By the numbers, Iowa should be a swing state, but it is currently solidly in Republican control. In the previous five presidential election cycles, Iowa was won by the Democratic candidate in 2000, 2008 and 2012 and by the Republican candidate in 2004 and 2016. In 2016, Trump defeated Clinton by a 9.4 percent margin. The widest margin of victory was Barack Obama’s 10 percent margin in 2008 while the narrowest was Al Gore’s 0.32 percent margin in 2000. With a Partisan Voting Index of R+3, Iowa has a Republican governor and 2 Republican U.S. senators, but only 1 out of 4 members of Congress are currently Republican. We are following the Iowa Senate race based on the 2018 pick-up of two U.S. House seats formerly held by Republicans and our data project that Democratic voter mobilization could flip the Senate seat to the Democrats.

In 2018, all eyes were on the congressional races and the governor’s race. Of the past ten gubernatorial elections in Iowa, only two have resulted in the seat changing party hands. In the 1998 election, the Democratic Party won the governorship for the first time since 1966, and the Democrats then held the governorship until Republican Governor Terry Branstad was elected in 2010. Branstad, who served for two consecutive and six total terms as Iowa governor, resigned to be the U.S. Ambassador to China in 2017. Lieutenant Governor Kim Reynolds took on the role of governor and in 2018 won a full term with 50.3 percent of the 1,327,638 votes cast.

Having gained control of the Iowa State Senate in 2016, Republicans increased their majority in the State Senate in 2018 to 32 seats compared to 18 Democratic held seats. In the State House, Republicans also held their majority but lost 4 seats, winning 54 seats to the Democrats’ 46 seats.