Rating Changes in Iowa Following Tuesday’s Primary

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE

— In Iowa, Rep. Randy Feenstra (R, IA-4), who got a late endorsement from Donald Trump, lost a gubernatorial primary to Zach Lahn, an anti-establishment newcomer.

— Regardless of who the GOP picked to run against state Auditor Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor, we have been considering moving the race to Toss-up—and we are making that change today.

— We are also bumping both Iowa’s Senate race and the contest for the state’s 2nd District from Likely Republican to Leans Republican.

— With the Supreme Court allowing Alabama to use a 6-1 Republican map, mid-decade redistricting may be coming to a close, at least for 2026.

— In Vermont, popular Gov. Phil Scott (R) announced at the last minute that he’d seek a sixth term; his decision means that the GOP will almost certainly keep the state’s governor’s mansion for at least 2 more years.

Table 1: Crystal Ball gubernatorial rating changes

Table 2: Crystal Ball Senate rating change

Table 3: Crystal Ball House rating changes

As Iowa Republicans defy Trump, the Hawkeye State gets more competitive

One of the patterns from last night’s primary returns was that Republican House members seeking higher office took something of a beating.

In South Dakota, Rep. Dusty Johnson (R, SD-AL), who was trying to pull off what neighboring Gov. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) easily did two years ago—navigate a transition from the House to his state’s governorship—appears to have finished third. That South Dakota GOP race will go to a runoff, as no candidate cleared 35% of the vote: wealthy car dealer Toby Doeden took just over 30%, and sitting Gov. Larry Rhoden, who ascended to his job after now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem joined the Trump administration, took 25%.

But the eventual GOP primary winner in South Dakota will be basically guaranteed a general election win this fall. This is not the case in next-door Iowa—a state that, in the now-famous words of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, seems to have “shocked the nation” again (or, the outcome was at least surprising enough to those of us who follow politics closely).

During most of the year, Rep. Randy Feenstra (R, IA-4) was seen as, at least, a tenuous favorite in the Republican primary for his state’s open-seat governorship. Feenstra won his seat in 2020 by ousting then-Rep. Steve King, a gadfly Republican whose views were beyond the pale for many of his party’s leadership.

Earlier this week, National Journal’s Abby Turner noted that, even as he faced a multi-way primary, Feenstra had seemed to shift too much of his focus to the general election—in a state where voters are used to retail politics, he frequently skipped debates and ran a campaign that seemed distant. Another canary in the coal mine was a late May survey from Republican pollster John Couvillon: While none of the primary candidates was clearing 25%, Feenstra was in second place to his main rival, wealthy businessman Zach Lahn who, ironically, could count the aforementioned King as one of his supporters. However, shortly after that poll was published, Feenstra got a coveted Trump endorsement, which appeared likely to move the needle enough in his favor. It didn’t.

With virtually all votes reporting, Lahn leads Feenstra by a 37.8% to 37.0% margin. One early indicator that Feenstra was in trouble was that he was clearly weak at home (he is from the Sioux City area). In 2020, three counties that occupy the state’s northwestern corner—Lyon, Sioux, and Plymouth—collectively gave Feenstra close to three-quarters of the vote against King; yesterday, that area was a draw, as Feenstra won them by about 90 votes out of the 10,000 they cast.

Map 1 breaks the Republican primary down by media market. The Lahn campaign’s spending strategy, from these returns, appears clear: it focused on the two most populous markets, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids/Waterloo—while the latter was close, the former made up just under 40% of the statewide share and also gave Lahn just under 40% of its vote. Meanwhile, Feenstra tended to do better in the markets that were less centrally-located: he carried Davenport while Omaha represented his best substantially-sized market—curiously, while many of those Omaha-area counties are in his district, he has less of a personal history there than he does in the Sioux City area, where he seemed to underwhelm.

Map 1: 2026 Iowa Republican gubernatorial primary by media market

On this note, last week, Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson wrote a fun article on media markets.

With this contest settled, Feenstra’s loss represented a rare 2026 result where a Trump-endorsed Republican did not win their primary, though there have been other cases this cycle at lower levels of government—in North Carolina, for instance, state Senate President Phil Berger (R) got the president’s support but narrowly lost his primary.

Lahn will now meet state Auditor Rob Sand (D) in the general election, as the latter had no primary opposition. Sand first won his office in 2018 by defeating an incumbent by 5 points and then held on by a quarter of a percentage point in 2022 to become Iowa’s only statewide Democratic officeholder. During his time as auditor, Sand has channeled the state’s senior senator, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), by regularly holding meetings in all the state’s counties.

The most recent public poll of the race was an April poll from Echelon Insights that actually had Sand up 51%-39% on Feenstra. We kept the race at Leans Republican since then because we’ve felt that Democrats just have a higher “burden of proof” in reddening states like Iowa. But there seems to be some evidence pointing towards a more competitive race.

While Democrats won’t have Feenstra’s voting record to scrutinize in the general election, it would be fair to call Lahn a less proven candidate; we would also expect Democrats to question Lahn’s Iowa credentials—though he was born and raised in the Hawkeye State, he built his business in Kansas and voted there in recent elections.

When the minority party in a state pulls out a win in a state that usually votes against them, majority-party overreach is typically a contributing factor. Though Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) is not as unpopular as some of her colleagues from neighboring states have been over the past decade or so—think Kansas’s Sam Brownback (R) or Illinois’s Pat Quinn (D)—she has usually ranked as one of the nation’s least popular governors. Lahn being more of an outsider than Feenstra could conceivably be helpful if he wants to distance himself from the state’s current leadership.

