Sarah Watson had the scoop for the Quad-City Times: U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks no longer officially lives in Scott County, or anywhere in Iowa’s first Congressional district. In July 2025, she changed her voter registration back to the Ottumwa home she shares with her husband.

Aspiring candidates and campaign strategists could learn a lot from how Miller-Meeks has handled questions surrounding her residency over the past four years. It’s hard to believe an experienced politician could botch this issue so badly.

“Good job you did! Great job,” President Donald Trump says to U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks in a 30-second commercial that has reached thousands of Iowans on the radio or social media platforms over the past month.

The three-term Republican did not place the ads through her campaign committee, which had accumulated more than $2.6 million cash on hand as of September 30.

Instead, Miller-Meeks—considered one of the country’s most vulnerable House Republicans—has used taxpayer funds to share Trump’s praise with Iowans.

Bleeding Heartland’s review of data from Facebook’s ad library and Federal Communications Commission files suggest that Miller-Meeks’ Congressional office has spent at least $10,000 to run this spot. (Several other taxpayer-funded radio ads have also been in rotation this fall.)

If the 2024 campaign is any indication, Miller-Meeks may spend much more from her Congressional office budget in the coming months, as she seeks to shore up her appeal with conservatives before another competitive primary election in Iowa’s first district.

Ed Tibbetts, a longtime reporter and editor in the Quad-Cities, is the publisher of the Along the Mississippi newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at edtibbetts.substack.com.

Attorney General Brenna Bird buried the news. I can understand why.

No self-respecting right-winger would want to be seen backing a centralized citizen registry in Washington, DC.

For as long as I can remember, conservatives were in the vanguard of opposing such big government excesses. Yet, here is Iowa’s attorney general—along with Secretary of State Paul Pate—actually helping to build what some critics are likening to a super database for Big Brother.

Carl Olsen is the founder of Iowans for Medical Marijuana.

The Iowaska Church of Healing is seeking a federal exemption for the religious use of ayahuasca, a hallucinogen in Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act. Several other churches have received exemptions for ayahuasca, so it seems like the process should be straightforward, and that’s what the church argued in the U.S. Court of Appeals on November 14, 2025, after a six-year delay in processing their application.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) created a Guidance Document for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 2009 which is at the heart of this case argued before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on November 14, 2025. In re: Iowaska Church of Healing, No. 25-1140. The Guidance Document explains how to apply for a religious exception to the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970 using the regulatory authority in the CSA.

Prior to the decision in Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficente União do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006), the DEA had claimed it lacked the regulatory authority in the CSA to make religious exceptions. The Guidance Document does not include an apology for that error, but it does finally settle the issue of whether the DEA has the authority to make religious exceptions. It does, and it always did.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

About 2,000 nurses in four Des Moines area UnityPoint Health campuses will vote early this month on whether to unionize their ranks for what leaders of the movement say will bring more bargaining power for salaries, benefits and working conditions through a proposed affiliation with the Teamsters Union.

Nurses are expected to vote December 7 to 9 on unionization at four UnityPoint locations: Iowa Methodist Medical Center, Blank Children’s Hospital, Methodist West Hospital, and Iowa Lutheran Hospital.

An affirmative vote would be a groundbreaking one in Iowa health care—and the union movement—as the Teamsters would represent nurses in non-profit hospitals, with the potential for organizing other health-care workers across a span of UnityPoint facilities in Iowa—and other medical centers in which health-care workers could be inspired by the Des Moines vote.

“We are fed up with UnityPoint whittling away at the things nurses need at the bedside,” said Alex Wilken, 39, a critical care nurse at Iowa Methodist Medical Center with more than a decade of experience.

Wilken is on the organizing committee for unionization with his nursing peers at the four centers.

“It isn’t just about pay,” Wilken said, adding that patient-staff ratios and safer working conditions are a big part of the push for what he believes will be more effective advocacy.

“The method we have here in the United States is to unionize,” Wilken said in a phone interview.

UnityPoint leaders say unionization is not in the best interests of the health-care network. UnityPoint management denied a request this summer for voluntary union recognition in workplace negotiations.

“At UnityPoint Health, we believe that direct collaboration is the foundation for building the strongest and most supportive environment for both our team members and the patients we serve,” UnityPoint officials said in a statement sent to Iowa Mercury. “For this reason, we believe that representation by an outside party is not in the best interests of our patients, our nurses or our community.”

