BREAKING: Democrats win upset special election in Iowa, break GOP supermajority

We spoke with Catelin Drey this week. Then she won big.

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Democratic activist Catelin Drey won a special legislative election in Iowa on Tuesday night, flipping a Republican-held seat and breaking the GOP’s supermajority in the state Senate.

Drey, 38, scored a 55-44% win in a hotly contested race to replace the late state Sen. Rocky De Witt, who won the western Iowa district by the same margin just last year. Located in western Iowa, the first Senate district is built around Sioux City, where Drey works in marketing and runs a nonprofit group called Moms for Iowa.

Republicans have an overwhelming advantage in voter registration in the district, with over 23,000 GOP voters to under 16,000 registered Democrats. But the tide has begun to turn against the Republican Party in the Hawkeye State, if ever so slightly; Gov. Kim Reynolds consistently rates as the least popular governor in the nation and Democrats flipped an even more conservative seat in the state Senate early this year. This win breaks the GOP’s supermajority in the upper chamber, giving Democrats some say over the governor’s nominees and the ability to negotiate over legislation. It’s the first small step toward restoring some balance of power in a state that has gone deep red since 2018.

Drey’s campaign was built on the kind of grassroots energy and organization that has largely eluded Democrats not named Zohran Mamdani, and she ran on the core issues that helped him score a landslide victory in New York City’s mayoral primary. A close ally of Iowa state Rep. JD Scholten, Drey also sought to emulate his populist approach to politics, standing up for vulnerable minority groups but focusing on the economic despair that has gripped the American middle class.

A critical special election in Iowa could revive rural Democrats

“Wen we talk about wage suppression, when we talk about the affordability crisis in terms of housing and health care and child care, all of those things resonate with folks across the political spectrum,” Drey told Progress Report in an interview earlier this week. “They don't want their life to be more expensive than it needs to be.”

Much of the GOP’s campaign was focused on social and cultural issues, complete with bizarre attack ads that portrayed her as a space alien who wanted to allow undocumented immigrants to vote in elections. Neither of those things were true; Drey had simply opposed a constitutional amendment that would have banned non-citizens from voting, something that was already illegal in both the US and Iowa.

Instead of kowtowing to their xenophobia, Drey held strong, convincing voters that she was nothing like what the ads suggested. Instead, by building an impressive ground game and knocking on thousands of doors herself, the newly elected state senator was able to convince people that she was fighting for them.

Watch our entire interview below:

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