Last night brought the first newsworthy special election of the Trump 2.0 era, as Republican Chris Cournoyer resigned her state Senate seat to become Iowa’s new lieutenant governor to create this race. She won her State Senate District 35 election in 2022 by 22 percent and Trump won this district by 21 points in November, only to watch Democrat Mike Zimmer beat Republican Kate Whittington by a little less than four percent last night, a nearly 25-point swing in 85 days. Zimmer ran on liberal priorities like raising the minimum wage, increasing funding for public schools, reinstating collective bargaining, and lowering the cost of living through proposals like creating affordable housing. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee said, “This earthquake victory in Iowa puts Republicans across the country on notice.”
While the usual caveats about a special election where the winner garnered less than 5,000 total votes apply, this is still a notable development. Democrats have been demoralized since the election, and per a report from NBC yesterday, party leadership has come to believe that the resistance to Trump the first time around failed and they need a new strategy. As I wrote yesterday about how leadership is paralyzed by their cowardice and incompetence, this is flat-out not true. The way that Democrats resisted Trump the first time around led to all kinds of historic electoral victories in 2018, 2020 and 2022. They flipped the dynamic around low turnout special elections like this on its head, where they used to favor Republicans, but since Trump won the first time, they have tilted towards the Democrats.
And this special election in a district that has voted heavily Republican since its creation in 2020 suggests that trend is still intact. In the wake of Trump’s victory in 2016, Democratic voters proved they would crawl over broken glass any day of the week to vote against Trump and his surrogates, and despite the desire of many in the party to embrace their idiotic bipartisan brain beloved only by their donors, this result suggests that there are still plenty who want to fight a man and his minions who the party rightfully called authoritarians all last year.
There is another dynamic to keep an eye on here, and it resembles the one that emerged southwest of this district in Nebraska during the 2024 general election. Independent candidate Dan Osborn came out of nowhere to give incumbent Republican Deb Fischer the fight of her life. While Osborn lost, his deep roots in Nebraska as a union leader gave him a kind of credibility with the voting public that no lifetime politician will ever receive in our cynical age.
That seems to be one of the better explanations for this near 25-point Iowa swing in just a few months, as Mike Zimmer spent nineteen years as an Industrial Technology teacher at East Central and Central DeWitt High Schools, five years as assistant principal and twelve years as principal. He has won local awards like Iowa State University Industrial Technology Teacher of the Year, and he owns his own local small business, Mike Zimmer Construction. Osborn proved the value of not being weighed down by the Democratic Party’s baggage in red states, but Zimmer could provide deeper insight into that dynamic, proving that the D next to his name is not an albatross if he is able to bring local credibility to the table that outshines his toxic party branding.
It’s too early and this election is too small to take any grand insight from it, other than the unimpeachable fact that a 25-point swing in a few months is the electoral universe telling you to pay attention. To what, we will find out, but this is more evidence of how thin Trump’s victory really was, and any Democrat who believes that capitulation is a superior strategy to taking the GOP head-on now has an election in this new Trump era suggesting their instincts are wrong yet again.
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