Iowa Methodist Medical Center in Des Moines (photo By Douglas Burns of The Iowa Mercury)

Union organizers held a news conference and rally on December 2 in front of Methodist Medical Center (across from 1320 Center Street) where they called for an investigation into how UnityPoint funded any opposition to unionization. In a flyer promoting the event, nurses and union officials allege that UnityPoint spent $6 million to fight the organizing drive.

UnityPoint did not respond directly to questions on funding sources for any activity related to the union vote.

Sammi Ladd, 36, a critical care nurse at Iowa Methodist, said health-care workers are concerned that staffing and security levels are not high enough to deal with patient violence. Ladd was attached by a patient while pregnant and kicked a few years later by another patient.

“I’ve seen my co-workers and friends get strangled by patients,” Ladd said.

Ladd expects the nurses to vote for unionization. The vote is managed by the National Labor Relations Board.

“I do truly think this is something that will go through,” Ladd said in an interview. “I do think this something that our community, Iowa, and nurses, deserve.”

Alano De La Rosa, the principal officer for Teamsters Local 90, which includes the Des Moines area and reaches into many other Iowa counties, said nurses will be able to negotiate with the full force of the Teamsters Union behind them. This includes a $400 million national strike fund, he said.

UnityPoint is clearly worried that the union effort with nurses at the four medical centers in the Des Moines could spread to their other facilities and staffing sectors, De La Rosa said.

“I believe it would have been considered by UnityPoint when they started cutting millions of dollars in checks to union busters,” De La Rosa said.

De La Rosa said the Teamsters Union has experience representing nurses and health-care workers.

“They are very big-hearted and they want to help everybody around them,” he said.

The vote is coming two months later than originally scheduled as as the federal government shutdown forced a postponement of a vote that had been set for early October.

Editor’s note from Laura Belin: Alex Wilken discussed the organizing drive on Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck podcast on December 1. The conversation is worth your time; several participants asked excellent questions, grounded in their experience with labor unions or working in the health care sector. You can watch that video here.

A little-known conservative group based in Virginia spent heavily in October to run a 30-second positive ad about Attorney General Brenna Bird on television and streaming services across Iowa.

The Fund for Economic Independence later claimed their commercial “sharply” improved Bird’s image with “targeted persuadable voters,” moving her from a 7-point deficit to a tie in a ballot test against Democratic challenger Nate Willems.

While it’s impossible to confirm whether that commercial measurably helped Bird with swing voters, one thing is clear: more than a year before the 2026 midterm election, the attorney general’s polling numbers were bad enough to inspire a well-funded outside rescue mission.

Even for President Donald Trump, who lobs public insults on a daily basis, this one stood out. During a November 14 gaggle with journalists on Air Force One, Trump tried to silence a reporter asking about the Epstein files: “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”

The target of his childish name-calling was Bloomberg News correspondent Catherine Lucey, and she has an Iowa connection.

Lyle Muller is a board member of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and Iowa High School Press Association, a trustee of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, former executive director/editor of the Iowa Center for Public Journalism that became part of the Midwest Center, former editor of The Cedar Rapids Gazette, and a recipient of the Iowa Newspaper Association’s Distinguished Service Award. In retirement, he is the professional adviser for Grinnell College’s Scarlet & Black newspaper. This article first appeared on his Substack newsletter.

It only took a few hours after my November 18 column about supporting local journalists to be published for Folience, the “100% employee-owned portfolio of companies with reputations for excellence,” to announce it had sold The Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids.

Also going to the buyer, Adams Multimedia of Minneapolis, are eleven community newspapers Folience owned through The Gazette.

“There’s a lot of processing,” Gazette Editor Zack Kucharski said Tuesday evening about his busy day talking through the sale and concerns with staffers, including those at some of the local papers. “It’s been a difficult day.”

I worked at The Gazette for 25 years as a bureau chief, reporter, and editor, so news of the sale stings. Of course, we should be used to the stings now. Another Iowa newspaper owner gone during the changing landscape for newspapers but also any news organization.

The bill President Donald Trump signed on November 12 to end the longest federal government shutdown includes $16 million for designated projects in Iowa, according to Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of a Senate Appropriations Committee report. U.S. Senators Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley were among 60 senators who approved the funding bill on November 10. All four U.S. House Republicans from Iowa—Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA-01), Ashley Hinson (IA-02), Zach Nunn (IA-03), and Randy Feenstra (IA-04)—were among the 22 representatives who voted for the bill two days later.

The bill funds most federal government operations through January 30, 2026. A few agencies and programs, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, are funded through the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30, 2026.

Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn had all requested “community project funding” through various USDA programs. The final bill included eleven of those earmarked projects: five in Hinson’s district, and three each sought by Miller-Meeks and Nunn.

