Democrats Christina Bohannan and Ryan Melton are campaigning for Congress on opposite sides of the state and in very different districts, but they have one thing in common — firsthand experience running for the U.S. House. In 2022, Bohannan challenged the Republican incumbent in Iowa’s eastern-most congressional district, the 1st, while Melton ran in the sprawling 4th District, which covers western Iowa.
The November 2022 election was a disaster for the Iowa Democratic Party. Its candidates for governor, U.S. Senate, and every statewide office except the auditor lost. Democrats lost seats in the Iowa House and Senate. All three Republican incumbents in the U.S. House were reelected, while the last remaining Democrat lost. When Congress convened in January 2023, it was the first time since 1957 Iowa didn’t have a single Democrat in either the House or Senate.
Bohannan and Melton were both first-time congressional candidates in 2022, and this year each is challenging the same Republican they lost to last time. Little Village spoke with Bohannan and Melton about their 2024 runs and what they see is different this time.
“We already have 102 volunteer shifts for door-knocking scheduled in Scott County between now and May,” Bohannan told the crowd filled with longtime Democratic Party stalwarts from Johnson County and its neighboring counties. “That is more than we did in the whole GOTV effort in October and November over in Scott County the last time, and we’re just getting started.”
It’s not the only encouraging sign for the campaign. Bohannan raised significantly more money than Mariannette Miller-Meeks did during the first quarter of this year. According to FEC reports, Bohannan took in $820,981 between Jan. 1 and March 31, while Miller-Meeks raised $378,901. So far this election cycle Miller-Meeks has raised a total of $2,691,316 while Bohannan had raised $2,143,456 by the end of March.
“More than three-quarters of that is coming from Iowa,” Bohannan is quick to add. “Unlike Rep. Miller-Meeks, most of hers is coming from Maryland and Virginia, because that’s where the lobbyists are.”
The first Iowa Poll conducted on the 2024 congressional races also had good news for Bohannan. The 1st was the only one of Iowa’s four congressional districts where likely voters favored a Democratic candidate over a Republican, 49 to 45 percent. The poll conducted Feb. 25 to 28 only asked generically about Democrats vs. Republicans as House candidates, and didn’t include any names of those running, but it’s still a notable change from 2022.
Miller-Meeks led the Iowa Polls during the congressional race two years ago. Her smallest lead was 9 percentage points.
Several people in the crowd at the office opening talked about Miller-Meeks winning her seat by only six votes . But that was in 2020. In 2022, Miller-Meeks won the 1st District by 20,173 votes. Bohannan carried only one of the district’s 20 counties. She won Johnson, the state’s most reliably Democratic county, with 71 percent of the vote. “Turnout was a big problem in 2022,” Bohannan told Little Village . “Tens of thousands of people who would have voted for me or for other Democrats did not turn out in the 2022 election. That’s somewhat a function of it being a midterm. Democratic turnout always falls off more than Republican turnout.”
Many other states didn’t have the traditional midterm dropoff in Democratic voters in 2022, as people mobilized in response to the U.S. Supreme Court eliminating federal protection for abortion rights five months before the election. But not in Iowa. Bohannan believes this year is different.
“Last time, it was a national issue people were talking about,” she said. “But I think it has really hit Iowa front-and-center now with the six-week abortion ban, that bans abortion before most women know they are pregnant.” Bohannan also pointed to the bill the Iowa House passed in March which would have created “fetal personhood,” making IVF treatments impossible — the bill died before a Senate vote — as well as Miller-Meeks cosponsoring a bill that would have established fetal personhood nationwide starting at fertilization of an ovum.
At campaign events, Bohannan talks about this in both personal and policy terms. She shares the story of her unsuccessful attempt to have a second child through IVF, and elaborates on how Republicans “are trying to inject politicians in families’ decisions about if, when and how to start a family.” Bohannan often blends the personal with the political. A central part of her campaigns both in 2022 and this year has been describing how she grew up in a working-class family in rural Florida that struggled after her father, a construction worker, fell ill and lost his job and his health insurance. It taught her hard and indelible lessons about the importance of the social safety net and the need for affordable healthcare.
