Where with a little bit of luck—and a ton of grassroots organizing—decency has a fighting chance.
Something is happening in Iowa.
You can see it in the polls, which show Rob Sand, the Democratic state auditor running for governor, consistently ahead of Republican Zack Lahn, in a state where the outgoing incumbent, MAGA Republican Kim Reynolds, was reelected by a 19-point margin four years ago—and where Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by over 13 points.
You can see it in Dubuque, where hundreds of protesters gathered for a No Kings rally before Trump’s visit to the state earlier this month. And in Sioux City, where 12 percent of the city’s residents are foreign-born, and in Des Moines, where thousands of demonstrators turned out at the State Capitol in the spring, and where the most recent protest, on October 17, was focused on encouraging early voting.
I first saw it for myself in late July in Guthrie Center, a town of about 1,500 people spread out along the South Raccoon River. This was the second day of RAGBRAI, the 53rd running of the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa. Invented by John Karras, a feature writer for the paper, and columnist Don Kaul, as a stratagem to get their employer to pay for a newsman’s holiday, the pair invited readers to join them for a weeklong bicycle jaunt across the state. Some 300 riders turned up back in 1973—of whom 114 stayed the distance.
This year there were 20,000 of us at the start in Onowa, a town that claims the widest Main Street in the country, but whose chief attraction these days is the Blackbird Bend Casino, operated by the Omaha tribe of Nebraska, and which boasts 350 electric slot machines—but no table games. After dipping our rear wheels in the waters of the Missouri River (the ceremonial start to every RAGBRAI) our route climbed over 3,500 feet, and 59.3 miles, to Harlan, where the temperature briefly hit triple digits. The road to Guthrie Center the next day brought an even greater number of hills—by the end of the day, several riders could be heard cursing whoever had assured them Iowa was flat—with the heat index reaching 110 degrees.
The Iowans on the ride were not surprised; indeed, many wore jerseys with the slogan “Iowa: Flat as a waffle.” But after pedaling under the blazing sun for hours between cornfields on one side of the road and soybeans on the other, without a stick of shade between them, it was a great relief to come into the shade and think about politics. The topic would have been on my mind anyway—I’d been given my first lessons in prairie populism by David Leshtz and Jeffrey Cox, co-editors of The Prairie Progressive, back in 2015 when the two of them were all in for Bernie Sanders. Jeff died in 2020, but Dave keeps up the fight, and it was partly his influence that made me say yes when a Vermont friend asked me if I’d ride RAGRAI with him. But I’d also brought along a native informant from Brooklyn.
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I met Peter Hedges because we shared a physical therapist in Cobble Hill, and after weeks of groaning side by side every Thursday, we began to talk and discovered a shared passion for movies and left politics. Peter is a playwright and screenwriter by trade; when I asked him if he’d written anything I might have seen, he said “I wrote the screenplay for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.” Turns out he wrote the novel, too. Peter was born and raised in West Des Moines, where he graduated from Valley High School. And that’s where the story gets interesting.
Because it turns out that Ashley Hinson, the Trump-endorsed candidate to replace retiring MAGA loyalist Joni Ernst, is also a graduate of Valley High. Back in the spring, a bipartisan group of Hinson’s former teachers joined with Valley High alumni to form Iowans for Decency, a PAC dedicated to marshaling local grassroots opposition to the Republican’s campaign—months before Josh Turek had even secured the Democratic nomination. Peter was already deeply involved, so when I asked him if he might want to come along on RAGBRAI, I didn’t have to twist his arm. “My brother rode RAGBRAI, and my cousin, and I always wanted to do it. But I never did.”
What I was thinking about in Guthrie Center—once my brain stopped boiling—and kept thinking about all the way to the finish line in Dubuque, was the way his fellow Iowans responded to Peter, who wore an “Iowans for Decency” jersey during the daytime, and a “What’s Eating Iowans?” purple T-shirt in the evening, when he’d turn up at the local high school to talk to the theater kids, or at the town library for the Iowans for Decency Listening Tour.
It wasn’t the issues that were surprising: the devastating effect of Trump’s tariffs on farm incomes, the price of gas and diesel, fear for their sons and daughters sent to fight Trump’s wars of choice, or the way, thanks to Big Ag dumping chemicals into the water table, Iowa has seen a sharp rise in cancer diagnoses (even while rates keep falling elsewhere in the country). What I kept hearing, and seeing, was some kind of limit being reached. It wasn’t exactly a prairie fire of populist enthusiasm—though Turek, who was politicized by his experience as a person with spina bifida navigating the American healthcare system, does describe himself as a “prairie populist.” (Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor, describes his politics as “radical centrist populism.”)
But then, in a state that sent Tom Harkin to the House for five terms and then to the Senate for five more terms, the Democratic Party brand is still sufficiently toxic for Sand’s yard signs to use green and orange rather than blue; I saw hundreds of them as I rode east across the state, without any idea which party the candidate was in.
So while Iowa may lack the high-stakes ideological drama of Abdul El-Sayed’s race in Michigan, or the presidential potential of Jon Ossoff’s expected triumph in Georgia, I’m going to be keeping my eyes on Iowa, where with a little bit of luck—and a ton of grassroots organizing—decency has a fighting chance.
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