The 36 counties in IA-04 will receive none of the earmarked funding, because for the fifth straight year, Feenstra declined to submit any requests for community projects. Ernst and Grassley have not participated in the earmarks process in recent years either. Abstaining from the process does not save any taxpayer dollars; it only ensures that the federal funds allocated for Congressionally-directed spending flow to other members’ districts.

These are the first earmarks Iowa will receive from a government funding bill since 2024. Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn submitted a combined $115 million in community project requests for fiscal year 2025, but the appropriations bill Congress approved in March of this year—with Iowa’s whole delegation voting in favor—included no money for any earmarked projects.

Miller-Meeks, Hinson, and Nunn each submitted fifteen community project funding requests (the maximum allowed for each U.S. House member) for the current fiscal year. Most of them were repeated from last year. The fate of the other projects—which include improvements to roads, flood mitigation, higher education, and airports—won’t be known until Congress approves and Trump signs final appropriations bills for fiscal year 2026.

Jeff Morrison is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative and the publisher of the Between Two Rivers newsletter, where this article first appeared. Find more of his work at betweentworivers.substack.com and iowahighwayends.net.

Forty-three Iowa school districts held bond referendums on November 4. According to unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office, eighteen passed, fifteen had a majority in favor but not the required 60 percent supermajority, and ten failed to reach 50 percent. The middle category has five districts of all sizes—Cedar Rapids, Easton Valley, Hinton, Independence, and Sergeant Bluff-Luton—receiving more than 58 percent but less than 60 percent support.

The 43 districts voted on a combined $1,435,950,000 in general obligation bonds. (That includes Atlantic’s $22.5 million bond for school construction, which passed, but not its $18.5 million sales tax revenue bond for a multipurpose facility, which failed.)

“I think it really speaks to the changing of the times,” Jill Shudak told me on November 6, two days after she became the first woman elected mayor of southwest Iowa’s largest city. Council Bluffs is “moving forward, and they’re ready for a forward thinker.”

Amid many Democratic victories from coast to coast in the November 2025 election, Shudak’s accomplishment stayed mostly below the radar. But she beat the odds in two ways. As a first-term city council member, she defeated a well-known, long-serving incumbent. Council Bluffs voters had elected Matt Walsh mayor three times; he had previously served on the city council since 1996.

It’s also notable that a Democrat won a mayoral race in a city that has trended red. (While local elections are nonpartisan in Iowa, area Democrats and labor activists were supporting Shudak, and Walsh is a Republican.) Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of results from the 2024 general election show voters across the 22 Council Bluffs precincts preferred Donald Trump for president by a margin of 53.6 percent to 44.7 percent for Kamala Harris, and preferred Republican Randy Feenstra to Democratic challenger Ryan Melton in the Congressional race by 55.3 percent to 44.1 percent.

Unofficial results from the 2025 election show Shudak received 3,641 votes (43.9 percent) to 3,524 votes (42.5 percent) for Walsh. City council member Chris Peterson likely received most of the 1,130 write-in votes (13.6 percent) in the mayoral race.

Shudak made time to talk about her campaign despite a “whirlwind” of activity since the election, including conversations with the city’s department heads and a round table discussion about property taxes with Governor Kim Reynolds. Here’s the full video from our interview.

At long last, U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra confirmed on October 28 that he’s running for governor.

For all of his talk about “taking Iowa to new heights”—and boy, was there a lot of it—the Republican front-runner’s rollout won’t get high marks.

I can’t remember when I met Claire Celsi. It was years before she decided to run for the state legislature. Our paths crossed often at Democratic events, and we knew many of the same people in progressive circles. I valued her take on the latest news and her thoughts about blogging, since she had kept an online journal during the 2000s.

Claire was generous with her time as a volunteer for many Democratic candidates, starting with Tom Harkin’s first U.S. Senate race in 1984. She was one of the early organizers of the West Des Moines Democrats, back when that suburb leaned strongly to Republicans. She managed Mike Huston’s Congressional campaign in 2000 and worked hard in 2017 to help Renee Hardman defeat an incumbent to win a West Des Moines city council seat. (Hardman is now the Democratic nominee to succeed Claire in Iowa Senate district 16.)

Josh Hughes described how Claire was the first “grown up” to take him seriously as a Democratic activist. She enjoyed spending time with people of all ages. Josh took this picture near the Surf Ballroom in August 2018, when he and Olivia Habinck were leaders of the College and Young Democrats of Iowa, and Claire and I carpooled with them to the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding.

