Here in Iowa, the Fight Goes On

iava Sity, iava— “I can’t stop knocking on the door until I feel a naked man coming to the door.”

Organizer Sharon Lake is half-serious as she trains and inspires 15 Democratic volunteers to campaign door-to-door. At the end of her 20-minute presentation, volunteers — mostly middle-aged women who have never knocked on doors before — rush out of Johnson County Sheriff Brad Kunkel’s garage clutching bulletin boards and campaign lights.

Lake may joke during her workouts (“I’ve only had loosely hung towels before”), but she’s 100 percent serious about grassroots organizing. Starting as a campaign captain for Obama’s Iowa caucuses in 2008, she now trains Democratic volunteers throughout eastern Iowa.

Iowa caucuses were strong 16 years ago, but an effective statewide structure did not exist. Volunteers were sent without proper training, and systematic campaigning began only in the late summer or autumn before the elections. Lake, now retired as a supply chain manager for a natural food manufacturer, began building a team and developing a learning-oriented strategy (“no meetings, just learning and working”) starting from the ground up. This last election cycle, Lake’s team started a year ago and expanded their reach to Scott County, an hour away.

Dan Feltes, an Iowa native who became the youngest majority leader in New Hampshire Senate history, moved with his family to Iowa City a couple of years ago and quickly became involved in local politics. He helped develop an early “door-knocking” plan, with an initial focus on listening to constituents’ concerns rather than campaigning for specific candidates. When it came time for persuasion and turnout efforts, thousands of voters had already been “touched” by a friendly neighbor who wanted to know what issues mattered to them.

An army of canvassers recruited and trained by Lake was a major factor in the record turnout in the last congressional race in Iowa’s southeast quadrant. In Iowa City alone, up to 100 volunteers showed up each day. Many of them went to other cities in their congressional district (1st in Iowa). State Senators Adam Zabner and Janice Weiner estimated that between them they knocked on more than 4,000 doors in 10 counties (Weiner was often accompanied by Alaska, her 6-year-old granddaughter). Feltes reported that volunteers knocked on approximately 58,000 doors.

The results of this finely tuned ground game were astronomical in Johnson County, home to Iowa State University and a longtime Democratic stronghold, with 87,012 people voting, the largest turnout in the county’s history. Democratic candidate Christina Bohannon received a record 35,225 more votes than Republican incumbent Marionette Miller-Meeks. That margin is the second-largest for a federal seat in the district’s history, surpassing Sen. Tom Harkin’s landslide re-election in 2008, and trailing only President Biden’s 2020 election. Even though Trump increased his numbers in Iowa, Bohannon’s (and Kamala Harris’) margin exceeded even Obama’s when he won Iowa twice. Unfortunately, her record number in Johnson County still wasn’t enough to unseat Miller-Meeks, who won the red-most 20-county district by just 799 votes out of 412,000 cast.

Bohannon won only two other counties in the 20-county district. Scott County, part of the once-Democratic Quad-Cities, gave her a 1,998-vote majority. Jefferson, Maharishi University’s home of Transcendental Meditators, gave her 227 more votes than Miller-Meeks. That’s it, three districts out of 20. The strategy devised by Lake, Feltes and Bohannon to break the bank in the “People’s Republic of Johnson County” (and reduce Republican margins in other districts) was sound. It almost worked, but it wasn’t enough to overcome a Republican landslide in a district that, like the rest of Iowa, has grown increasingly red over the past decade.

Where do Iowa Democrats go next? Many of the soldiers in the army of door-knockers were motivated by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds’ push for a statewide ban on abortions after six weeks. It was unusual to see a preponderance of older women hitting the streets after a workout at Sharon Lake. The question is whether enough future voters will connect the dots between Trump, his US Supreme Court appointees, Gov. Reynolds, the Republican legislature and the Iowa Supreme Court justices appointed by Reynolds, who have ruled that the six-week ban is constitutional.

John Norris, Polk County (Iowa’s largest county) and former gubernatorial candidate, agrees that the abortion ban and unusual ground game will be critical if Democrats are to recover from the latest onslaught. Norris also cited a volatile budget due to the Republicans’ massive tax cuts and continued attacks on public education funding as additional points people should connect to.

Despite the woes of this election, one thing is certain: Sharon Lake will continue to campaign during the next cycle, still hoping that a naked man will come to the door.