Iowa Down Ballot with Dave Price 8/15/26

We split up this week: Laura hit the Wing Ding in Clear Lake, Dave went to the Field of Dreams game. Both nights ran long.

Wing Ding drew its best crowd since 2019, about 750 people, with Mark Kelly headlining and fueling more 2028 speculation. Over in Newton, RNC Chair Jeff Kaufmann made the case that Republicans only need to flip a handful of seats nationally, two of them right here in Iowa. Laura’s not so sure the math holds, she counts at least three competitive Iowa districts.

We also flagged the odd, limited-media visit from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, campaigning for Miller-Meeks and Nunn under the guise of official business.

And the Libertarian ballot saga rolls on. New candidates, a likely court fight ahead.

Plus a preview of what we’re watching for at the Register Soapbox at the state fair this week.

Want to sharpen your writing and get the inside scoop on Iowa politics at the same time? Join us September 27-30 at the Okoboji Writers’ & Songwriters’ Retreat on beautiful West Lake Okoboji, featuring Iowa Down Ballot analysts Laura Belin and Kathie Obradovich. They’ll walk you through finding public information, getting your opinion pieces published, and plenty more. Spots are limited, so scan the QR code at the beginning and end of the video or head to okobojiwritersretreat.com to sign up. If you’d like to make a donation to help the Iowa Writer’s Collaborative which supports this show please click the button below. Thanks!

Auto-generated transcript below:

Dave Price: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Iowa Down Ballot podcast, our weekly confab of all things politics in Iowa, and some other things that impact Iowa politics — the people, the places, the issues, the events, this big campaign, all that kind of stuff. We talk about it here on the podcast. I’m Dave Price, joined by my Iowa Writers’ Collaborative colleagues, Kathie Obradovich, the czar, the queen of the Iowa Capital Dispatch...

Kathie Obradovich: And...

Dave Price: ...Laura Belin, the founder, the creator, the editor, the writer...

Dave Price: The bookkeeper. Did I get them all? At Bleeding Heartland

Laura Belin: Most of them, yes.

Dave Price: Most of them, yes. It just depends on me. How are you both? And I love your peach, Kathie.

Kathie Obradovich: Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, happy Friday. It doesn’t feel like Friday, because I think we’re going to be going all weekend, right? At least with the Saturday State Fair.

Dave Price: Indeed. I feel like I need to pre-apologize just in case for how this podcast goes. We were recording on Friday morning. Laura went to the Wing Ding, which we’re going to talk about, at Clear Lake — that ain’t close to Des Moines. I went to Dyersville for the Field of Dreams game with my son — that is not close to Des Moines either. So not to whine, but we both had very short nights and took a good extended nap, separately. Do you drink caffeine, Laura?

Laura Belin: I do not. I get all the caffeine I need from chocolate.

Dave Price: Okay.

Laura Belin: But I got home at about 11:30 last night, and then I was just wired, so I couldn’t go to sleep right away, because it was a highly stimulating environment up there at the historic Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake.

Dave Price: Oh, man, I’m jealous — you beat us by an hour and a half. We walked in just a couple minutes before... before wine. My 16-year-old, he’s like the Energizer bunny — he slept almost the entire three-hour drive back. Now, he did drive us there so I could work while we drove, but I guess 10:30 was his knockout point, so it was just me and a silent car for three hours on Highway 20. But here we are. All right, how about we leave...

Kathie Obradovich: And I didn’t do anything.

Dave Price: Not bragging.

Laura Belin: So you edited a bunch of stories, I did — late.

Kathie Obradovich: I watched Field of Dreams on Netflix — not to give it a plug or anything. And yeah, I did edit the Wing Ding story when it came in, and I drank some wine, so today I have my baseball mug for my caffeine.

Dave Price: May I just say it’s good to be the boss working at home when you can drink? I’m not going to allege that you drank your wine while you edited Robin’s story from the Wing Ding — that’s for everyone else to figure out, and this is not a confessional here — but regardless of the order, that’s the way to make that night work.

Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I think so. I haven’t been doing this for almost 40 years for nothing, babe.

Dave Price: Amen. All right, Laura — since you were the one of the three of us physically present at the Wing Ding, give us a little intro, because you’ve gone to a bunch of these things. Talk about what happens there first, and then, as they usually do, they had a high-profile guest — in this case, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly. What’s the atmosphere like when you get into the Surf Ballroom?