Overall, and with these factors in mind, we are moving the Iowa gubernatorial race from Leans Republican to Toss-up.

We are also making a couple of federal-level rating changes in Iowa.

In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this week, Marc Short, a Center for Politics scholar and former Chief of Staff to Vice President Mike Pence, suggested that some of the Trump administration’s trade policies, compounded with the Iran War’s fallout, may be especially harsh in farm states like Iowa. Though this effect has probably been reduced in recent years by bigger-picture partisan realignments, the Farm Belt has sometimes revolted against incumbent administrations over such issues—during the 1980s, for instance, as Republicans were blamed for the farm crisis, Iowa was one of the nation’s most Democratic-leaning states in presidential elections. While we wouldn’t expect the state to revert to its much less red Obama-era lean, this local factor as well as a broader national environment may make some other races more competitive.

Specifically, we are moving both the state’s Senate race and the contest for IA-2, both of which are open, GOP-held seats, from Likely Republican to Leans Republican.

In the Senate race, Rep. Ashley Hinson (R, IA-2), was a Trump-endorsed candidate who fared much better than Feenstra—she defeated former state Sen. Jim Carlin (R) by almost three-to-one. Democrats had more of an actual contest, though state Rep. Josh Turek defeated former state Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls by 26 points. Both Democrats fundraised similarly, although Turek got a significant amount of outside help from the group VoteVets, which may have made the difference.

Hinson has performed well in her light red 2nd District and starts the general election with a notable cash advantage, although the preponderance of polling we have seems to point to a single-digit edge for Republicans. Even as we’re downgrading this race for Republicans, Democrats’ larger-picture challenge remains: while they have several GOP-held offensive opportunities, many of them are clearly red-leaning.

We are also moving our rating for Hinson’s open House seat, which takes up the northeastern corner of the state. State Rep. Lindsay James (D) and former state Rep. Joe Mitchell (R) won their respective primaries easily. While this district, at the presidential level, is redder than districts 1 and 3, both of which we rate as Toss-ups, it isn’t so much so that we could justify rating it two categories to the right, especially if Iowa as a whole ends up competitive this year.

Mitchell’s fundraising has been better than James’s so far, and Mitchell may benefit from Hinson’s Senate run in what is still her current district. However, this race merits watching amidst a possible Democratic wave environment. Despite voting for Trump by 10 points in 2024, if the statewide races for governor and Senate are reasonably close, the district may very well vote Democratic in one or both of those contests, perhaps providing James a lift. Table 4, reprinted from an analysis we did of Iowa last year that laid out the challenges Democrats face in the state, shows the congressional district-level results in the state in recent contests. Three of the state’s four congressional districts are less Republican than the state as a whole is, thanks to the deep GOP lean of the outgoing Feenstra’s 4th District.

Table 4: Recent statewide results in Iowa congressional districts

Sources: The Downballot, Dave’s Redistricting App, Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections

Democrats also won a version of this district in 2018, as they were winning three of the state’s four House districts in a blue-leaning midterm (but Republicans held the governorship, and there was no Senate race that year). Still, it’s the heaviest lift of the three House races Democrats are targeting in Iowa.

Quick notes elsewhere

— We will take a more detailed look at California’s House primary results, which sometimes can provide clues about the general election, in a future issue after the results are finalized (which will take several weeks). But a race to watch is in the redrawn CA-6, which is one of the five seats Democrats redrew to help themselves in their gerrymander. Rep. Kevin Kiley, left with no good options after the redraw, switched his party affiliation from Republican to independent in order to seek reelection in this Sacramento-based district, which backed Kamala Harris for president by 8.5 points. He was joined on the ballot by another Republican, Michael Stansfield, as well as five Democrats. Currently, Kiley is in first with 27% of the vote, while Stansfield is edging out the leading Democrat, Richard Pan, 22%-21%. It would be a catastrophe for Democrats, and a coup for Republicans, if Democrats got shut out of the top two election. But let’s not jump to conclusions, as only about half of the expected vote has been tallied yet. If the results in California indeed get bluer as all the votes are tallied—as many analysts expect—Pan may very well rise over time and get into the top two. One sign of this possibility is that redder Placer County has a higher percentage of its expected votes counted than bluer Sacramento County, according to both Associated Press and Decision Desk HQ estimates (those two counties make up almost the whole district). But this one will be worth monitoring as the vote count is finalized.

— Outside of the Tuesday night primary results, new Republican-drawn maps designed to eliminate one Democratic seat apiece in Louisiana and Alabama were finalized in recent days. The former was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor late last week, and the latter was allowed to go into effect by the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday evening. We previously analyzed these maps in depth a couple of weeks ago; in any event, LA-6 moves from Safe Democratic to Safe Republican and AL-2 moves from Safe Democratic to Likely Republican. This may be it for the redistricting wars in 2026.

— Late last week, Gov. Phil Scott (R-VT) announced that he will be running for a sixth, two-year term. Despite Vermont’s strong Democratic lean at the federal level, the moderate Scott has been an electoral powerhouse, winning by more than 40 points in each of his last three elections. We had been holding Vermont at Likely Republican as we awaited Scott’s decision; that race moves to Safe Republican now that he is running again.

Kyle Kondik is a Political Analyst at the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball.

J. Miles Coleman is the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ authoritative, nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He also serves as the Center’s Media Relations Coordinator. Follow him on Twitter @jmilescoleman.

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Views expressed in this column are those of the author, not those of Rasmussen Reports. Comments about this content should be directed to the author or syndicate.