Steve Dunn is a retired journalist who has self-published two books, about former State Senator Pat Deluhery’s political career and the history of professional baseball in Des Moines. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Blasts and Bunts.

As I wrap up another nine months of volunteering at an elementary school, I reflect on what the state of Iowa is doing to its once-admired public school system.

To put it simply, the Republican-controlled legislature and Governor Kim Reynolds are tearing apart K-12 public education in the name of parental choice.

Of course, parents have always had a choice of where they could send their kids to school. Most opted for public schools. Others preferred private schools if they could afford it.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

At the risk of blurring the increasingly fuzzy line between church and state, here is a Gospel reading for public employees and elected officials, according to Matthew: 

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.”

Unfortunately, it does not take much looking these days to see government leaders bedeviled by lousy optics. Perhaps it is a lack of vision or just a refusal to listen.

Either way, these officials are doing and saying things that leave the taxpayers who pay their salaries perplexed.

President Donald Trump got the ball rolling when he demanded that Texas adopt a new map creating five more Republican-held U.S. House seats. The U.S. Supreme Court escalated the redistricting “arms race” by blowing up what remains of the Voting Rights Act.

Since the summer of 2025, nine GOP-controlled states and two states with Democratic trifectas have either adopted new political maps or begun the redistricting process, seeking to give their party an advantage in this year’s Congressional races.

More states will likely draw new maps next year, including New York (where Democrats could net several U.S. House seats) and Indiana (where Trump-backed challengers just defeated most of the Republican legislators who declined to redistrict this cycle).

One red state that won’t join the gerrymandering stampede is Iowa, where legislators have completed their work for the year. Even if Republicans lose one or more Congressional races this November, they could not easily draw friendlier maps before 2028. And even if the majority party overhauled Iowa’s redistricting statute—which lays out the nonpartisan process—our state constitution makes it difficult to create four reliably red U.S. House districts.

Noah Gratias is a seventh generation Iowan from Waukee.

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday, the distance between the founding ideals and modern realities often feels vast. The language of the founders is frequently invoked, yet sometimes it feels distant or abstract. In Iowa, however, one phrase has endured with clarity since the state’s founding: our state motto.

Things designed by committee are rarely remembered for their foresight. Yet a committee of three Iowa state senators selected a creed in 1847 that still inspires 180 years on: “Our liberties we prize, our rights we will maintain.” It strikes at the core of why our union was founded: for the love of liberty and the protection of inalienable rights. Folks across the political spectrum have invoked the motto since its adoption, because it captures the core principles of our country and its people.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has won the culture war.

In so-doing, Reynolds has dug the state into a deep, deep hole largely by rallying voters to reject allegedly naughty books and keeping them (us) embroiled in one-after-another pieces of nonsense legislation.

And by gifting a minority of parents, her allies, with the unquestioned right to enroll their kids, at taxpayer’s expense, in any church-affiliated school, academy, or charter of their choice. And, in the face of all these new budget-busting costs, cutting taxes and swaying otherwise public minded voters to doubt the effectiveness of their kids’ local schools. It’s plain sinful.

Adam Shriver is Director of Wellness and Nutrition at the Harkin Institute for Public Policy and Citizen Engagement. This essay was first published on his Substack newsletter, Canary in a Cornfield.

Iowa’s high cancer rates are understandably generating a lot of headlines. And for better or worse, a lot of groups are working overtime to offer their own “interpretations” of some of the various reports on the cancer crisis that have come out. Since there are many opportunities to misunderstand these reports, I thought it might be valuable to clarify a few things in response to some of the claims I’ve been seeing.

One of the most egregious “misunderstandings” (I’m putting this in quotes because I think it’s an extremely charitable way of describing it) was the National Pork Producers Council’s response to a recent Yale University study.

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

Last May, when Iowa Republicans passed the health and human services budget for the current fiscal year, I asked the bill’s floor manager, State Representative Ann Meyer, a simple question. What would happen when U.S. Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Randy Feenstra, Zach Nunn, and Ashley Hinson voted to cut federal health care funding?

Iowa Capital Dispatch reported at the time:

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.

The Iowa Department of Education’s press release from December 19 said, “State projections developed prior to the passing of the Students First Education Savings Account (ESA) program showed a downward trend in public school enrollment starting in the 2023-24 school year. Likewise, the National Center for Education Statistics projects enrollment at public schools to decrease by 2.7 million students by 2031, a decrease of almost 5% nationally.”