Despite the difficulties she faced, Bohannan persisted and became the first member of her family to graduate from college, earning a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Florida. She worked for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, before attending the UF College of Law.
In 2000, she came to Iowa City as a visiting professor at the UI College of Law. Two years later, she joined the faculty full time.
Bohannan’s first run for office came in 2020, when she defeated a 20-year incumbent to win a seat in the Iowa House. In August 2021, Bohannan announced her first challenge to Miller-Meeks. She announced her 2024 run in August last year.
“Running the second time is really good,” Bohannan said. “You have more name recognition, a bigger donor network, people are excited about the campaign, they really wanted me to run again, so people are all in for this.”
She explained, “it allows us to just hit the ground running from where we were last time and really build on that.”
It’s not just Bohannan that is different this time. In 2020, Miller-Meeks was part of the House minority, and could campaign on what she and her fellow Republicans would do if they took over. They did, creating two years of chaos and failures to pass major legislation.
“She’s in the majority, and they have proven themselves incapable of governing,” Bohannan said. “They are not getting anything done, they are fighting amongst themselves constantly. And the few things they are doing, they’re just adding abortion restrictions to every bill they can think of. It just makes no sense.” The issues House Republicans have focused on over the last two years are not the ones Bohannan says she hears when talking to voters in the 1st.
“Everybody is concerned about protecting our democracy,” she said. “Everybody is concerned about climate change, and really, honestly future-looking issues, like keeping our kids in Iowa. Our kids are leaving Iowa, and they’re not coming back.”
Bohannan said she’s seeing much higher levels of engagement and energy among voters this time out. Not just among Democrats and independents, but also among Republicans reconsidering their choices.
“I’ve been having Republicans come to some of my events who just see what’s happening in the state and country, and just don’t recognize it. They don’t understand what’s going on, they think that it’s extreme, they think that it’s dysfunctional, and they just want a change.
“The first time I ran because no one else was going to,” Melton told Little Village .
J.D. Scholten, who had been the Democratic congressional candidate in the 4th District three times — running against Steve King and once against Randy Feenstra — announced in 2021 he wouldn’t run again.
Campaigning in the 4th is a daunting prospect. It’s a large, rural district, with long distances between population centers. And it’s even more daunting if you’re a Democrat. The 4th is one of the most solidly Republican congressional districts in the country.
As the filing deadline in 2022 drew closer and closer, and no Democrat was willing to challenge incumbent Republican Randy Feenstra, Melton decided he needed to act.
“No one knew who I was at the time, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any connections, I didn’t have a pedigree. I was as blank-slate, as grassroots as they come,” he recalled. “But I just decided in the age of Trumpism, in the age of anti-democracy we could not just concede a quarter of our congressional districts without a fight.” “We literally had two months from the moment I realized we had no other option, to gather the signatures we needed to get on the ballot,” Melton said. “We gathered 1,726 signatures. As a Democrat doing that in the 4th Congressional District in two months when no one knows who you are, it felt like an impossible task.”
“We got our last signature the evening before the filing deadline. I dropped my binder of signatures at the Secretary of State’s office an hour before the filing deadline. It felt kind of miraculous that it happened, that we got over that threshold.”
This election cycle, Melton was determined not to rely on the miraculous. He has a clear understanding of what he’s facing as a Democrat running in the 4th. The last time western Iowa sent a Democrat to the House of Representatives was 1982, when Tom Harkin was elected to a fifth term in what was then the 5th District. (The 5th was eliminated in the redistricting that followed the 2010 census.)
Fundraising totals also show the odds against Melton. During this election cycle, Feenstra had raised $3,075,314 by the end of March. Melton raised $36,577.
