First off, I’m excited to say that Word Salad crossed another threshold, and we’re now over 7,000 subscribers! According to the Constitution if we hit 8,000 Trump has to resign, so thank you for doing your part, and keep spreading the word. (Also, this is my first interview-style post. Like this format? Hate it? Let me know.)
Last week, I was at a coffee shop in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where I overheard two customers talking about the results of a special election for the Iowa state senate. That’s odd. Not in the top ten of odd things that have happened recently, but odd nonetheless.
It says something about how desperate Democrats are for wins that flipping a state senate seat in Iowa becomes coffee-shop conversation material in Jersey. But it also says something about how angry (and, yes, frightened) we are that so many people care. Like many of you, I wondered “How exactly did Dems flip that seat?” and “Can we learn anything from this nationwide?”
Then I realized I knew someone who could answer those questions. Zach Wahls is an Iowa State Senator and, until recently, the State Senate minority leader. He’s also a former intern in the Obama White House and he spoke at the 2012 Dem convention, which is where we met.
Zach took time from taking care of his small child to talk with me about this rare bright spot for Democrats, and what it will take for Democrats to compete again in Obama-turned-Trump states like Iowa.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our Zoom. I also put the whole video up here if you want to follow us all the way down several election-related rabbit holes, or just admire Zach’s cool hat.
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DAVID: This State Senate election from last week. What happened?
ZACH: It starts a few months ago. There's a vacancy at the Lieutenant Governor's spot. The Governor appointed State Senator Chris Cournoyer to that position. Chris represented a district in eastern Iowa, right along the Mississippi River, and it was a special election situation. Donald Trump carried this district by 21 points last November.
Democrats nominated an extraordinary local leader named Mike Zimmer. Republicans, on the other hand, nominated a local activist, very far right. We wound up winning the seat by four points, a 25-point swing in a few months. I think most political observers in Iowa were hoping, best-case scenario, to be a mid-to-high single-digit loss for Democrats, where we’d have something to point to in terms of over-performance. I think it was only a handful of people who genuinely thought that Senator-elect Zimmer had a chance at winning outright.
DAVID: In terms of this election, was there a moment where you started to think something seems to be shifting and we could actually do substantially better than we thought?
ZACH: First of all, Mike is just a tremendous candidate. One of the things that has become super clear to me is candidate quality really matters. And when you have a big gap in candidate quality, that can make a big difference. And it was very clear to me very early on that we were going to benefit from that in this race. I know some of the folks who were involved with recruiting Mike. They were super bullish on his candidacy and when the opportunity presented itself, we had somebody who was ready to go.
DAVID: What makes somebody a good candidate, in your experience?
ZACH: If you were going to put together a committee to raise money to build new lights for the baseball field in your school district, who would you want to lead that committee? That's the person who you want to run for local office. The person who's going to spearhead a small community effort to raise money is going to be well-known, respected, trusted in the community, and they're going to have relationships they bring to the table. When you're a public educator, teacher, or principal, people come to you, and people had lots of positive experiences with Mike. There's often this idea that in politics, it's about who you know. It's actually the other way round. It's about who knows you.
The other obvious takeaway to me from this is when Trump's not on the ballot, a lot of those folks who voted for him are staying home.
DAVID: Tell me about that. How did turnout compare in this extremely obscure special election to a big national presidential election with so much on the line?
ZACH: There are two points that I would make here. First, turnout was way down. Special elections, it's always the case. And to say nothing of the fact that there are plenty of Iowans who snowbird and Arizona or Florida who might not have had enough time to cast an absentee ballot.
The other thing that's interesting about this area, though: this is a pivot county. You have a lot of ancestral Democrats who voted for a Democrat previously. My guess is a lot of those people look at Mike Zimmer and they don't see a D.C. Democrat like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. They see the old-school Democrat who they used to vote for, who was a little bit more blue-collar, a little bit more conservative. Mike, for sure, got Democrats out who were excited and motivated. He also appealed to a good chunk of the electorate who has been going back and forth, or had swung from Democrats to Republicans.
DAVID: You’re an elected democrat in the minority, in a red state. What can democratic lawmakers do right now?
ZACH: Last week, when the orders start coming out of Washington, DC — the Trump folks are freezing foreign aid, federal grants, loans, NIH grant review panels — I put out a bunch of videos on social media, several different posts on all different platforms: Hey, send me your stories if you’re working in an office that's being affected.
DAVID: This is something I think a lot of Democratic electeds don't get. Social media can be there for listening, not just talking.
ZACH: Part of using social media is, people want to feel heard. They want to feel like they can share their concern or their frustration, and have a local elected leader listen to it and do something about it. I can't force the Trump White House to do something, but I can relay the concerns that I'm hearing from my constituents to my US representative.
Just yesterday, some of my colleagues and I sent a letter to [Republican] Senators Grassley and Ernst demanding more information about the NIH funding freeze and how that's going to impact the University of Iowa, which does $190 million worth of NIH research every year.
DAVID: Let’s talk for a second about the Democratic brand nationwide, and how that’s affecting Democrats in places like Iowa.
ZACH: The failure of Democratic governance in blue states has given Republicans in red states something very easy to point to. Look at what has happened in places like San Francisco. There are plenty of examples, whether it's mass crime, the amount of open-air drug use, concerns about public safety in New York City—high-profile, visible places.
DAVID: You're talking about cities, really, more than states.
ZACH: That’s a good distinction. Republicans here in Iowa say, “Look, if you want that, vote for Democrats. If you want safety, security, whatever, vote Republican.” And is there some racism built into some of this stuff? For sure. Is there a legitimate concern about Democratic governance in blue cities and states? I think so. One of the things that Democrats need to come to grips with is needing to govern better in the places that we actually run and control.
DAVID: Aright, Zach, thank you very much. We’ll talk soon.
ZACH: Thanks, David. Okay, bye.
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