The statement, on its face, is true — but it obscures some essential elements.

• There are now fewer students in Iowa public schools than any time in the modern era, edging out the previous low of 2010-11.
• Excluding a pandemic-related drop between 2019-20 and 2020-21, the percentage loss of public enrollment between 2024-25 and 2025-26 is more than double the greatest loss since 2001-02. It’s the largest percentage loss, period, since 1982-83 to 1983-84.
• The numerical drop in two years (FY25+26) is greater than that of any period in the last four decades (since FY84+85).
• State enrollment projections made through and including 2023 did show a downward trend, but they did not expect the low public numbers seen in the last three years, nor did they anticipate enrollment in private schools surpassing 40,000 for the first time since 2000-01.

Robin Opsahl, Brooklyn Draisey, and Cami Koons collaborated on this article, which was first published by Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Following the second “funnel” deadline of the Iowa legislative session, lawmakers often aim to shift their focus from policy to budgeting. But as lawmakers hit week 10 of the 2026 session, it appears agreements have not been reached on some of the top priorities laid out by Republicans at the beginning of session — primarily, eminent domain and property taxes.

Friday marked the second major deadline of the session, when most bills must be passed by one chamber and approved by a committee in the other chamber to stay eligible for consideration. There are many caveats to this rule — legislation involving spending, taxes or government oversight are not subject to the funnel.

Chamber leadership can also designate bills that have not made it through the committee process required as “unfinished business,” saving the measure from the funnel cutoff – and can also bring back “dead” legislation as leadership-sponsored legislation. Some “dead” bills may be added as amendments to surviving bills in future debate.

House File 2676 may not be the most harmful of the 80-plus bills the Iowa House approved last week. And language allowing pharmacists to dispense ivermectin without a prescription may not be the most harmful provision of that so-called “Make America Healthy Again” bill.

But the brief Iowa House debate about ivermectin on March 3 illustrated how conspiracy theories—once confined to fringe elements of the conservative movement—now drive the mainstream Republican agenda.

Governor Kim Reynolds drew criticism in 2018 for accepting free flights on private planes belonging to campaign donors and a longtime state vendor. Her plane travel came under scrutiny again this week.

Des Moines Register reporters Phillip Sitter and Tyler Jett had the scoop on February 24: for the past year, Reynolds has periodically flown on a state-owned plane, purchased with federal pandemic relief funds she allocated to the Iowa Department of Public Safety in 2024.

Reynolds told reporters on February 26 that occasional air travel allows her to use her time more efficiently. To justify spending COVID-19 relief money on the plane, she and her staff have also claimed the 14-seat Cessna 208B Grand Caravan augmented the Iowa State Patrol’s “aging fleet” with “more sophisticated equipment and technology to accommodate a broader span of use for law enforcement.”

But documents I obtained through public records requests show the Iowa State Patrol already had a smaller plane equipped with similar advanced technology, such as thermal imaging and de-icing capability. That Cirrus SR-22 was no obsolete aircraft; the Department of Public Safety used a state appropriation to buy it new in 2021.

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years.

As I round the corner on 40, it’s been humbling and heartbreaking to reflect on how much of my life experience has been defined by global historic change: a child of the 1990s growing up at the peak of American exceptionalism, bookended by the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, graduating college during the worst recession since the Great Depression, and having my own young children attend school during the worst viral outbreak since the flu epidemic a century ago.

However, regardless of which epochal change I’ve lived through, there has been at least one constant: lectures from the party of “personal responsibility.” 

For the past nine years, Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature has given Governor Kim Reynolds a free hand. GOP lawmakers allowed Reynolds to spend billions of federal dollars provided through the CARES Act and American Rescue Plan with no legislative input.

They approved most of the governor’s signature proposals, expanded her power to hire and fire officials, and allowed her to set agency directors’ salaries with no constraints.

Neither chamber’s Government Oversight Committee has investigated any alleged malfeasance or mismanagement in the Reynolds administration, such as the governor’s questionable spending of pandemic relief funds on her staff’s salaries, or the tens of millions of dollars wasted on a no-bid contract for Workday.

