up added to the impression that he — and Harris — couldn’t fix anything.