“I don’t come from wealth, I reject corporate PAC money, I have a full-time job and a family,” Melton said, explaining that what he does have is the willingness to put in the long hours traveling across the 4th to meet with voters.
“So I got in much earlier this second time, because that was the only thing I could have done really to counteract all of those disadvantages,” he said. “So I’ve been running all over the district since the Fourth of July 2023.”
Ryan Melton grew up in Nebraska and western Iowa. He attended Iowa State University, earning a bachelor’s in history and political science, before going to the University of Kansas for a Master’s in history. He works in management in the insurance industry, and lives in Story County with his wife and their two sons.
Melton had never run for office before entering the 2022 race. He didn’t expect to win, but said he knew he’d “make a better option than a blank spot on the ballot, which is what would have happened if I didn’t run.”
Feenstra beat Melton by 37 percentage points in 2022, but Melton did carry Story County. And Melton does feel he accomplished some important things in the 2022 campaign.
According to Melton, even Democratic Party stalwarts in the 4th were deeply discouraged after Scholten’s loss to Feenstra in 2020, following his strong showing against King in 2018, but his run in 2022 allowed him to engage in some party-building. In 2022, Democrats only fielded 10 candidates in the 25 statehouse seats in the district. This year there are 16 Democrats running.
“That means there are more conversations that are being had than there were last time,” Melton said. “There’s more accountability being pressed upon the Republican incumbents than there was last time. So, that’s a win.”
He also feels his 2022 campaign helped change the political discussion around carbon capture pipelines in his district. Farmers and homeowners throughout the 4th were opposed to the pipelines and the threats of using eminent domain to seize property for them by the companies behind the pipeline, but the companies had the backing of elected officials at the state and federal levels. Randy Feenstra even published an op-ed promoting the pipeline projects in 2021.
“I was the first major candidate in either party to fight against these carbon capture pipelines,” Melton said. “When I made that decision in 2022, pretty much right after I paperwork with the FEC, in many ways I was a man on an island, because a lot of people within my own party didn’t quite understand. They thought the pipelines were just a climate change mitigation solution, because they were greenwashed.” This year, politicians in both parties have come out against the pipeline projects or are quieter and more cautious in their support of them. “One of the big things that I continue to hear from Republican voters when I talk to them is the frustration that their Republican representatives are much more beholden to their corporate donors than they are to their voters,” Melton said. “I think that that’s why the carbon capture pipeline issue is so important. It’s a microcosm of this problem on the Republican side.”
Melton feels that the extreme policies and politics Republicans have been pushing in Des Moines and Washington D.C. are alienating traditional Republican voters in the 4th.
“We’re last in the country when it comes to the availability rate of ob-gyns,” he said. “We’re last in the country in mental healthcare bed availability rate. Our public education rankings are plummeting. We’re finding it harder to attract business here. We’re the toxic beach state. There’s been a clear hollowing out of our state that made our communities less safe. And that’s not going to get better anytime soon. The Republicans who are pushing this extremism, they’re not going to stop.”
“I’m running, which is to stem the tide of the hollowing out of our state. I am absolutely convinced that the Republican Party at the national level knows that they’re a dying party — they’re operating from a position of desperation, not power — and so they’re pushing extremism to hollow out red states. And Iowa has been victim to that.” Melton said he hopes to present “a long-term vision of sustainability, of growth for our communities” during the campaign, because current policies are “essentially turning our 4th District into one big open-lot CAFO.”
He remains realistic about his possibilities, but determined to push forward his priorities.
“I’m not going to out-fundraise most people, but I’m going to out-work them,” Melton said. “And that’s how we’re going to continue to put a dent in the status quo here.” This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2024 issue.
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The November 2022 election was a disaster for the Iowa Democratic Party. Its candidates for governor, U.S. Senate, and every statewide office except the auditor lost. Democrats lost seats in the Iowa House and Senate. All three Republican incumbents in the U.S. House were reelected, while the last remaining Democrat lost. When Congress convened in January 2023, it was the first time since 1957 Iowa didn’t have a single Democrat in either the House or Senate.