Now, in the tenth year of Iowa’s GOP trifecta, the ruling party has suddenly decided the legislature should be a check on the executive. Several bills that are eligible for floor debate could prevent Reynolds’ successor from making big changes in state government.

Insulting all of our collective intelligence, Republican lawmakers claim these bills aren’t fueled by concern that State Auditor Rob Sand may win the governor’s race in November.

Here’s a rundown of pending bills that could hamstring the next Democratic governor.

Robin Opsahl, Brooklyn Draisey, and Cami Koons collaborated on this article, which was first published by Iowa Capital Dispatch. Clark Kauffman and Kathie Obradovich also contributed to this story

Iowa lawmakers took on hundreds of bills in the first six weeks of the 2026 legislative session, though several measures named as top priorities heading into the year, like eminent domain and property taxes, have yet to find consensus.

February 19 was the last day lawmakers met to consider legislation before the first “funnel” deadline of the year. While there are many exceptions, most bills that don’t involve spending, taxes or government oversight must pass through a committee in either the House or Senate in order to stay eligible for consideration.

Linda Schreiber writes commentary on selected legislative issues.

Bob Dylan’s 1964 lyric, “The times they are a-changin’,” captured a moment of upheaval. The same could be said today—especially when it comes to how Iowa funds its communities.

A decade ago, when lawmakers reduced state funding for schools and local governments, cities and counties could adjust their budgets and, if needed, raise property taxes to maintain services residents wanted. Today, that flexibility is disappearing. And therein lies the paradox.

Throughout the first year of the 91st Iowa General Assembly, lawmakers debated cutting property taxes. With Republicans holding a trifecta, this is the year those cuts may pass. Two GOP proposals emphasize a strict 2 percent cap on local property tax revenue growth, promoted as relief for taxpayers. If state-level cuts reduce local revenue, will the result be fewer services Iowans rely on?

Bruce Lear lives in Sioux City and has been connected to Iowa’s public schools for 38 years. He taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring. He can be reached at BruceLear2419@gmail.com 

Governor Kim Reynolds laid out her last legislative agenda in her Condition of the State address on January 13. It took a while for me to remember that much avoidance in a speech. I remember now.

After the teachers in a building were fed up with lack of leadership, and aggravation reached critical mass, there were often explosions. I always knew the “Enough is enough” stage had been reached when the phone calls began from teachers I’d never met. They were the silent majority, but now they were ready to shout.

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer. This commentary was first published in the Waverly Democrat.

With reluctance and apprehension I am beginning 2026 by venturing back into the property tax jungle. In my September column, which focused on farmland taxes, I indicated I would return to address the property tax concerns of my in-town friends and neighbors.

In-town residential property taxes are more complicated for a couple of reasons. Of course, city residents pay city taxes—city finances could easily be the topic for an entire column. I had the opportunity to be a guest Waverly City Council member in January 2025, which included attending annual budget hearings. My overall impression was that our city operating departments are seriously committed to providing the services they deliver as efficiently as possible.

The other complicating factor is that houses are taxed on their estimated market value. That gets interesting. In 2024 the assessed value of our home was increased 15.3 percent. The Assessor only bumped up the value of the house by 6 percent, but increased the value of our lot by 56 percent.

For most of the time Kim Reynolds has served as governor, her staff have tried to limit my access to information and news conferences available to other statehouse reporters. This week, the governor’s press secretary blocked me from attending a briefing a few hours before Reynolds delivered her Condition of the State address.

The video of my encounter with Mason Mauro on January 13 was shared widely and generated hundreds of comments across my social media feeds. Many readers, followers, and well-wishers (plus a few trolls) have asked about the incident—far too many for me to answer individually.

I’m addressing the most frequently asked questions below.

Voters in Iowa Senate district 16 will elect a successor to State Senator Claire Celsi on December 30. The stakes are high: this election will determine whether Republicans regain their 34-16 supermajority in the chamber for the 2026 legislative session. With a two-thirds majority, Republicans could confirm Governor Kim Reynolds’ nominees with no Democratic support.

If West Des Moines City Council member Renee Hardman keeps this seat in the blue column, the Republican majority in the chamber will return to 33-17, meaning Democrats could block some of the governor’s worst appointees. Either way, the winner will serve out the remainder of Celsi’s term.

