If I had a nickel for every time someone said today’s Democrats need to get in the game, I’d be rich. The trouble is what do Democrats do differently to overcome the Republican advantage in Iowa?

Democrat Catelin Drey is the case that conventional Iowa political organizing can be effective. On Wednesday, after her 4,208-3,211 victory in Iowa State Senate District 1, that Trump won in 2024 by 11.5 percent, she enumerated what worked for her in an interview with Laura Belin and Zachary Oren Smith. In descending order, she said door-to-door contact, telephone contact, and person to person contact within their existing social networks helped identify her voters and get them to the polls. This is so old school, I remember my father doing it during the 1960 Kennedy campaign.

The special election environment helped. Governor Reynolds set the date for the special election to replace the late state senator Rocky De Witt on June 30 for Aug. 26, 57 days later. The short duration meant there was no time to wait for anything. The campaign ignited with energy. Volunteers, including multiple state senators and representatives, rallied immediately to help. Importantly, volunteers arrived from all over the state, contributing to knocking some 17,000 doors during the campaign, Drey said. She had plenty of volunteer help. Money wasn’t a problem either, enough so that Republican Party of Iowa chair Jeff Kaufmann complained about it.

Things might be different in a general election when folks can’t travel to the west side of the state because local races depend on their work at home. I expect Kaufmann will add this seat to his target list when it is up again next year. Drey seemed quite talented during the interview. Maybe she can pull off a 2026 re-election in a Trump district without all the statewide help. I hope so. Well done Catelin Drew!

I’m from Iowa so I am used to working hard for a candidate and then losing the election. I can think of some things Democrats need to change to turn the Republican advantage around.

Some history. When the worm started to turn on Republicans after the U.S. Supreme Court gave the 2000 election to George W. Bush, Democrats slowly began to change. When Bush won re-election in 2004, it was game on. In Iowa, we came back in 2006 by electing Democrat Chet Culver as governor and Dave Loebsack defeated long time Republican house member Jim Leach. The 2008 Iowa Democratic Caucuses had the most interest and biggest attendance I’ve seen in 32 years living here. As we all know, and may be weary of hearing, Barack Obama won Iowa and the nation in 2008. In 2012, Obama’s margins deteriorated yet he won Iowa again. In retrospect, 2008 was the high water mark of Democratic political activism in Iowa. Loebsack got elected to seven terms, but Culver turned out to be a one-term wonder and we haven’t had a Democratic governor since.

I love memories of the 2006-2008 campaigns but the electorate has changed. I would argue it changes at least every presidential cycle. Trump successively grew his vote count in Democratic Johnson County, Iowa during each of his three elections here. Recognizing such demographic changes is the first thing Democrats must change. Nothing stays the same. We should be like Catelin Drew and talk to everyone possible.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket did Iowa Democrats no favors when he prosecuted Rita Hart’s 2020 six-vote house race loss in the Congress. When the Iowa Secretary of State certified the election, Hart should have accepted it, even though the path to appeal was there. Given the political climate at the time, the case was dead on arrival. NBC News reported, “Republicans sought to cast her litigation as Democratic hypocrisy for trying to undo a state certification of an election after Democrats criticized 138 Republicans for objecting to the Electoral College count on Jan. 6.” The place for Democrats to win elections is in voter contacts, not in courtrooms, or in the U.S. House.

Finally, Democrats should talk in terms of the voter’s interests. For Catelin Drew, this came naturally. Because childcare was an issue for her personally, it lent credibility in conversations where childcare was the voter’s concern. We can set aside all the verbiage about the whys and wherefores of needing childcare, like Rita Hart raised in an op-ed in the Solon Economist. Candidates seem better off sharing their authentic selves and empathizing with voters as best they can.

I think we need a better name for it than grassroots politics. The electorate has changed and is changing. Democrats need to find voters where they live: on the grass, on the internet, at work, at the grocer, and at the gym. We have done it before and we should get back to it. We need a change and that could be the change we need.