Laura Belin: The Iowa Democratic Wing Ding is a fundraiser put on by a bunch of county Democratic Party organizations across northern and western Iowa, but it draws people from well outside that region too — I saw people from Scott County, Polk County, and lots of places. They said last night there were about 750 people there, and it certainly looked it — the room was very full. They said it was the best-attended Wing Ding since 2019, when they had more than a dozen presidential candidates there. I was at that one too, and it was kind of wild with the presidential-candidate sign wars.

This time, since it’s after the primary, there’s no Democratic competition, so they had most of the statewide nominees speaking — except not Rob Sand or Dave Muhlbauer, but all the other nominees for statewide office: Chris Jones, Taylor Wedick, John Norwood, Nathan Willems and Ryan Peterman running for Secretary of State. Then they always have two congressional candidates — Lindsey James, the nominee in the 2nd District, and Dave Dawson in the 4th. And, as you mentioned, Mark Kelly, the keynote, gave kind of a rally-the-troops speech. Last year’s keynote was Harry Dunn, the Capitol Police officer who was there on January 6th, and he gave a more introspective speech than Kelly did. Oh, and I forgot to mention — Josh Turek, the Senate candidate, was there too, speaking. The crowd was very into the speeches. Afterward, talking to activists, there’s a lot going on the ground — coordinated campaign offices open in several counties across the 2nd and 4th Districts. People seem pretty fired up.

Dave Price: The one thing I thought was interesting about what Kelly was talking about — this is where I feel like Democrats are a little split, at the DC level. Kelly talked about the importance of Democrats getting back into the majority so they could investigate the alleged corruption of the Trump administration. Some Democrats don’t really want to talk about that — they may not want to talk about Trump at all, or about possible impeachment, corruption, and all that. What was your take on how that played with the crowd?

Laura Belin: He didn’t talk about impeachment. But if you’re Mark Kelly, and you were threatened with prosecution over that video he and other members of Congress recorded telling service members they don’t have to follow illegal orders, I think you almost can’t avoid talking about the Trump administration a little bit. But it definitely wasn’t the focus of his remarks. He was really trying to say we’ve got to get things under control. He told a story I’ve heard him tell before, about going with his daughter — who’s about 30 now — to visit the house where he and his wife lived when she was born. It was a four-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood that he could afford to buy as a young Navy officer, which nobody in his daughter’s generation can afford at her age in a neighborhood like that. So I’d say he emphasized economic issues more, though he did touch on the investigations and what Pete Hegseth is doing. Later, after his speech, he did a segment on MS NOW where he talked more about allegations involving the Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf — he didn’t dwell on that during his speech. But I think a crowd like that does want to hear about investigating the Trump administration. Though that’s definitely not something — I don’t think I’ve ever heard Josh Turek say “send me to the Senate so I can investigate Trump corruption.”

Kathie Obradovich: Dave, you said exactly what I was thinking — it was an interesting choice, given that I think there’s a definite thought among at least some of the party that you don’t want to focus on Trump. But I also agree with Laura that from Kelly’s perspective, given that he’s been investigated, people would think it was weird if he didn’t mention it. So you’ve got two things there. It may not have been the focus of his speech, but it was probably the focus of a lot of the media coverage. The second thing I’d point out: he hasn’t ruled out running for president — he’s actually said he’s thinking about it. So having him headline the Wing Ding takes on added significance, since we’re always looking ahead to the next presidential race, even though we’re not over the hump of the midterms yet. These kinds of events are kind of the unofficial start of the 2028 cycle. A colleague of mine in Arizona asked, “Do you think Mark Kelly’s going to run?” I said, “Well, he’s making the moves.”

Laura Belin: Yeah, well, he... I’m sure he was booked before the DNC made the calendar decision that left Iowa out of the early window — he probably committed to the Wing Ding before that. But he did do the obligatory “I have an Iowa connection” — it turns out his wife’s brother was a Cyclone, a kicker for the football team, and actually held the record for the longest field goal for 45 years. He said that record was just broken last year.

Kathie Obradovich: But it’s a good Iowa connection — coming from a Cyclone and an Ames native.

Dave Price: The search for any potential presidential candidate to find some kind of real or obscure Iowa connection is kind of like what people are doing now with Quincy, Illinois, where they sold that billion-dollar-plus Powerball ticket — “man, I need to have a great-aunt who lives there, I need to go through my family lineage, because somebody in Quincy — I hope I’m related to them.”