Bohannan and Melton were both first-time congressional candidates in 2022, and this year each is challenging the same Republican they lost to last time. Little Village spoke with Bohannan and Melton about their 2024 runs and what they see is different this time.
Christina Bohannan, the contender in the 1st District
The room was packed for the opening of Christina Bohannan’s campaign office in Iowa City on April 12, and the people there were enthusiastic.“We already have 102 volunteer shifts for door-knocking scheduled in Scott County between now and May,” Bohannan told the crowd filled with longtime Democratic Party stalwarts from Johnson County and its neighboring counties. “That is more than we did in the whole GOTV effort in October and November over in Scott County the last time, and we’re just getting started.”
It’s not the only encouraging sign for the campaign. Bohannan raised significantly more money than Mariannette Miller-Meeks did during the first quarter of this year. According to FEC reports, Bohannan took in $820,981 between Jan. 1 and March 31, while Miller-Meeks raised $378,901. So far this election cycle Miller-Meeks has raised a total of $2,691,316 while Bohannan had raised $2,143,456 by the end of March.
“More than three-quarters of that is coming from Iowa,” Bohannan is quick to add. “Unlike Rep. Miller-Meeks, most of hers is coming from Maryland and Virginia, because that’s where the lobbyists are.”
The first Iowa Poll conducted on the 2024 congressional races also had good news for Bohannan. The 1st was the only one of Iowa’s four congressional districts where likely voters favored a Democratic candidate over a Republican, 49 to 45 percent. The poll conducted Feb. 25 to 28 only asked generically about Democrats vs. Republicans as House candidates, and didn’t include any names of those running, but it’s still a notable change from 2022.
Miller-Meeks led the Iowa Polls during the congressional race two years ago. Her smallest lead was 9 percentage points.
Several people in the crowd at the office opening talked about Miller-Meeks winning her seat by only six votes . But that was in 2020. In 2022, Miller-Meeks won the 1st District by 20,173 votes. Bohannan carried only one of the district’s 20 counties. She won Johnson, the state’s most reliably Democratic county, with 71 percent of the vote. “Turnout was a big problem in 2022,” Bohannan told Little Village . “Tens of thousands of people who would have voted for me or for other Democrats did not turn out in the 2022 election. That’s somewhat a function of it being a midterm. Democratic turnout always falls off more than Republican turnout.”
Many other states didn’t have the traditional midterm dropoff in Democratic voters in 2022, as people mobilized in response to the U.S. Supreme Court eliminating federal protection for abortion rights five months before the election. But not in Iowa. Bohannan believes this year is different.
“Last time, it was a national issue people were talking about,” she said. “But I think it has really hit Iowa front-and-center now with the six-week abortion ban, that bans abortion before most women know they are pregnant.” Bohannan also pointed to the bill the Iowa House passed in March which would have created “fetal personhood,” making IVF treatments impossible — the bill died before a Senate vote — as well as Miller-Meeks cosponsoring a bill that would have established fetal personhood nationwide starting at fertilization of an ovum.
At campaign events, Bohannan talks about this in both personal and policy terms. She shares the story of her unsuccessful attempt to have a second child through IVF, and elaborates on how Republicans “are trying to inject politicians in families’ decisions about if, when and how to start a family.” Bohannan often blends the personal with the political. A central part of her campaigns both in 2022 and this year has been describing how she grew up in a working-class family in rural Florida that struggled after her father, a construction worker, fell ill and lost his job and his health insurance. It taught her hard and indelible lessons about the importance of the social safety net and the need for affordable healthcare.
Despite the difficulties she faced, Bohannan persisted and became the first member of her family to graduate from college, earning a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Florida. She worked for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, before attending the UF College of Law.
In 2000, she came to Iowa City as a visiting professor at the UI College of Law. Two years later, she joined the faculty full time.
