Mom For Iowa Gonna Turn State Into Woke Hellhole Of Funded Schools With Books And Stuff ... For Kids!

A nice time!

Iowa state Senator-elect Catelin Drey, screenshot from a July 11 interview by Bleeding Heartland on YouTube

Democrats broke the Republican supermajority in the Iowa state Senate yesterday with a special election win by Catelin Drey (D-Sioux City), who flipped a Republican-majority seat in a district that Donald Trump won last fall by 11 points. Drey’s victory — by more than 10 points —was the third Democratic win in four Iowa special elections since Trump took office in January

If you want to call Drey’s 55.2 percent to 44.8-percent win over Republican Christopher Prosch a repudiation of Trump in a very red state, we certainly won’t stop you, though we’ll also point out, dour killjoys that we are, that special elections in off-cycle years tend to be low-turnout affairs. That was the case for Drey’s upset win: Just under 24 percent of voters turned out to choose the replacement for state Sen. Rocky De Witt (R), who died of pancreatic cancer in June.

You can also argue that the low turnout, even with the Senate supermajority at stake, reflected a lack of enthusiasm among Iowa Republicans, who have for decades dominated the state.

As a result of losing their 2/3 supermajority, Republicans can no longer confirm Gov. Kim Reynolds’s nominees on a simple party-line vote; they’ll need to get one of the 17 Democrats to join them, giving Ds new power (if they use it!) to demand some compromises in confirmation battles. Rs also won’t be able to override a veto with only GOP votes, though we can’t think of many situations in which Reynolds would veto a Republican-majority bill to begin with.

We like the cut of Ms. Drey’s jib, particularly her campaign’s emphasis on making housing and childcare affordable, and fully funding public schools, as she discussed in this interview last month with the Midwestern progressive news site Bleeding Heartland.

This was Drey’s first run for office, although she’s been a longtime advocate for public schools and affordable childcare. She started a group called “Moms for Iowa,” which seeks to get parents in touch with their electeds, and which she jokes was named in part as a progressive play off “Moms for Liberty.” She also mentions that she majored in Spanish and photography in college, so “I can take your picture in two languages.” Yay for cornball mom/dad jokes!

Her campaign focused on personal outreach and rejected the Culture Warring that has driven Republicans so much in recent years, and voters seemed to respond well to her “moms know how to clean up a mess” and “I think we need more regular people in office” messaging.

It may have helped that Prosch, her Republican opponent, was a raving far-right Christian nationalist weirdo who runs a firm that a few years ago produced and distributed a direct-to-video polemic titled “Enemies Within the Church,” all about how fundamentalists must drive out “woke” Christians who aren’t hateful enough. Enjoy, if you can stomach it, this trailer, with its dorky photoshopped image of Jebus crucified on a hammer and sickle.

Another 38-minute segment condemned a “Marxist Baptist church” just 44 seconds in, revealing the heresy of a pastor who said that Jesus believed in redistributing wealth, the horror!!!!

Once he secured the GOP nomination for the state Senate seat, Prosch quickly got to work deleting his personal and business social media accounts, but not before screenshots could document some of his his more out-there content, like his retweet of a 9/11 “truther” and a Facebook post from his political consulting outfit that insisted, “Global cooling.. global warming..climate change…whatever they’re calling it, it’s all a lie!”

And in a 2022 video that’s still on YouTube, Prosch explained on his podcast that actually Democrats are far worse than Hitler, because duh, abortion: “Who was worse? The Nazi Germans who killed 10 million Jews and many other people? Or the left’s policies to target an entire generation of babies to death?”

Sounds like the state of Iowa really missed out on a winner, there.

And of course the Republican Party of Iowa sponsored a website called “dreyfor illegals.com” (archive link), which claims she supports positions she has never taken, saying she “wants illegal immigrants voting in Iowa elections” (she opposed a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register, which is not the same!) and that she has “praised” a group that wants to “Abolish ICE,” “end deportations of illegal immigrants, and “Terminate funding” for the Border Patrol, which of course is the exact same thing as wanting all that herself. Heavens, she even wants porn in schools, or at least opposed a wingnut bill that would have banned books the far Right wanted to call “sexually explicit.”

Both national and state parties threw a lot of money at the race, and the Democratic National Committee got 30,000 volunteers involved too.

This was the fourth Iowa special election in which Democrats outperformed results from last fall, winning three of them. In January, Democrat Mike Zimmer won another state Senate seat in a district that went for Trump by 21 points; Democrats only narrowly lost a House race in a district Trump won by 27 points. In April, another Dem won a 58-point victory in a House race in a blue district where Kamala Harris only beat Trump by 35 points.

But don’t worry, no trend to see here, said Iowa GOP chair Jeff Kaufmann, who confidently insisted that “National Democrats were so desperate for a win that they activated 30,000 volunteers and a flood of national money to win a state Senate special election by a few hundred votes.” Which seems like a pretty good use of volunteers and money to us.

[Des Moines Register / Bleeding Heartland / NBC News / Iowa Starting Line /

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