No Wing Ding for me, but earlier this week I went to Newton, where the RNC chair — Jeff Kaufmann for the Republican Party of Iowa — was there, along with Marianne Miller-Meeks, Derek Wolf (the lieutenant governor candidate), and a few local state house candidates. It was kind of a coordinated effort.

I need to interrupt myself for a second, because the Scott Bessent visit was odd to me — the Treasury Secretary. He did a couple of events, one with Miller-Meeks and one with Congressman Zach Nunn, but it was limited media. Apparently a few outlets did preview stories and then were able to cover it — I don’t really know how it all went down. I was trying to play catch-up. It’s rather embarrassing not to know the Treasury Secretary is coming — I didn’t find out until the evening before, or something like that. Generally you get a heads-up for that. I don’t know what you two thought of it — I appreciate that the Trump administration’s probably not calling...

Laura Belin: Welcome to my world, Dave. I absolutely didn’t know either. I also didn’t know about the event in Newton, otherwise I would’ve gone.

Dave Price: I work for nine television stations that broadcast in Iowa, so I assumed we’d be part of that coverage — but it was limited, and some things got built as exclusives. I mean, this is semantics, I suppose, but as we’ve seen, sometimes a White House uses a cabinet official technically for an “official visit,” but let’s be honest — it’s campaign season, and you’re here for two competitive seats. I don’t want to get us too far into a side tangent, but I found it odd. I had six hours in the car going to Dyersville and back, so I was ruminating on it. I can’t remember a time when a cabinet official was here and you weren’t really able to cover it as a traditional member of the media. Kathie, can you go through your mental Rolodex — did you find that unusual?

Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, there have been times — and yeah, we didn’t get notice either. It’s not just Laura, so you’re not alone on this one. But yeah, I think it’s unusual. Why not get the most bang for the buck if you’re going to fly somebody out here? It was a busy day, who knows if we’d have had time to cover it anyway. There have been occasions with the Trump administration where they’ve restricted media — like when Trump himself went to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale. You can understand you may not be able to pack as much media into the Iowa Machine Shed restaurant as you’d want. But yeah, during campaign season, when you’re really trying to promote a candidate, it just seems like an odd choice.

Dave Price: Anyway, I essentially interrupted my own story, but that was on my mind. So, back to that Newton event — the speech by the RNC chair was interesting to me, and honestly, I thought it was very effective. Jeff Kaufmann gave kind of his traditional speech, portraying Democrats as “crazies” and those kinds of things — he gives these fired-up speeches. The RNC chair — that’s not his style, I think he’s from Florida — his speech was all about unity: the election’s over, the primary’s over, let’s all get together. It went over well with the crowd, several dozen people there.

The RNC chair was doing math — talking about how in the House you have 435 members, and there are only about 18 truly competitive seats. When you look at Cook Political Report’s forecasting, he made the pitch that Republicans really just need about six of those 18. Standing in the back of the room watching it, I thought that seemed like a pretty effective way to communicate to the crowd — essentially saying, “it’s a tough environment” — he acknowledged midterms don’t usually go well for the party in power — “but here’s what we really only need to focus on.”

He mentioned two competitive seats here in Iowa — I think he said two, not three; I don’t think he counted Hinson’s congressional seat. I’m curious if you’ve heard any other prominent Republican use that kind of pitch. Marianne Miller-Meeks isn’t a screamer or a rah-rah type — she largely did her biographical speech, mixed in some patriotism, got emotional a couple times. She joked she was hopped up on Diet Coke before the event — she walked in with this huge Diet Coke, confessed it wasn’t her first of the day — but her speech was effective with this group too. Going back to the RNC chair’s pitch about “here’s the atmosphere, here’s really all we need to focus on” — have you heard that kind of message from other prominent Republicans?

Kathie Obradovich: It seems a little bit like a perverse message, in the sense of — “we really only need to focus on 6 of 18 of these seats” — to me, not having heard it, it’s like, “relax, people, we’re really in great shape, we only have to get less than half of these.”

Dave Price: Let me interrupt — sorry — I should have underscored: he immediately followed up by saying two of the six are right here in this state, and this is the most important state. Sorry to interrupt.

Kathie Obradovich: No, that helps. I think there are probably folks that kind of framing appeals to — presumably party insiders. I’d be curious whether he goes to some other state and says “two of the six are right here” there too. But yeah, it’s a different way of talking about the race, for sure.