Hardman is favored over Republican Lucas Loftin in this suburban area. But as we’ve seen this year in Iowa, anything can happen in a low-turnout special election. And it’s hard to think of a date primed for lower turnout than the Tuesday between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Randy Evans is executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes openness and transparency in Iowa’s state and local governments. He can be reached at DMRevans2810@gmail.com. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Stray Thoughts. 

What makes freedom of speech so difficult to understand and accept?

That question came up during a recent discussion at the Des Moines Valley Friends Meeting. The Friends invited me to speak at the gathering that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the December 15, 1975 bombing of the Friends meeting house and the adjacent American Friends Service Committee building at 42nd Street and Grand Avenue in Des Moines.

Police never located the bomber, so no criminal charges were filed. Consensus remains that someone planted the explosives who disliked the Quakers’ and AFSC’s opposition to the Vietnam war, their support of non-violence, and their humanitarian relief efforts in Vietnam after the war.

I reminded the audience of what Mary Autenrieth of Paullina, the chair of the AFSC’s regional policy board 50 years ago, told The Des Moines Register then: “I expect in a nation where open disagreement is encouraged, there are some who disagree with us. But I would expect that they would not use violence in answer.”

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece called “America Needs Farmers, Just Not Their Politics.” It is probably one of my most read pieces, which somewhat broke containment before I even had a space of my own on Substack. I felt like it was a worthwhile endeavor to check back in, since I wrote that piece before the 2024 election.

We’ve had a year to see how the active rural voting parts of our state, alongside the big agricultural entities like the Iowa Farm Bureau and Iowa Soybean Association, would handle the increased turmoil in a Trump administration.

Jon Muller is a semi-retired policy analyst and entrepreneur who previously was a tax analyst and revenue forecaster for Iowa’s Revenue Estimating Conference.

Iowa Republicans appear to be budgeting on pure hope. And that’s probably the only tool they have. That hope appears to be misplaced.

State government is piecing together a budget, but it’s like flying a plane with one engine gone. This piece is an effort to estimate how far they can fly the plane before it crashes.

The three-member Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) left the estimates largely unchanged at its December 11 meeting, with an additional $23 million for the current fiscal year and an extra $105 million for the budget they’ll appropriate next session.

Normally, that would be pretty good news. The state government historically worked on the premise that future expected appropriations could be funded with future expected revenues. Even when the income tax cutting regime got its foothold in the mid-1990s, both the legislative and executive branches used five-year forecasts of revenues and expenditures to make sure the long-term forecast was at least theoretically reasonable. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using reserves to fund tax cuts in the short run, if it’s reasonable to believe future revenue increases are sufficient to fund them.

I sincerely doubt the state government uses this approach anymore. Because they have committed fiscal malpractice the likes of which I have never seen in Iowa.

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

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds on December 15 ordered all flags in Iowa lowered in honor of the two Iowa National Guard members killed in Syria.

The two service members were killed on December 13 in Palmyra, Syria, by a lone gunman suspected to be affiliated with ISIS. The two individuals were identified in a news release Monday as Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard of Marshalltown and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar of Grimes. Both were members of the 1st Squadron, 113th Cavalry Regiment.

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 Dude, where this essay first appeared.

Thanksgiving is one day in the year that no one in the United States should go hungry. Ya think? If you don’t agree with that, you probably are not reading this post.

While Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds pardoned Tailfeathers and Wing-ding the turkeys this week, it’s worth noting that she and others in the majority party who consent to her schemes don’t mind depriving people of food access other times of year.

No, I am not related to Debbie Downer, who spoiled Thanksgiving dinner. However, now that I have gathered some evidence, this holiday seems an appropriate time to point out that the governor’s Healthy Kids Iowa summer food “pilot” program for school children did exactly that—deprived kids of food.

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.

If I were in charge of the state budget and had just watched $825 million unexpectedly disappear, I suppose I’d try to bluff my way out of this mess, too.

Which is what the Reynolds administration looked like it was doing earlier this month, when the state’s Revenue Estimating Conference (REC) said the 2025 fiscal year ended with $300 million less than they’d expected a year ago.

For the current fiscal year, 2026, they’re now anticipating a whopping $525 million less than predicted last October.

I touched on this trend in my last post about Iowa’s long-suffering economy, but after I published, the news from the REC got so much worse.

