Only one Iowa legislative race was recount-close this year: House district 19, covering part of Council Bluffs. Unofficial results put Republican State Representative Brent Siegrist 39 votes ahead of Democratic challenger Ben Larson: 5,157 votes to 5,118 (50.1 percent to 49.8 percent). Larson requested a recount.
Pottawattamie County Auditor Mary Ann Hanusa confirmed by telephone on November 10 that the recount will begin on Monday morning, November 16. Since there are only eleven precincts to count, she expects to announce results the same day.
House district 19 will be Iowa’s first state legislative race recounted under a new procedure Republicans enacted in 2025. Under that law, staff from the Pottawattamie County auditor’s office will conduct the recount. Previous state law entrusted recounts to a three-member board consisting of each candidate’s designee and one person chosen by the other two members.
Hanusa told me that Democratic and Republican members of the county’s Absentee and Special Voters Precinct Board will be able to watch the recount. Each candidate will be able to designate up to five observers as well.
Staff will run the ballots through a vote counting machine. Hanusa said staff will examine undervotes (ballots where the machine cannot read a vote in the House district 19 race), looking for a discernible mark for either candidate. Optical scanners may not record a selection if the voter marked the ballot with a line or an X, rather than filling in the oval next to the candidate’s name. But Iowa law allows such votes to be counted.
A surprisingly close race
To my knowledge, House district 19 wasn’t on any analyst’s list of Iowa legislative races to watch in 2026. It is the more Republican-leaning of the two state House districts in Council Bluffs.
The terrain favors Republicans. Official figures indicate that as of November 1, House district 19 contained 5,746 registered Democrats, 7,500 Republicans, 6,806 no-party voters, and 307 voters with some other affiliation (mostly Libertarians).
According to a State Navigate spreadsheet showing 2024 presidential results by state legislative district, Donald Trump received about 53.4 percent of the votes for president in House district 19 precincts, while Democrat Kamala Harris received 44.8 percent. (Hat tip to Macklin Scheldrup for compiling the Iowa House and Senate data for that project.) Siegrist was re-elected in 2024 with more than 58 percent of the vote.
Understandably, neither party targeted the district this year.
The Republican Party of Iowa spent about $65,000 in kind on direct mail, text messages, and digital advertising supporting Siegrist, according to campaign finance disclosures (see here and here). The GOP was spending five to ten times as much in state House races they perceived as competitive. Mailings downplayed the incumbent’s party affiliation, depicting Siegrist as “delivering for Council Bluffs” by “lowering costs,” “strengthening education,” and promoting “a healthier Iowa.”
Larson raised a little more than $6,000 for his entire campaign, including $4,000 he contributed himself (see here and here). The Pottawattamie County Democratic Central Committee donated $1,000, but the Iowa Democratic Party did not invest in the race.
Larson wasn’t surprised the election was close, he told me in a November 8 telephone interview. He knocked at least 6,000 doors while working full-time as a nurse. Many people had warned him how difficult the race would be, or cautioned him not to get his hopes up. “But then I would go on doors, and it seemed like every couple of days, sometimes every day, I had somebody that would ask me who my opponent even was.”
Voters were often shocked to hear Siegrist had been in office for so long, Larson said. (The incumbent served in the Iowa House from 1984 to 2002, rising to the position of speaker before leaving the legislature to run for Congress. He came out of retirement to run for the state House in 2020.)
The top issues voters mentioned to Larson at the doors included Iowa’s high cancer rate, corruption, limited access to health care, Medicaid cuts, data centers, and Flock cameras (automated license plate readers).
I asked Iowa House Minority Leader Brian Meyer on November 8 whether Democrats should have invested in House district 19. “Hindsight’s 20/20,” he told me. He acknowledged Larson’s performance “took me by surprise.” Had his team known it would be so close, “we would have invested accordingly.”
The last time Democrats made a serious play for the House seat in this area was in 2020, when the party spent around $500,000 supporting Jen Pellant. (The district lines were not identical, but it was the more GOP-leaning House seat in Council Bluffs.) Siegrist won that race by 50.5 percent to 45.0 percent for Pellant and about 4 percent for a Libertarian candidate.
“I survived the blue wave and the Turek wave”
Siegrist confirmed in a November 10 telephone interview that this year’s race was his closest re-election bid by far. “I survived the blue wave and the Turek wave,” he said, referring to Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Josh Turek. A Council Bluffs native, Turek has represented neighboring House district 20 for the past four years and overperformed in the area.
I tallied the precinct-level vote totals, based on unofficial results from the Iowa Secretary of State’s website. My analysis shows Turek carried every precinct in House district 19, receiving 5,691 votes district-wide to 4,379 for his Republican opponent Ashley Hinson (54.6 percent to 42.0 percent).
Governor-elect Rob Sand carried ten of the eleven precincts, gaining 5,811 votes to 4,585 for Republican Zach Lahn (55.8 percent to 44.0 percent).
Looking at it another way: Siegrist received 778 more votes than his party’s nominee for Senate and 572 more votes than his party’s nominee for governor. Being a long-serving incumbent is a big advantage in a state legislative race.
Siegrist expressed confidence about the recount, saying he had been told there were only four provisional ballots. Most recounts of Iowa legislative races result in single-digit changes to the numbers.
One wonders who would have come out on top in this blue wave environment if Iowa ballots still had a straight-ticket option for Democrats or Republicans. (The GOP trifecta eliminated straight-ticket voting prior to 2018.) The 153 voters who chose a candidate for U.S. Senate race but did not mark their ballot for either House district 19 contender could have changed the outcome.
I will update this post on November 16 once final numbers are available. If Siegrist prevails, the Iowa House will have 56 Republicans and 44 Democrats when the legislature convenes in January, down from a 67-33 majority during the 2026 session.