Charles Bruner, Ralph Rosenberg, and David Osterberg jointly wrote this piece. All of the authors served with Paul Johnson in the Iowa legislature and remain active in Iowa politics and policy. They serve on the board of the Johnson Center for Land Stewardship Policy, which worked with Curt Meine in the development of We Can Do Better.

A land comprised of wilderness islands at one extreme and urban islands at the other, with vast food and fiber factories in between, does not constitute a geography of hope. But private land need not be devoted to a single-purpose enterprise. With a broader understanding of land and our place within the landscape, our Nation’s farms, ranches, and private forest land can and do serve the multiple functions that we and all other life do depend upon.

That quote is from Paul Johnson’s introduction to the USDA National Resources Soil Conservation Services’ 1996 America’s Private Land: A Geography of Hope, which is even more relevant today than when he wrote it and shepherded that publication. 

Paul Johnson (1941-2021) was a pivotal figure in American conservation, dedicating his life to bridging the gap between agriculture and environmental stewardship. A new book of Paul’s writings has just been released.

Some 25,000 to 30,000 Iowans were among the millions of Americans who protested President Donald Trump’s abuses of power on October 18. Despite the grave threats that brought people to the rallies, the prevailing mood was upbeat at the two “No Kings” events I attended. That’s consistent with news reports and anecdotal accounts of a “festival atmosphere” in cities and towns across the country.

I took most of the photos enclosed below in Indianola, where more than 300 people lined a busy street in the late morning, or at the early afternoon rally outside the state capitol in Des Moines. Hand-made signs vastly outnumbered professionally printed signs, capturing the protesters’ passion, creativity, and humor.

Pam Mackey Taylor is the Director of the Iowa Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Every three years, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) conducts a Triennial Review of its water quality standards. Part of the review is a determination of what changes need to be made to Iowa’s existing water quality standards.

The agenda for the Triennial Review was simple. The DNR intends to focus on the following topic areas related to water quality standards:

• Tribal reserved rights
• Antidegradation
• Human health criteria
• Chapter 61/Surface Water Classification document cleanup
• Use attainability analysis
• PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, sometimes called “forever chemicals”)
• Lake nutrients

After digging into these topics during the review meeting, what jumped out was the lack of investment the State of Iowa and the DNR have made in water quality and improved water quality standards over the last two decades. 

Robin Opsahl covers the state legislature and politics for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared.

The Iowa Revenue Estimating Conference on October 16 lowered its estimates for the state’s tax revenue in fiscal year 2026 by $375 million compared to predictions from March of this year.

The panel, chaired by Iowa Department of Management Director Kraig Paulsen, approved changes to the revenue estimates in light of recent economic shifts and tax policy changes like the federal “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the budget reconciliation measure President Donald Trump signed in July. The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency reported the state’s revenue in fiscal year 2025 was $198 million below the panel’s March forecast because of the impact of federal tax law changes.

Paulsen said the new REC estimates account for both the reduced state revenue due to federal tax policies, the impacts of the state’s 2024 acceleration of previously approved income tax cuts, as well as economic factors like rising unemployment rates and China’s move to import soybeans from South American countries instead of U.S. producers.

A new Iowa poll is testing messages about a $4,000 tax credit to help families cover “approved education expenses,” and suggests that approach may save taxpayer money currently spent on children enrolled in public schools.

It’s not clear who commissioned the text survey, which has been in the field in recent days. The questionnaire points to Randy Feenstra’s campaign for governor, which is technically still in the “exploratory” phase, or some entity planning to support Feenstra for governor. Many of the questions use preferred Republican frames (“education freedom,” parental choice, “limiting government overreach”). The poll asks how important it is for Iowa’s next governor to “work to improve K-12 education,” and tests only one potential match-up: Randy Feenstra vs. Rob Sand. (Last month, Bleeding Heartland covered a different poll testing messages about Feenstra and Sand.)

Homeschoolers are an important Republican constituency, especially among social conservatives. Families who send their kids to private schools—almost all of which are Christian or Catholic—would also welcome an education tax credit, in addition to the taxpayer assistance they already receive through Iowa’s school voucher program (“education savings accounts”).

Feenstra has good reason to search for ways to shore up his support with the “education freedom” crowd. His underwhelming victory over a little-known 2024 primary challenger highlighted troubles on his right flank. He is unpopular among property rights activists who oppose the use of eminent domain to build Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline. He has skipped forums involving other Republican candidates for governor, including an Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition event in July. Feenstra’s exploratory committee has the resources to pay for opinion research.

