By Conservative commentator Steve Deace warned Wednesday that Iowa Republicans are confronting a difficult midterm environment, citing a private polling briefing that he said showed trouble reaching into strongly Republican districts. Public polling offers additional signs of Republican vulnerability, although the broader Senate polling average shows a much closer contest than one recent survey suggests.
According to Deace’s account, pollsters told Iowa House Republicans that a district with a 15-point Republican advantage was now within the margin of error, while a district with a 10-point advantage was “underwater.” The Blaze Media host suggested the party could face losses worse than the 2006 Democratic wave, though the underlying private polling was not available for examination.
Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a +15 district you’re within the margin for error, if you’re in a +10 district you’re underwater, and that this might end being an even worse midterm environment than 2006.
I slept on…
— Steve Deace (@SteveDeaceShow) September 23, 2026
Deace said he debated whether to share the information before deciding Republicans needed to hear it. “I don’t want to cause anyone to black pill,” he wrote. “But this morning I ultimately decided the truth should be shared while there is still six weeks left to do something about it.”
A Marist survey released Sept. 22 provides some public evidence of the strain. It found Democrat Josh Turek leading Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson 50% to 42% in Iowa’s Senate race. Democrats also led the statewide generic congressional ballot 50% to 45%, while 58% of registered voters disapproved of President Donald Trump’s job performance and 41% approved. The survey of 1,050 registered voters was conducted Sept. 17–20 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
The RealClearPolling average, however, showed a substantially tighter Senate contest: Turek at 44.7% and Hinson at 44.3%, a Democratic advantage of just 0.4 percentage points. That broader picture puts Marist’s eight-point margin in context and offers less support for claims of a commanding Democratic lead.
Iowa also supplied one of the most conspicuous polling failures of the 2024 election. Ann Selzer’s final Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey put Kamala Harris ahead of Trump 47% to 44% shortly before Election Day. Trump instead won the state by more than 13 percentage points—an error of roughly 16 points in the projected margin.
That result demonstrates how badly an individual Iowa poll can miss. It does not establish that the current surveys are wrong, just as the current surveys do not establish that Republican losses are inevitable. The available public numbers show a closely divided Senate contest alongside unfavorable findings for Republicans in Marist’s survey, with meaningful differences between the two measures.
Deace placed much of the blame on U.S. military involvement around the Strait of Hormuz, describing it as a “2020 Covid lockdown level of political albatross” and comparing its political reception in Iowa to the TARP bailouts. “This whatever/kinda/sorta/but not really war has become an existential misuse of political capital,” he wrote.
He urged Trump to campaign immediately, called for Republicans to sharpen their attacks on Democratic voting records and demanded a clearer explanation of what victory in the conflict would mean. “We have to save America before we can save the world,” he wrote.
Despite his warning, Deace said he believed Republicans still had time to recover. “We don’t have to just sit here and take the L,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to end this way. We can still win.”
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