Numbers Game
At the start of each month, the Office of Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate issues a report indicating how many people are registered to vote in Iowa, and what political affiliation they’ve declared. They post this on their web site by county and congressional district.
We just had the municipal and school elections last Tuesday, so there might have been a spike of new registered voters…but since those were non-partisan races, there’s probably not much movement in declared party preference.
As of the start of this month, we had 2,130,208 registered voters in Iowa. And by party affiliation, Republicans outnumber Democrats in each of Iowa’s four congressional districts. At first blush, you might say that makes sense, because all four members of the U.S. House from Iowa are Republicans.
But when you look just a bit further, you’ll see it’s not as clear cut as that—and has not been for some time.
Yes, in both of eastern Iowa’s congressional districts, Republicans have a roughly 20,000 registered voter advantage over Democrats. But the GOP number is dwarfed by the number of “non-partisan” registered voters…around 20,000 more non-partisan voters than Republicans in the southeastern Iowa district, around 15,000 more in the northeastern Iowa district.
That means those seats are always in play…when the single largest bloc of voters are not declaring allegiance to either party, you have the potential for wide shifts—enough to easily flip seats.
In the south central district including Des Moines, the GOP tops even non-partisan voters, but the number is about even…Democrats are about 15,000 voters behind. Again—just by the numbers, subject to flip.
The largest district in number of counties in the northwest fourth district, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than two to one in the number of registered voters…and the GOP outnumbers non-partisan voters by 70,000.
2026 has the potential to be a major change election in Iowa. We’ll continue to watch those registered voter partisan declarations to see if we can detect shifts as the primary and general elections draw closer.
