While 2025 was ostensibly an off year for elections, the year proved to be filled with fascinating and important contests, culminating in one final race earlier this week.
The last special election of the year was in Iowa, where voters in a Des Moines-area district were tasked with choosing a new state senator. Republicans took the race seriously for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the broader context in the state Capitol: A victory would give the GOP a supermajority in the state legislative chamber.
That didn’t happen. The Washington Post reported:
A Democrat won a special election for an Iowa state Senate seat Tuesday, denying Republicans the opportunity to regain a supermajority in the chamber and handing the Democratic Party a large-margin victory ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Renee Hardman, a member of the West Des Moines City Council, received 71.4 percent of the vote in the special-election race for state Senate District 16, according to unofficial results from the Iowa secretary of state. Republican candidate Lucas Loftin received 28.5 percent of the vote in the race, which encompasses a suburban Des Moines jurisdiction.
That lopsided, 43-point margin of victory was especially notable: The local district is considered an area that favors Democrats, but a year earlier, Kamala Harris’ 2024 ticket won here by 17 points.
In other words, Hardman, the first Black woman ever elected to the Iowa Senate, didn’t just win, and didn’t just deny Republicans the supermajority it was seeking, she also overperformed to a significant degree.
She has a lot of company. In elections throughout 2025, Democrats overperformed in ways that should make Republicans quite nervous ahead of the 2026 midterm election cycle.
Around this time a year ago, as Donald Trump prepared to reenter the White House, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans had entered an era of electoral dominance. Trump had successfully realigned the American electorate to put the GOP in a position to control the nation and its future.
The same commentary held that the Democratic Party wasn’t just defeated, it was also small and divided, with a demoralized and disheartened base, filled with voters who were prepared to withdraw from civic life for a long while. In the weeks and months that followed, there was a near-obsessive focus on Democrats and their “brand.” Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado told NBC News in March that his party’s brand was “problematic.” Around the same time, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, said the Democratic brand was “toxic.” Days earlier, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania told Politico, “If we don’t get our s––– together, then we are going to be in a permanent minority.” As it turns out, there’s been a lot less talk along these lines lately. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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