An Attack on Working Iowans

2/10/2026

I have struggled with the content of this post for some time now, but feel its weight is draining me the longer I keep it. Iowa is not all right. Over the last several years, rural and urban Iowans have watched as those meant to represent us at the state capital erode the very foundations that historically provided opportunity, stability, and hope for all. The soul of Iowa is on the line at this very moment. Our communities, our schools, and our people are under threat from the unilateral control Republicans currently hold in our government.

Republicans would have us believe that the divide in our state is between rural and urban communities, but their complaints are all the same: our schools are broke, our children are going without food, our roads aren’t being maintained, we are being priced out of our homes, neighborhoods, and farms, and we need a government that works for the people!

For a decade now, Republicans have substituted substantive, meaningful policy with culture war garbage. Iowa schools are lagging behind the rest of the nation; they receive lower functional budgets year over year, are continually re-evaluating their standards, and are required to implement teacher wage increases without guaranteed funding to sustain them. We are lagging behind nearly a quarter of the other states due to a consistently declining quality of life and a lack of educational funding. We have terrible water quality, we are a national leader in cancer rates, and we divert money from our public schools into exclusionary private schools, further diminishing the already bare education budget of our schools. Iowa spends approximately 16k per student on education, while national leaders in education spend over 20k per student. Adequate funding matters, our children matter, our futures matter!

Republicans sell their voters promises of a revitalized rural Iowa while cutting off vital services and funding from those communities, and eliminating any avenue for recourse that Iowans could use to protect, reclaim, or improve their livelihoods. Instead of investing in infrastructure and penning policy that would incentivize the formation of a strong state economy that uplifts Iowans, our Republican politicians are working to erode civil rights protections for already marginalized communities, passing unsustainable tax breaks for corporations that refuse to invest in the future of Iowa and Iowans, which has caused our state to run on a deficit of $1.2 billion. They don’t work for Iowans; they work for their party and their donors.

Recently proposed legislation will further erode Iowa by eliminating protections for minorities, worsening our schools, allowing pipelines to seize private property, limiting our children's access to food, limiting local educational autonomy, and creating a hostile state environment for women and minorities. The party of “small government” is terrified of a nanny state and would instead grow a police state; rather than uplift and care for Iowans, it would have them limited by economic opportunity and immutable characteristics to a poorly educated, poorly fed subsistence working class.