No wonder the ruling party was putting on a brave face and trying to convince Iowans this was all part of the plan. But they’re not very good poker players. Their tells were all over the place.

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.

John and Terri Hale own the The Hale Group, an Ankeny-based advocacy firm focused on older Iowans terriandjohnhale@gmail.com. Dean Lerner is an attorney and former Director of the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals dean@kelinsonlaw.com.

With the passing of State Senator Claire Celsi, Iowa has lost the elected official who cared the most and worked the hardest to improve quality of care for residents of Iowa’s nursing facilities.

We collaborated extensively with Claire on aging and nursing home issues. She was as her friends and colleagues described her: tenacious, passionate, a truth-teller and a fighter.

This is an image of a reimagined Iowa state flag with rainbow Pride stripes.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Jenny Turner is a public school mom and a school speech therapist. She lives in West Des Moines.

It might be prudent to wait for all the facts before writing an opinion piece on ICE detaining Dr. Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools. It is true that there is a lot we don’t know. Which leads me to the central question: why don’t we know?

Dr. Roberts has allegedly had a removal order for nearly a year and a half. Why did the district not know about this? Why was Dr. Roberts arrested suddenly, in the most dramatic fashion, for what amounts to late paperwork (if true)? Why was no thought put into the effect this would have on the community and the kids? Why was it not done mindfully to minimize the impact?

Al Charlson is a North Central Iowa farm kid, lifelong Iowan, and retired bank trust officer. This column was first published in the Waverly Newspapers.

We recently received the 2025-26 real estate tax statement for our farmland in my “home county.” The 11 percent increase must have felt like a punch to a lot of our neighbors back home at this time of corn and soybean prices below the cost of production. It hits particularly hard for younger farmers struggling to provide for their families, make farm payments, and maintain their machinery.

As a note to my non-farm friends and neighbors, the assessment of Iowa farmland for real estate taxes is entirely different than it is for our homes. Home assessments are based on recent sale prices of comparable homes. Since 1977 Iowa farmland has been assessed based on soil productivity (estimated value of crops produced minus production costs).

That makes a big difference. Based on the Bremer County Assessor’s valuation, our Waverly home is worth about 1.4 times the estimated fair market value of our “home county” farmland. The non-city portion of 2025-26 taxes on our Waverly home are about 4.4 times the taxes on our farmland. In my opinion this accommodation for agriculture, the base of Iowa’s economy, is reasonable and justified.

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.

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. This essay first appeared in the fall issue of the 2025 American Atheist Magazine

I am often asked, “Why are you an atheist?” or, “How can you be an atheist?” when engaging with members of the public. Here in Iowa, being an atheist, humanist, or secular person is still seen as an anomaly by a lot of folks, especially well-meaning people who are struggling with many of the actions of our state and federal government. They have grown up with the idea that religiosity is synonymous with morality, and while that is so demonstrably not true upon any short reflection, it remains a social burden nonreligious folks must bear. This is deeply unfair as well as untrue: most human beings do not share the faith of the people here.

This is one of the many reasons that I’m motivated to be an atheist activist.

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.

Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

I’m okay. I’ve rested long enough. This kerfuffle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has reached a red line with me, and my dander is up. I can’t hold it in. I’d like to skim the top, say there had been a little trouble and now it’s all okay. I can’t, and it’s not.

“I’M APPALLED,” SAID GOVERNOR REYNOLDS

Ed Tibbetts covered this terrain in a Bleeding Heartland post from early August. But the kerfuffle has a new wrinkle almost every day. Tibbetts tells us the details: In a law approved this year, Iowa Code §261J.2, Republican lawmakers made talk or teaching of or about diversity, equity, and inclusion forbidden, effective July 1, 2025. 

Randy Richardson is a former educator and retired associate executive director of the Iowa State Education Association. Bruce Lear taught for eleven years and represented educators as an Iowa State Education Association regional director for 27 years until retiring.

Every few years politicians recycle bad ideas that would make teaching even harder. Often, those ideas are long on rhetoric and short on common sense.

Historically, these stale ideas originate from an appointed task force, so politicians don’t have their fingerprints on the ideas if they backfire with the public. 

It’s happening again.

Governor Kim Reynolds’s DOGE Task Force met on August 6 and released a set of 45 recommendations that supposedly would make Iowa’s government more efficient. One of the proposals would establish “merit pay” for teachers.