Laura Belin: I think 18 is very low. Even with all the gerrymandering that’s reduced the number of competitive districts, if it turns out to be a wave election, I think there are a lot more than 18 seats truly in play. While you were talking, Dave, I went back to double-check my memory — the National Republican Congressional Committee, the main campaign arm for U.S. House Republicans, added Iowa’s 2nd District to their target list in March. They put Joe Mitchell on what they call their “Maga Majority” program. So they’ve officially acknowledged Iowa has three competitive districts. And Joe Mitchell, last month at the Family Leadership Summit, made a comment along the lines of — “Ashley Hinson’s been great, but the only problem is she made a lot of people think this district isn’t really competitive, but it is.” So I’d say there are definitely three competitive districts in Iowa, and I wouldn’t go along with only 18 being competitive nationwide.

Dave Price: Speaking of Nunn — he’s been touting that he’s one of the most bipartisan members in the U.S. House, which reminded me of when he was running in his first primary. I talked to a Republican strategist type back then — and, as we all know, I had that debate moment with Nunn during his congressional primary, where I’d asked, spur of the moment, who wants to ban all abortions, and Nunn kind of looked around at the other candidates and eventually raised his hand. That became a campaign commercial that probably still runs today — I wish it would go away, my kids joke about it, and it’s about a very serious topic. But I remember a Republican strategist telling me at the time: “Nunn’s doing what he’s got to do to get through this primary, but he’s going to pivot — he understands the district, he knows it’s a purple district and will stay purple, and he’s really going to push bipartisanship.” Now, he’s still a Republican, of course — he’ll do videos supporting President Trump and so on — but it can’t hurt to have a list come out ranking him the third-most-bipartisan member of the U.S. House, in a very competitive seat, in a very competitive year.

Kathie Obradovich: I wonder what their criteria were for bipartisanship, because whenever I look at voting records, the Iowa Republican delegation votes with the majority — I’d say probably more than 90% of the time. It’s got to be something other than voting records.

Dave Price: What they’ve sponsored, probably.

Laura Belin: Part of it is co-sponsoring bills — I think he co-sponsors a bunch of bipartisan bills that don’t go anywhere, but then he gets credit for being a bipartisan member of Congress. I don’t know the specific criteria, but I’ve seen that pattern on lists like this before. And speaking of the cabinet official coming here for an ostensibly “official” event that’s really connected to the campaign — Zach Nunn has been doing a lot of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for earmarks that were actually finalized back in January or March, but the ribbon-cuttings are happening now. Those are all official events, not campaign events, but he’s getting a ton of media coverage from them, which can only help his campaign.

Dave Price: Yeah, and he’s definitely taking advantage of the recess while Congress isn’t meeting. It feels like he’s had two or three of these a week the last couple of weeks — I was going to tally them up for a story I haven’t done yet.

Okay, so — related to campaigns — how many weeks in a row have we talked about the Libertarians? But seriously, every show we’ve had some new development. We need, like, a soap-opera theme song — “As the Libertarian Turns” or something.

Kathie Obradovich: Who would have thought that getting kicked off the ballot would be the most free media the Libertarian Party gets? For anyone who hasn’t followed this saga: two of the Libertarian tickets got kicked off the ballot by the state objection panel. One was lieutenant governor candidate Jules Cutler, which put the whole ticket in jeopardy. The second was 3rd District candidate Marco Battaglia, who got kicked off because his actual legal name is Mark Anderson — who knew? The party has been fighting this in court. Battaglia then announced a medical emergency and dropped out of the race. So the Libertarians held a convention and nominated Charles Aldrich — a name well known to Libertarians and political followers — as the lieutenant governor candidate; he most recently ran in the 4th Congressional District. And Jacob Heard, who’s served as the Libertarian Party’s lawyer and has run for the state house, is going to run in the 3rd Congressional District. Part of why we follow this so closely is that, with so many competitive races, any third-party candidate — including the Libertarians — can actually make a mark.

Laura Belin: Charles Aldrich — both candidates on their governor ticket, Nicholas Gluba and now Aldrich as the lieutenant governor replacement, attempted to run for Congress in 2024 and were part of the case that went to the Iowa Supreme Court, which upheld the decision disqualifying the Libertarian candidates from the ballot on the grounds the party hadn’t done the convention process correctly. I also learned that Aldrich used to live in Minnesota and ran for U.S. Senate there as a Libertarian in the 2008 election — the one that went to a months-long recount and contest between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. He got almost 14,000 votes in an election where the final margin between Franken and Coleman was like 200-something votes.

Dave Price: I mean, seriously — what other podcast gives you that kind of nugget?