A recent poll of “likely Republican voters,” conducted by American Viewpoint, found Feenstra “in a commanding position,” with 41 percent support in the governor’s race and no other GOP candidate above 5 percent. A cautionary note: American Viewpoint’s polls for Feenstra’s U.S. House campaign found the incumbent with a roughly 50-point lead over challenger Kevin Virgil before the 2024 GOP primary. Feenstra ended up winning the nomination in Iowa’s fourth Congressional district by a margin of 60.1 percent to 39.4 percent.

A pair of recent polls have tried to gauge how the arrest of then Des Moines Superintendent Ian Roberts could affect Iowa’s U.S. Senate race.

One text survey, which was in the field this past week, seeks to determine how much respondents have heard about the incident, who “bears the most responsibility” for the situation, and whether the Roberts controversy gives respondents concerns about Des Moines School Board President Jackie Norris, who is one of the Democrats running for Senate. A different version of the survey tests another negative message about Norris’ past political work and support for “radical DEI policies” on the school board.

Staff for Norris did not respond to inquiries about the survey, but the question wording (enclosed in full below) strongly suggests the Norris campaign commissioned it. Notably, the poll tests U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson (the Republican front-runner) against Norris twice, and Hinson against State Representative Josh Turek once, but does not ask respondents about their preference between Hinson and either State Senator Zach Wahls or Iraq War veteran Nathan Sage. It also tests messages about Norris, but not about any other Democratic candidate.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the main campaign arm of U.S. Senate Republicans, commissioned a separate poll of 579 “Democratic primary voters via text-to-web surveys” on September 29 and 30, a few days after Roberts’ arrest. The NRSC has not released full results from that poll, the questionnaire, or the screen used to identify “Democratic primary voters.” Jennie Taer published a few findings in an article on the conservative website The Daily Wire.

“The system is broken,” declared Libertarian Thomas Laehn as he kicked off his U.S. Senate campaign on October 11.

The Greene County attorney, who became the first Libertarian elected to a partisan office in Iowa in 2018, styled his case against two-party governance as a two-count “indictment” of the 535 members of Congress.

One of his central arguments could appeal to many disaffected Republicans.

Matt Russell is a farmer, political writer, and progressive ag and rural leader. He has published work in the New York Times, TIME, AgInsider, Civil Eats, and many state or local publications. He co-owns Coyote Run Farm with his husband Patrick Standley in rural Lacona, Iowa. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Growing New Leaders: Perspectives from Coyote Run Farm.

The media is covering the federal government shutdown as a battle between Democrats and Republicans. I disagree that this is a fair assessment. The battle is about more than partisan politics. For President Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and Republicans, this is a battle about redefining the federal government, the Constitution, our democracy, and our nation as it has developed over 250 years.

I don’t think the federal government has ever been used for this kind of obviously partisan communication, other than what Trump has previously said and done. As a reminder, the president is not covered by the Hatch Act, the law that prevents federal employees from engaging in partisan politics while performing their duties as well as other aspects of their lives.

Without doing further research, I don’t want to claim something like this has never happened, but unless someone can show evidence that it has, I’m willing to suggest it likely hasn’t.

A text poll in the field this week is probing whether the recent arrest of Superintendent Ian Roberts is a “convincing” argument against a bond issue that is a priority for the Des Moines Public Schools.

Voters in the Des Moines school district will decide on November 4 whether to approve a $265 million, 20-year general obligation bond to finance the Reimagining Education, Reinvigorating Schools initiative. The referendum needs at least a 60 percent “yes” vote to pass; the district hopes to expand or remodel all of the Des Moines high schools and nearly a dozen middle or elementary schools.

The survey tests two messages against the bond referendum and two supporting it, with a ballot test before and after respondents read the arguments. I enclose below the full questionnaire, drawn from screenshots shared by those who took the “Des Moines Schools Survey.”

Representatives of Yes for Des Moines Schools, a political committee formed this summer to support the bond issue, did not respond to Facebook or email messages seeking to confirm whether the group commissioned the poll. But the results could provide valuable information to that organization, which had raised $105,000 by mid-July, according to a campaign finance disclosure.

Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Through what political scientists might call a deep canvass into her own culturally polarized family in rural, de-industrialized Ohio author Beth Macy gives us a riveting, devastating and call-to-action mirror into our nation with her extraordinary new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In a Fractured America.

The powerhouse work of non-fiction connects three threads—Macy’s memoir of life in rural Ohio, both as a kid and returning adult, exhaustive and exhilarating reporting on a changing America, and a fierce case for the role of local news in preserving or stitching back democracy.

