Best wishes to Ryan Melton who ran a heck of a campaign as he did in 2022. We hope you run again.

Hello all,

After taking some time to decompress and rest, I wanted to reach out to you one last time (at least for now) with gratitude. I want to thank all of you for your help, whether it be via donations, volunteering, spreading the word, voting, or however else you helped boost this campaign. I will be forever grateful for all the care and support from countless folks I encountered on the campaign trail.

As I’ve always said, this is going to be a long term build in the 4th, a district where a Democrat hasn’t won a U.S. House seat in 40 years, and one the national party has abandoned. However, the progress from my ‘22 campaign to my ‘24 campaign is undeniable. We improved our percentage of votes earned overall by 3 percent, jumping from 30% to 33%. We improved our performance in 31 of the 36 counties in the district. Considering I’ve had so many ’22 supporters move out of the district and state and therefore couldn’t vote for me in ’24, the 3 percent jump felt higher than that. We won Story County again. We had 17 state house candidates running in the 4th in ‘24 compared to only 10 in ‘22, and we have held some of the wealthiest in the world accountable and have delayed their progress on the eminent domain abuse-driven CO2 pipelines that threaten our public health and water. When I was arguably the first candidate to run against those pipelines back in early ’22, I was told it was a fool’s errand, that they were all but guaranteed to be constructed.

We’ve also forced conversations that weren’t happening before at the candidate level here regarding water pollution, the cancer crisis, the damaging influence of excessive corporate power on our politics and our governance, and the hollowing out of rural Iowa. We also got a lot more folks engaged and out to campaign events, and I’m so excited about the growth of our county parties over the last two years.

We also started to build a cross-partisan populist movement, earning an unprecedented crossover endorsement from my general election opponent’s Republican primary challenger, Kevin Virgil, an endorsement that forced the Iowa GOP leadership into a week of a very public panic attack (in which they didn’t address a single concern of Virgil’s).

We also engaged a lot of young folks, and have been answering emails from high schoolers since the election thanking the campaign for what we represented and urging me to run again for the 4th in ’26.

I don’t know what capacity I’ll do this in at this point, but I’ll continue to help the building of our 4th District Democratic Party, and will continue to hold Feenstra accountable for his lack of representation. We aren’t quitting. There are too many voices that would go unheard otherwise, and too many painful problems our district is suffering from that would become much worse if we quit. I’ve had people post-election ask me to run for governor in ’26, to run against Ernst for Senate, to run in the 4th again, to run for state-level office, and to run for IDP Leadership. I’m not sure what my next steps will be in that context, but the focus will always be on doing what I think would be most helpful to the cause of the people. In ’22 and ’24, since I was the only person on the primary ballot in the 4th race, that role was clearly running for the 4th. We’ll see what the future holds.

Thank you to all the candidates, volunteers, county party folks, and others that helped move the needle forward in the 4th. Let’s keep building together. Let’s remained plugged in and engaged. I know the battle will be tough and long, but as MLK said, “The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It is us that need to work to bend that arc.

I’m going to rest and have a normal life again for a little while. I’m tired, but grateful for all the love and well wishes I’ve received from folks of all political affiliations over the past week in the 4th. I ask you to remain subscribed to this newsletter if possible, so we can stay connected and build the momentum we’ve started here together.

Let’s keep fighting the good fight together!

Ryan Melton
P.O. Box 132 Nevada, IA 50201
melton4iowa@gmail.com
https://www.meltonforiowa.com/