Kathie Obradovich: The Libertarians could really be a force in Iowa if they’d just learn the rules and stop making themselves vulnerable to being kicked off the ballot.

Laura Belin: I didn’t even know this process existed — that you could replace a candidate. I’m sure Republicans will file some kind of legal challenge — how can you replace a candidate who didn’t actually qualify for the ballot in the first place? So we’ll probably end up with a court case anyway. I wasn’t aware of this avenue; I thought if you didn’t do it through petition, you’d have to hold a special convention, and that’s very difficult now for third parties, since the requirements for how many people need to attend a convention to nominate someone were raised.

Dave Price: Hey Kathie, let’s put a cherry on top of what we talked about earlier — Mark Kelly and the presidential race. Laura already mentioned the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee — we’re recording Friday morning, and Saturday they could finalize the decision on what the calendar will look like.

Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, the full DNC is meeting Saturday and is expected to ratify the calendar the Rules and Bylaws Committee already proposed. Iowa was left out of that — there are five early states, starting with South Carolina, also including Nevada, New Hampshire (third in the lineup, if I remember right), Michigan, and Virginia.

When the Rules and Bylaws Committee made that decision, Iowa Democratic Party leadership was a little coy about whether the party will actually follow the DNC’s rules and go after Super Tuesday, or jump the line and hold a rogue early caucus. There are two schools of thought — even people who like the caucuses may not want the state to defy the DNC, while others are sick of the caucuses and say we should let them go. It really rubbed Iowa Democrats the wrong way that New Hampshire was left out of the early cycle in 2024, went early anyway, and suffered no consequences, while Iowa followed the rules and got stripped of its Rules and Bylaws Committee member — left out in the cold again. Some feel they were punished for following the rules while New Hampshire was rewarded for flouting them. It’ll be interesting to see — party leadership said they probably won’t make any decision until after the midterms. But if Iowa elects more Democrats in the midterms, the party may feel it has more leverage to test the DNC on all of that — stripping delegates and so on, which often gets waived away by the time a presidential candidate is actually nominated.

Dave Price: Hey, Laura and I are going to sprint out of here as soon as we finish recording to head over to the Des Moines Register Soapbox — day two of the fair, but day one of candidates actually appearing at the soapbox. There are about five today, a bunch on Saturday, none on Sunday, then back to a bunch on Monday, carrying through the week. Laura, without getting too specific about individual candidates — what are you going to be watching for? We’ll have Democrats and some Republicans up there, folks gathered around, maybe some hecklers.

Laura Belin: I’m always curious whether they hang around to take questions afterward, but mainly I want to know whether they come with a focused message on some issue, or just give the same introductory biographical speech I’ve probably already heard them give.

Dave Price: All right, Kathie — as you assemble your team to cover all this, and you know how the sausage gets made from your years at the Register — how do you guide your team, and what will they be watching for?

Kathie Obradovich: We’re obviously looking for candidates to make news — similar to what Laura said, if it’s just a biographical speech we’ve heard before, it’s not going to make much news. We like to see them come with a specific issue, something provocative to talk about. We also look at crowd reaction — do they have supporters there, or are they relying on whoever happens to be walking by, which is sort of the ethic of the soapbox? Organized campaigns will seed the crowd with supporters who show up early and take the front chairs, so we look for that kind of evidence of campaign organization. Soapbox is always fun — it’s unpredictable. And I always love watching candidates at the fair — you can really tell who’s comfortable talking to people they don’t know. I’ve got a lot of stories about presidential candidates at the fair; we can talk about that some other time.

Dave Price: I know — we should seriously do an entire episode on that.

Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, I want to know what they eat — do they flip a pork chop, drop one on the ground, and put it back?

Dave Price: On the ground. Exactly, exactly.

Kathie Obradovich: Okay, bye.

Dave Price: All right — Kathie and Laura, thank you both. Have a good weekend, let’s hope the rain stays away. Friday morning brought another round of rain, as did Thursday, so we’ll see how that shakes out and whether the heat gives us a break next week as we’re out there listening to these folks. Thanks to everyone who’s dropped in for the podcast this week, thanks to the new subscribers, thanks to those sharing it to help us grow, and a special thanks to our paid subscribers — especially those who’ve re-upped and enhanced their support level, we really appreciate that. And to those thinking about supporting the podcast — we’re going to do something special in the weeks ahead for paid subscribers. We’ll talk more about that in the next couple of weeks. Thanks for joining us, have a great week, and we’ll talk to you next week.