You can get a first-hand preview of Paper Girl in Des Moines, Iowa this weekend with the author of the just-released book.

For years, Governor Kim Reynolds resisted COVID-19 vaccine mandates, saying she believed “in Iowans’ right to make health care decisions based on what’s best for themselves and their families.”

But as this year’s cold and flu season begins, many Iowans who want to protect themselves and their families from COVID-19 are unable to get a booster shot, because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration restricted access to updated vaccines.

Public health authorities in about two dozen states have issued guidance or standing orders designed to help adults choose to vaccinate themselves or their children against COVID-19. The Reynolds administration has not acted.

Staff for the governor’s office and Iowa Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to several requests for comment over the past ten days.

Robin Opsahl covers the state legislature and politics for Iowa Capital Dispatch, where this article first appeared.

Des Moines Public Schools superintendent Ian Roberts has resigned from his position effective immediately, lawyers representing him said on September 30.

UPDATE: On September 29, the Des Moines School Board learned that the Iowa Board of Education Examiners had revoked Roberts’ administrator license, and received from federal authorities a copy of the final order of removal and other documentation indicating that Roberts was not authorized to work in the U.S. The board held another special meeting at which members voted to put Roberts on unpaid leave. They also gave his attorney until noon on September 30 to provide documents supporting his claim to citizenship. Otherwise the school district will start the process of terminating his contract. Original post follows.

Members of the Des Moines School Board voted unanimously on September 27 to place Superintendent Dr. Ian Roberts on paid administrative leave, one day after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him. ICE has said Roberts is unlawfully present in the U.S. and lacks work authorization.

In support of the motion she offered at the special meeting, school board member Kim Martorano said, “While there is still much that we don’t know, what we do know is that Dr. Roberts is currently unavailable to perform his duties as superintendent.” She said Iowa Code Chapter 279 and “standard district practice” called for putting Roberts on paid administrative leave “pending further information. The board may revisit this at any time that we have obtained additional concrete information relevant to Dr. Roberts’ status.”

Voters in Iowa House district 7 will elect a successor to Republican State Representative Mike Sexton on Tuesday, December 9. Governor Kim Reynolds announced the special election on September 24, five days after Sexton resigned to become the next leader of Iowa’s Rural Development office in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That’s the same position former U.S. Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield held during the Biden administration.

Sexton had served in the Iowa House since 2015; he previously served a term in the Iowa Senate, starting in 1999. Most recently he chaired the House Agriculture Committee; House leaders have not yet named his successor in that role. He endorsed Carly Fiorina before the 2016 Iowa caucuses but was an early supporter of Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign and attended several Trump rallies in Iowa in 2023.

This race will be the fifth special election for an Iowa legislative district in 2025. But Democrats should not expect another upset win here; House district 7 is among the state’s most solidly Republican districts.

Rick Morain is the former publisher and owner of the Jefferson Herald, for which he writes a regular column. This essay first appeared on Substack.

Congress averted an impending federal government shutdown in March by reaching a bipartisan compromise, which kept the government funded through the end of the current fiscal year. Time passes, and we’re approaching the new deadline.

By now a functional Congress would have performed its due diligence and approved the twelve required federal spending bills for the fiscal year. Has that happened? Of course not. So the House, the Senate, and President Donald Trump are dancing through the same old drill. They have until midnight on Tuesday, September 30, to get it done.

Chuck Isenhart is an investigative reporter, photographer and recovering Iowa state legislator offering research, analysis, education and public affairs advocacy at his Substack newsletter Iowa Public Policy Geek, where this essay first appeared.

In 2014, Raki Giannakouros and Blue Sky Solar put six solar panels on the roof of my house. I have not paid for an electron since. The installation has paid for itself multiple times. Even with Alliant Energy’s recent 19 percent daily “customer charge” increase, my monthly bill is still less than a Thomas Jefferson.

When natural gas prices doubled for everybody in the months after the Texas freeze, I was able to use an electric space heater on many winter nights to avoid the worst of the gas price surge. All made possible by a net-metering policy in Iowa that allows me to generate power the utility can sell to others in the summer (avoiding costs for the utility) that I can reclaim in the winter (when electricity demand is down).

Dave Leshtz is the editor of The Prairie Progressive.

“Satanism is as American as apple pie.”

