KDSN RADIO News
UNI professors publish research on Iowa’s U.S. House districts
Election day is just six weeks away and very few of the 435 races for U.S. House seats are competitive. However, based on the amount of advertising alone, two of the congressional races IN IOWA are getting national attention.
University of Northern Iowa political science professor Donna Hoffman said about 95% of incumbents in the U-S House will get reelected. “In Iowa, it’s about 85%, so there’s a little bit of a gap there,” Hoffman said.
Six years ago, in the 2018 election, Democrats were elected in three of Iowa’s four congressional districts. Republicans won all four districts in 2022. “So it’s the notion of a swing in Iowa. It happens at the presidential level. It can even happen in these congressional elections and they can even be competitive,” Hoffman said. “…Finding the right issues, getting the right cycle in terms of midterm (or) presidential election, turnout — all of those things can combine to make for some surprising results.”
UNI political science professor Christopher Larimer said while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is spending money on candidates in Iowa’s first and third districts, it’s hard to judge whether those seats will swing to the Democrats. “We’re still kind of trying to figure out: ‘What are the atmospherics of this election going to be?” Larimer said. “As strange as that sounds, we’ve had so much change over the summer.”
Larimer and Hoffman made their comments during a recent appearance on “Iowa Press” on Iowa PBS. The professors discussed their recently published research paper titled “Iowa’s Unique Congressional Competitiveness.” In Iowa’s first district, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, the incumbent, is in a rematch with Democrat Christina Bohannan. In 2022, Republican Congressman Zach Nunn won the third district race by about two thousand. His 2024 Democratic opponent is Lanon Baccam.
