People cheer at a rally for U.S. President Donald Trump on Jan. 27, in Clive, Iowa.Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press
In the deep freeze of an Iowa winter, the Regal Beagle bar is hopping, the Busch Light is flowing, the tavern owner is pumping out garlic cheese bread, the University of Iowa basketball game against Wisconsin is on two huge television screens, and the talk is about how the Democrats can triumph in November’s midterm congressional elections.
Agrarian Iowa is devout Trump country. The one-time New York tycoon has swept this state with its generations-long rural culture three times. The state’s two senators and all four members of the House of Representatives are Republicans, and the GOP controls the governor’s suite, the attorney-general’s office and both houses of the state legislature.
And yet Democratic hope is springing out of the cold, hard fields where, by the time voters go to the polls Nov. 3, the massive harvest of soybeans will have completed its voyage from seed to cash crop to trains to Pacific export terminals on their way to China.
A farmer uses a combine to harvest soybeans in Rippey, Iowa.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
But there weren’t nearly as many bulk cargo ships stuffed with the state’s giant yield heading to China’s state-owned commercial processors last year. A recent Iowa State University study showed that reciprocal tariffs could cost as much as a quarter of the state’s US$5.8-billion soybean trade.
“These tariffs are making everything more expensive for Iowans,” state Senator Zach Wahls, one of the candidates for the Democratic Senate nomination here, said in an interview as the music roared in the Regal Beagle. “They have destroyed agricultural export markets that Iowa farm leaders spent decades building, making seed, fertilizer, wood ash and pesticides more expensive.”
Which is why deep-red Iowa suddenly seems to be turning purple, a political transformation that stirs Democratic hopes and Republican fears.
Sen. Zach Wahls, D-Coralville, speaks at the Statehouse in Des Moines, Iowa, in February, 2025.Charlie Neibergall/The Associated Press
Other factors: The combination of soft markets for agricultural equipment and tariffs affecting steel and aluminum cost the Iowa operations of the John Deere farm-machine empire more than US$300-million last year. Many of the migrants from the Caribbean and Central America who for decades have worked in Iowa’s food-processing plants have now fled the state or live in fear of Washington’s mass deportation drive.
Half the state’s U.S. House members had smaller 2024 victory margins than Mr. Trump, and they’re on the priority list the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released this week for an infusion of national party money.
As the Democrats seek to end GOP domination on Capitol Hill, the trends shaping politics in Iowa, where agricultural trade with China is down 81 per cent year-over-year, are being replicated across the country.
A farmer spreads corn stalk mulch to bed his cows in Vinton, Iowa.JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images
In Maine, a state where Republican Senator Susan Collins is in peril, lobster exports to China are down almost 50 per cent year-over-year. In North Carolina, where pharmaceuticals, the state’s largest export, are down 13 per cent, former Democratic governor Roy Cooper has a decisive advantage in his Senate race.
“Some of the Republicans are sticking with Trump despite the tariffs, but the races that seemed easy ‘red’ wins like the Senate race here now may be toss-ups,” said Barbara Trish, a political scientist at Grinnell College, in Iowa’s Powesheik County, where grains, oilseeds, beans and peas are grown. “It’s an important change.”
The Iowa Senate seat became competitive because two-term Republican Jodi Ernst isn’t seeking re-election. With tariffs biting hard, her withdrawal created an unusual opportunity for Democrats in a state where the Republicans have controlled the state House of Representatives for all but four of the last 34 years.
Sen. Susan Collins arrives for Senate luncheons on Wednesday in Washington.Heather Diehl/Getty Images
In recent years, the state has reverted to the reliable Republican status that prompted an early 20th-century senator, Jonathan Dolliver, to say that “Iowa will go Democratic when Hell goes Methodist.”
That aphorism hasn’t been repealed, and the Democrats will face an uphill but still winnable battle against the likely Republican nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, a one-time television anchor who won her third U.S. House term in her northeastern district by a landslide. But she will be on the defensive for her support of the Trump tariffs.
She’ll likely face either Mr. Wahls or state Senator Josh Turek, two candidates whose political profiles match the kind of Democratic figures emerging now – and who represent two distinct paths for the party.
Former Iowa senator Amanda Ragan of Mason City, right, speaks with current U.S. Senator candidate Josh Turek at Iowa Event Center in Des Moines in November, 2025.Bryon Houlgrave/for the Register/Reuters
Mr. Wahls, of Coralville in eastern Iowa, is something of a rebel who is painting Mr. Turek, of Council Bluffs, on the state’s western border with Nebraska, as part of the tired Democratic tradition. The Republicans are characterizing Mr. Wahls as being in “lockstep with Democrats’ radical voting base,” while Mr. Turek’s endorsement from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York makes him the establishment choice.
Like so many states with an intimate political character, the profile of the candidates matters.
Mr. Wahls is a sixth-generation Iowan who attracted national attention by citing his two mothers in his argument favouring same-sex marriage. Mr. Turek, a Paralympic basketball medalist with spina bifida, is known for slogging through the snow to meet voters, going door-to-door and crawling up the front stairs while dragging his wheelchair in his hands.
Their fight is bitter, perhaps divisive. As such, it may be jeopardizing the possibility that Republican voters financially battered by the Trump tariffs and fed up with the administration’s chaos might migrate to the eventual Democratic nominee.
Mr. Trump greets patrons as he visits the Machine Shed restaurant in Urbandale, Iowa, on Jan. 27.Win McNamee/Getty Images
Republicans lead in party registration, and Democratic margins have shrunk in their traditional middle-class urban strongholds such as Davenport and Dubuque, both on the eastern fringe of the state.
How Republicans outside the MAGA movement vote – and whether they vote – may be the key to races in Iowa and elsewhere, as they were in the Democratic gubernatorial victories last year in New Jersey and Virginia. As a result, the Democrats’ prospects may depend upon a collapse of participation among Republicans.
That’s what boosted Iowa Democrats during the 1980s farm crisis – and could do so again if the tariffs prove sticky and Mr. Trump continues to lag in polls.
“The problem for the Democrats,” said veteran Iowa political analyst Dennis Goldford, an emeritus Drake University political scientist, “is that some voters may be upset about soybean exports to China – but still don’t like the kind of things they hear from Democrats.”