           –Bill Douglas, author of The People are Kind: A Religious History of Iowa

It was hot as hell on Sunday, September 14, in Toledo, Iowa—the scene of a public reading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

For the second time, members of the Satanic Temple of Iowa gathered to honor the epic poem they consider the foundational text of what history calls The Enlightenment. My car’s thermometer reached 93 degrees as I parked in front of the Tama County courthouse. Undeterred by the heat, eight Temple members were dressed in their traditional Satanic black finery as they read Milton’s blank verse masterpiece beneath a black pop-up tent.

When I attended the Temple’s first public reading last summer, members were still smarting from the Iowa Department of Administrative Services’ abrupt cancellation of their planned event at the state capitol. Agency director Adam Steen had yanked its approval, forcing the group to look for another government location.

A poll in the field this week previews attack lines Republicans may use next year against State Auditor Rob Sand, the likely Democratic nominee for governor.

Some Iowans have received this survey over the phone, and others over text. The questions enclosed below are taken verbatim from a respondent’s screenshots. A different respondent who took the poll by phone confirmed the question wording.

A quick reminder: although you may feel angry when you hear biased or misleading claims about Democratic candidates, it’s better not to hang up or click away. Take screenshots or detailed notes, or record the phone call, and share the questionnaire with me. (I won’t publish your name.)

Adam Zabner represents Iowa House district 90, covering part of Iowa City.

In April 2024, Bleeding Heartland published an op-ed I wrote detailing my fight with Governor Kim Reynolds’ administration to secure voting rights for Iowans on Medicaid. The fight centered around a federal law, the National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to offer voter registration to people registering for public assistance programs.

As I wrote, at the time, “Iowa’s Medicaid application form is 27 pages long. Many other states include a voter registration form in the packet. In Iowa, at the bottom of page 16, the packet contains one sentence and a link to the voter registration form. The link is printed out. An Iowan would have to type the 46-character link into their browser and access a printer to print it out. This is unlikely to register voters and states with similar policies have been found to be out of compliance with the NVRA.” The result was that far fewer people were registering to vote through Medicaid applications in Iowa, compared to almost any other state.

The Republican supermajority in the Iowa Senate is no more. Catelin Drey became the seventeenth Democrat in the 50-member chamber on September 15.

About half of her Democratic colleagues came to watch Drey take the oath of office, including State Senator Mike Zimmer, who flipped another Republican-held district in January.

Alongside her husband and daughter, Catelin Drey repeats the oath after Iowa Supreme Court Justice Matthew McDermott (photo courtesy of Iowa Senate Democrats)

Catherine Ross is a pseudonym for one of the authors of this post. Bleeding Heartland is keeping the authors’ names confidential, as well as the location in Iowa where these detentions occurred.

June 16, 2025 began like any other morning for two hardworking men in an Iowa community. As dawn broke, the first—a restaurant employee driving to work—was boxed in by two unmarked cars. Masked figures jumped out, ordered him from his vehicle, and whisked him away.

Three friends, trailing behind, watched in horror, as it appeared their fellow worker was being kidnapped. One friend ran to move the abandoned car off the street, unaware that other masked men lurked nearby. He, too, was seized and driven away. Only two witnesses in the second car remained to tell the tale.

Friends and families did not learn these men’s whereabouts for thirteen hours, when their names were found on ICE’s (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the US Homeland Security) detainee roster at Polk County Jail—a facility paid by ICE for housing ICE detainees. After 48 hours there, they were transferred to Pine Prairie Correctional Facility in rural Louisiana for four more days.

“You understand what too many of our fellow Americans have forgotten: that democracy is not on automatic pilot,” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen told hundreds of Democrats in Des Moines on September 13. “Its survival, its very survival, depends on us.”

In his keynote address at the Polk County Democrats’ annual Steak Fry fundraiser, the senior senator from Maryland repeatedly urged Democrats to fight back against President Donald Trump’s lawless regime. He also faulted members of his own party, who don’t always stand up for core principles.

It’s been a wildly successful week for U.S. Representative Ashley Hinson.

Three days after U.S. Senator Joni Ernst confirmed she won’t seek re-election, the three-term member of Congress all but wrapped up the Republican nomination for Iowa’s Senate seat. President Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement” shut the door on any realistic chance Hinson could lose the June 2026 primary.

But Hinson’s embrace of the Washington establishment could alienate a segment of Republicans she will need after the primary. And her slavish allegiance to Trump could become a liability for the likely nominee in the general election campaign.

greg wickenkamp is a lifelong Iowan.

More than 250 people from throughout Iowa gathered in Iowa City on August 23 to help save state history. Attendees demanded the state reverse its decision to close the State Historical Society of Iowa (SHSI) archives in Iowa City.

