Democrat Lanon Baccam won a landslide victory in Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, and the Republican incumbents in the 1st and 4th Districts who faced challengers on Tuesday both won. Incumbents typically win primary elections in Iowa, but a Republican supervisor in Polk County and a Democratic supervisor in Johnson County were defeated in their primary races.
The race for the Democratic nomination in the 3rd District was never close. The Associated Press was able to declare Baccam the winner just 20 minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m. According to the vote totals posted by the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office,
Vine did carry Page County in the southwest corner of the district. She won 72 of the 117 votes cast by Democrats in that county. Baccam won in all of the district’s other 20 counties. In the district’s largest county, Polk, Baccam won with 15,129 of 17,731 votes cast in the race.
Baccam is a first-time candidate, but he is not a newcomer to Iowa politics. In 2020, he was the deputy state director for the Biden campaign in Iowa. And as the Des Moines Register reported when he launched his campaign in November, he has previously “worked in state government and for several other Iowa Democrats, including former U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, former Gov. Chet Culver and former U.S. Reps. Leonard Boswell and Bruce Braley, as well as then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.”
Baccam is a veteran who served as a combat engineer in Afghanistan, and worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Obama and Biden administrations. He will face incumbent Rep. Zach Nunn in the November election.
Nunn, who was unopposed in the Republican primary, is completing his first term in Congress. He defeated incumbent Democrat Cindy Axne in the newly redrawn 3rd District by 2,100 votes, or 0.6 percent of the total vote, in 2022. Nunn is one of two Republican incumbents in Iowa considered vulnerable by state and national Democrats.
The other Republican incumbent Democrats consider vulnerable is Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. Miller-Meeks faced David Pautsch — the owner of an ad agency, as well as the head of Thy Kingdom Come Ministries and organizer of the annual Quad Cities Prayer Breakfast — who claimed she is not a true conservative.
Miller-Meeks, a two-term incumbent, had the backing of the state and national Republican establishments and a considerable fundraising advantage over Pautsch. She also spent roughly six times more on the campaign than her challenger did. On Tuesday, Miller-Meeks won the district by 12 percentage points.
Pautsch did win five of the district’s 20 counties, including its biggest, Scott County. His largest margin of victory was in Clinton County, where Pautsch received 56 percent of the 1,154 votes cast by Republicans. His smallest margin came in Scott, where Pautsch won by only six votes, according to the totals published by the Secretary of State’s Office.
Six votes is, of course, a significant vote total for Miller-Meeks. It was her margin of victory in 2020, when she defeated Democrat Rita Hart for the seat left open by the retirement of Rep. Dave Loebsack.
In the 2022 election, Miller-Meeks improved her margin of victory, defeating Democrat Christina Bohannan by 20,173 votes. Miller-Meeks will face Bohannan again in the November election. Bohannan was unopposed in the Democratic primary on Tuesday.
There were two seats on the Polk County Board of Supervisors on the ballot in the primary election. The seat in District 2 is open, because long-time incumbent Robert Brownell announced in March he would not run again in order to have more time to care for his wife, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Jill Altringer, an attorney and a registered lobbyist with the Iowa Legislature (her clients include the Iowa Soybean Association and the Iowa Turkey Federation) defeated fellow Republican Bob Start, winning with 71 percent of the vote in the district. In the November election, Altringer will face Democrat John Forbes, a retired pharmacist who has represented Urbandale in the Iowa House of Representatives for six terms.
In District 3, Republican Mark Holm won 69 percent of the vote, defeating two-term incumbent Steve Van Oort. Holm, who has been mayor of Ankeny since 2021 and served on the Ankeny City Council before that, will now run against Democrat Kim Hagemann, a retired attorney who worked in the crop seed industry, for the seat.
Supervisors are elected on a county-wide basis in Johnson County instead of by district. Three seats were on the ballot in Tuesday’s election, and there were five candidates, all Democrats. No Republican candidate filed to run for the Board of Supervisors.
Rod Sullivan, the longest-serving member of the board, finished first among the five candidates, winning 4,263 votes, and incumbent Lisa Green-Douglass secured her party’s nomination with 3,925 votes.
Corridor Community Action Network Director Mandi Remington secured her place on November’s ballot by winning 3,820 votes. Remington finished 857 votes ahead of incumbent Royceann Porter and 1,433 votes ahead of Bob Conrad, an Iowa State Trooper.
Porter made history in 2018 when she was first elected to the board of supervisors in a special election to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Supervisor Kurt Friese. Porter was not only the first Black person elected to countywide office in Johnson County history, she was also the first Black person to be nominated for a countywide office by a major party.
On Tuesday night, Porter published a message on social media, thanking friends and supporters for their work on her behalf.
“Although I faced a loss in the primary tonight, I remain deeply grateful for the trust and confidence you placed in me,” Porter wrote. “This experience has been incredibly rewarding, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to serve our community.”
“This is not the end of my journey. I will continue to work tirelessly for our community, advocating for the causes that matter most to us all.”