Watch COURIER founder Tara McGowan’s full conversation with Iowa state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott about her race against Rep. Zach Nunn in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, why some lifelong Republicans are considering crossing party lines, and the issues driving voters ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
We say this all the time at COURIER: Don’t sleep on Iowa. And we have many good reasons to believe it. The biggest, of course, is our eldest newsroom, Iowa Starting Line, which has been a lonely but fierce stalwart of democracy and progressive journalism in the state since it was founded in January of 2015 by our good friend and former colleague Pat Rynard.
In the 11 years since, Starting Line has been doing the tireless work of believing in a state that the Democratic Party and pro-democracy efforts largely gave up on after it swung nearly 15 points between 2012, when Iowans elected President Obama to his second term, and 2016, when they chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 9 percentage points.
Fast forward to 2024 and Donald Trump won the state by more than 13 points. He carried Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, where Des Moines sits alongside southwestern Polk County, by roughly 4.4 points. Current incumbent Republican Congressman Zach Nunn won his own race there by nearly four points the same year.
And yet, less than two years later, Iowa has once again reclaimed its mantle as one of the most interesting states to watch in this midterm election cycle.
On Oct. 9, the Cook Political Report moved Iowa’s 3rd District from Toss Up to Lean Democratic, part of a broader shift toward Democrats across the House battlefield- and the state. One of the Democrats trying to take advantage of that shift is Iowa State Senator Sarah Trone Garriott, a Lutheran minister, former hospital chaplain, nonprofit leader, and mom of two who told me something I keep hearing from candidates in competitive races across the country:
“Folks are coming up to me and saying, ‘I voted Republican my whole life. This year I’m voting for you.’”
Sarah Trone Garriott: ‘We have to hold these folks accountable’
Sarah’s explanation for those crossover voters isn’t complicated. She says people are hurting, and they’re connecting that pain to decisions being made in Washington.
In Iowa, that means tariffs hitting a farm economy already under pressure, higher gas and diesel prices, rising grocery bills, and healthcare getting harder to access. Sarah told me about a farmer in Davis County who said rising costs would cost him $16,000 more just to bring in this year’s harvest.
Sarah’s opponent Nunn has increasingly talked about the need for Congress to have a stronger hand in trade policy, but Iowa Starting Line reviewed his voting record and found multiple instances where he voted to preserve or protect Trump’s tariffs before later expressing concerns about how they were being used.
Tariffs aren’t the only issue Nunn has tried to reinvent his positions on, either. Healthcare is a huge issue in a state that has one of the highest cancer rates in the country (a trend Iowa Starting Line has covered closely over the years), and the state already has a serious shortage of doctors and healthcare access, particularly in rural communities. Nunn said last year that concerns about rural hospitals closing as a result of Republican Medicaid cuts were a “myth.”
That’s an interesting take, given that Starting Line reported MercyOne’s Ottumwa family medicine clinic closed earlier this year, and two South Des Moines clinics later announced closures, with MercyOne specifically citing anticipated Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement cuts as among the pressures driving the decision. Try telling Iowan families that their rural hospital that has since been shut down is a “myth.”
Sarah told me that when voters lose their doctor and suddenly have to drive an hour for basic care, no amount of political messaging can convince them they aren’t feeling what they’re feeling.
But not all stories on the campaign trail are depressing. Days before Sarah and I spoke, Iowa Starting Line spoke to a man who had appeared in a Nunn campaign ad praising provisions of the Republican tax bill. He told our reporters he had actually been paid to appear in the ad, pushed back on the message he had delivered, and said he can’t even vote, as a very meme-able cherry on top!
When I played the video for Sarah, she said what we were all thinking: “It is really sad when you can’t find someone who is willing to say good things about your votes without paying them!”
But beneath the very funny campaign moment lies the same argument Sarah made throughout our conversation: voters want politicians who will actually show up for them and who they can trust. Sarah has rightly criticized Nunn for not holding open town halls, and Nunn only recently agreed to their first and only debate, set for next week.
That question of accountability also came up in a much darker context: the Epstein files. Sarah recently toured the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Reading Room when it came through Des Moines alongside survivor Sharlene Rochard and family members of Virginia Giuffre. Iowa Starting Line reported that Nunn ultimately voted for releasing the files, but had previously voted against multiple earlier efforts that would have forced their release.
For Sarah, that issue is personal in a way I didn’t know before our interview. Before becoming a pastor, a mother or an elected official, she worked as a crisis counselor for survivors of sexual assault, meeting victims in emergency rooms and helping them navigate what came next.
“This is a really personal issue for me,” she told me. “We have to hold these folks accountable.” And that’s what I found most interesting about Sarah. She is running in one of the most politically competitive districts in the country, but when I asked what drives her, she didn’t talk about control of the House, polls or political strategy.
She talked about showing up.
As a hospital chaplain, she showed up for people on the worst days of their lives. As a pastor in a rural community twenty miles from the nearest grocery store, she took the church directory and visited people where they lived. Working with a food pantry network, she learned how to build coalitions among churches, businesses, schools, and people who disagreed on plenty of other things.
“At the heart of my faith is the call to love my neighbor,” she told me. And she sees politics as an extension of that obligation, not a departure from it. That might also help explain why some people who don’t identify as Democrats are giving her a look.
This district did not suddenly become deep blue. Race ratings aren’t votes. But when a district Trump carried by more than four points moves from Toss Up to Lean Democratic weeks before Election Day, it deserves attention.
And when lifelong Republican voters start walking up to a Democratic candidate in Iowa to tell her they’re ready to cross the aisle for her, we feel pretty confident our little mantra is worth repeating: Don’t sleep on Iowa.
Watch my full conversation with Sarah Trone Garriott, and if you have friends or family in Iowa, send this one their way. We have 13 days left to vote for the Congress and country we all deserve.
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