Rally-goers also called on state officials to reverse their decision discontinuing the only peer-reviewed state history journal, The Annals of Iowa. Without inviting adequate public comment, and after refusing to cover the basic costs of maintaining the historical archives, state officials unilaterally pushed to end these public serving institutions. Since the Iowa City rally, more than 6,000 people have signed a petition to reverse the state’s decision.

In the end, it wasn’t even close.

Democrat Catelin Drey defeated Republican Christopher Prosch by 4,208 votes to 3,411 (55.2 percent to 44.7 percent) in Iowa Senate district 1, covering much of Sioux City and some rural areas in Woodbury County. Donald Trump carried this district by 11 points in the 2024 presidential election, winning more votes than Kamala Harris in fifteen of the 22 precincts. Yet Drey carried nineteen of the 22 precincts and improved on Harris’ vote share in every precinct.

It was the second Iowa Senate seat Democrats flipped in 2025, and the fourth straight special election in Iowa where the Democratic nominee overperformed by more than 20 points, compared to the November 2024 presidential results. Drey’s win also means Republicans will no longer have a two-thirds supermajority in the Iowa Senate when the legislature convenes in January.

While not every tactic from a special election campaign translates into a higher-turnout midterm environment, Democrats can learn a lot from what Drey and her team did right as they prepare for 2026 races for down-ballot offices. In addition, these lessons could help many progressives running in Iowa’s nonpartisan city and school board elections this November.

Senator-elect Drey and Iowa Senate Minority Leader Janice Weiner joined Iowa Starting Line’s Zachary Oren Smith and me on August 27 to discuss how they overcame the odds. You can watch our whole conversation here.

I also sought insight from Julie Stauch, who has worked on many Democratic campaigns and helped guide a successful 2023 special election campaign for Warren County auditor.

Promising to fight for public schools, workers’ rights, safe drinking water, and quality health care, former Democratic State Senator Nate Boulton announced on August 29 that he will run for the Iowa House in 2026. The previous day, longtime Democratic State Representative Rick Olson confirmed he won’t seek another term in Iowa House district 39.

That seat covers part of the east side of Des Moines and Pleasant Hill in eastern Polk County, making up half the Senate district Boulton represented through 2024. Like many similar working-class areas, it was a Democratic stronghold for decades and has shifted toward Republicans during the Trump era.

Boulton, an employment lawyer for many workers and labor unions, served two terms in the Iowa Senate. He initially represented a safe seat for Democrats. Despite sexual harassment allegations that ended his 2018 campaign for governor, he did not face a Democratic primary challenger or a Republican opponent in 2020.

After redistricting removed some heavily Democratic neighborhoods from his territory and added GOP-leaning precincts in eastern Polk County, Boulton lost his 2024 re-election bid by less than 0.2 percent (44 votes out of more than 31,000 ballots cast). Republicans spent more than $750,000 on that Iowa Senate race, and Democrats spent about $500,000.

But Boulton significantly outperformed the Democratic baseline in his Senate district as a whole, and in the precincts where he will run for the state House next year. Bleeding Heartland’s analysis of the 2024 precinct-level results from House district 39, which can be viewed here, show Donald Trump edged out Kamala Harris in the area (49.6 percent to 48.9 percent). In contrast, Boulton received more of the votes cast for state Senate (51.4 percent to 48.3 percent for Republican Mike Pike). He received a higher vote share than Harris in all twelve precincts and more raw votes than his party’s presidential nominee in eight of them.

UPDATE: Drey won the election by 4,208 votes to 3,411 (55.2 percent to 44.7 percent), according to unofficial results. A forthcoming post will analyze the precinct level results. Original post follows.

The stakes are unusually high for the August 26 special election in Iowa Senate district 1. If Republican Christopher Prosch wins the race to succeed former State Senator Rocky De Witt, who died of cancer in June, the GOP will hold 34 of the 50 Iowa Senate seats for next year’s legislative session. That would give Republicans the two-thirds majority they need to confirm Governor Kim Reynolds’ nominees with no Democratic support.

If Democrat Catelin Drey flips the seat, the Republican majority in the chamber will shrink to 33-17, allowing Senate Democrats to block some of the governor’s worst appointees.

Equally important, a win in red-trending Woodbury County could help Democrats recruit more challengers for the 2026 legislative races, and could inspire more progressives to run in this November’s nonpartisan elections for city offices and school boards.

Although Donald Trump comfortably carried Senate district 1 in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats have grounds to be optimistic going into Tuesday’s election.