Democrats In Iowa, Alaska And Georgia Eye Governor's Mansions (And Just May Win)
Rob Sand
In Iowa, Republicans face a potential bruising that could leave the red state looking pretty purple after November.
Once a bellwether, Iowa has jagged to the right recently. In 2024, Donald Trump won it by over 13 percentage points, making for the state’s largest margin of victory in a presidential election since 1972. And two years before that, in 2022, it reelected Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds by over 18 points.
In a normal election year, a Democrat would likely have little chance of winning the keys to Terrace Hill, the governor’s official residence. But with Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East and domestic prices climbing, this isn’t shaping up to be a normal election year. In fact, Iowa’s governor race may prove to be something of a bellwether for state executives across the nation.
In the Hawkeye State, presumptive Democratic nominee Rob Sand, the state auditor, is handily leading Republican front-runner Randy Feenstra, who represents Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District. A recent poll conducted by Echelon Insights for NetChoice found Sand with 51 percent support among likely voters, while Feenstra scored just 39 percent.
Better yet, Sand’s support appears more solid. While 12 percent of voters said they would “probably” support either candidate, 39 percent said they would “definitely” back Sand, and just 24 percent said the same about their support for Feenstra.
This aligns with the only other public survey released so far this year. In late March, pollster GBAO, working on behalf of a group of moderate Democrats, found Sand leading Feenstra by eight points, 50 to 42 percent.
Trump 2.0 has battered Iowa, making it ripe for Democrats’ picking. In April 2025, the president’s tariffs led China to cut off soybean imports from the U.S., delivering disproportionate harm on Iowa, a top grower of the crop. While China has resumed imports, Iowans are still struggling. The state is one of only three that saw its per-capita personal income contract in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The broader Republican brand appears to be hurting as well. Trump’s job approval in Iowa is 14 points underwater, according to The Economist. And Reynolds is one of only two governors to have a net-negative approval rating, per Morning Consult.
The only governor with a similarly bad rap? Alaska’s Mike Dunleavy, also a Republican.
Dunleavy is term-limited from running again, but you wouldn’t expect a state that Trump won by 13 points in 2024—and that has only once in its history backed a Democrat for the presidency—to be competitive this year.
And yet.
A recent poll from Alaska Survey Center shows Democrat Tom Begich, a state representative, prevailing with nearly 54 percent of the vote in the final round of ranked-choice voting, the state’s electoral system wherein voters rank the candidates rather than select only one.
Begich’s support appears to be growing as well. The pollster’s survey from this past October showed him winning just over 50 percent of the final vote.
Even if Begich were to lose by a narrow margin, the result would be shocking. A Democratic gubernatorial candidate hasn’t won better than 45 percent of the vote since 1998, when the state last elected a Democrat to the position. And in 2022, Dunleavy won reelection by 26 points, though that margin of victory is artificially high due to him facing two high-profile challengers.
Begich is surely benefitting from his family name. His father, Nick Begich Sr., was the state’s representative in the early 1970s before his presumed death in a plane crash. (His body was never recovered.) Tom’s brother, Mark, was the state’s Democratic senator from 2009 to 2015, and his nephew is Nick Begich III, the state’s Republican congressman, who is running for reelection this year.
From the Last Frontier, we roll down to the Peach State, where polling shows that former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has a real shot at flipping Georgia’s governor’s mansion. The Echelon Insights/NetChoice poll finds her polling ahead of both Republican front-runners—Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and healthcare executive Rick Jackson—by six points each.
Bottoms has a clear lead in the Democratic primary, but Jones and Jackson are neck-and-neck on the Republican side, according to FiftyPlusOne’s polling average. However, if state Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, who is polling third, were to eke out a win, Bottoms would face even steeper competition. The same poll finds her up only 2 points over Raffensberger.
A Democrat leading polling in Georgia may not come as a shocker. After all, the state has two Democratic senators, and it backed Joe Biden for president in 2020.
However, those are at the federal level, and state government is another matter. A Democrat has not won a top executive role in Georgia—governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, or secretary of state—since 2006. That’s a flip of the phenomena in which red states tend to be more open to electing Democrats to state office than to federal office (see: Kansas and Kentucky).
In other red states, polling has shown Democratic gubernatorial candidates lagging their Republican rivals, though sometimes not by much.
In Ohio, another ex-bellwether, Democratic nominee Amy Acton is just 5 points behind Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy in the Echelon Insights/NetChoice poll. Two other recent polls have had them in a virtual tie. For context, in 2022, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine won by 25 points.
And while Florida may generally seem out of Democrats’ reach, most recent surveys show the top two Democratic candidates—Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and former Republican (you read that right) Rep. David Jolly—trailing the Republican front-runner, Rep. Byron Donalds, by single digits. That’s surprising given that Gov. Ron DeSantis won a blowout 19-point victory just four years ago, and no Democrat has won the governorship since 1994, though some have come very close.
The pain of Trump 2.0 and chronic Republican mismanagement are rattling the foundations of governors’ mansions the nation over. And if these polls are to be believed, many red-state voters want Democrats to come in and clean up the mess.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
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