Bohannan’s first run for office came in 2020, when she defeated a 20-year incumbent to win a seat in the Iowa House. In August 2021, Bohannan announced her first challenge to Miller-Meeks. She announced her 2024 run in August last year.
“Running the second time is really good,” Bohannan said. “You have more name recognition, a bigger donor network, people are excited about the campaign, they really wanted me to run again, so people are all in for this.”
She explained, “it allows us to just hit the ground running from where we were last time and really build on that.”
It’s not just Bohannan that is different this time. In 2020, Miller-Meeks was part of the House minority, and could campaign on what she and her fellow Republicans would do if they took over. They did, creating two years of chaos and failures to pass major legislation.
“She’s in the majority, and they have proven themselves incapable of governing,” Bohannan said. “They are not getting anything done, they are fighting amongst themselves constantly. And the few things they are doing, they’re just adding abortion restrictions to every bill they can think of. It just makes no sense.” The issues House Republicans have focused on over the last two years are not the ones Bohannan says she hears when talking to voters in the 1st.
“Everybody is concerned about protecting our democracy,” she said. “Everybody is concerned about climate change, and really, honestly future-looking issues, like keeping our kids in Iowa. Our kids are leaving Iowa, and they’re not coming back.”
Bohannan said she’s seeing much higher levels of engagement and energy among voters this time out. Not just among Democrats and independents, but also among Republicans reconsidering their choices.
“I’ve been having Republicans come to some of my events who just see what’s happening in the state and country, and just don’t recognize it. They don’t understand what’s going on, they think that it’s extreme, they think that it’s dysfunctional, and they just want a change.
Ryan Melton, the longshot in the 4th District
Last July, Ryan Melton became the first Iowa Democrat to declare he was running for Congress. That was a sharp contrast to 2020, when he announced his run months after every other candidate. But that was because Melton never planned to run.“The first time I ran because no one else was going to,” Melton told Little Village .
J.D. Scholten, who had been the Democratic congressional candidate in the 4th District three times — running against Steve King and once against Randy Feenstra — announced in 2021 he wouldn’t run again.
Campaigning in the 4th is a daunting prospect. It’s a large, rural district, with long distances between population centers. And it’s even more daunting if you’re a Democrat. The 4th is one of the most solidly Republican congressional districts in the country.
As the filing deadline in 2022 drew closer and closer, and no Democrat was willing to challenge incumbent Republican Randy Feenstra, Melton decided he needed to act.
“No one knew who I was at the time, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any connections, I didn’t have a pedigree. I was as blank-slate, as grassroots as they come,” he recalled. “But I just decided in the age of Trumpism, in the age of anti-democracy we could not just concede a quarter of our congressional districts without a fight.” “We literally had two months from the moment I realized we had no other option, to gather the signatures we needed to get on the ballot,” Melton said. “We gathered 1,726 signatures. As a Democrat doing that in the 4th Congressional District in two months when no one knows who you are, it felt like an impossible task.”
“We got our last signature the evening before the filing deadline. I dropped my binder of signatures at the Secretary of State’s office an hour before the filing deadline. It felt kind of miraculous that it happened, that we got over that threshold.”
This election cycle, Melton was determined not to rely on the miraculous. He has a clear understanding of what he’s facing as a Democrat running in the 4th. The last time western Iowa sent a Democrat to the House of Representatives was 1982, when Tom Harkin was elected to a fifth term in what was then the 5th District. (The 5th was eliminated in the redistricting that followed the 2010 census.)
Fundraising totals also show the odds against Melton. During this election cycle, Feenstra had raised $3,075,314 by the end of March. Melton raised $36,577.
“I don’t come from wealth, I reject corporate PAC money, I have a full-time job and a family,” Melton said, explaining that what he does have is the willingness to put in the long hours traveling across the 4th to meet with voters.
“So I got in much earlier this second time, because that was the only thing I could have done really to counteract all of those disadvantages,” he said. “So I’ve been running all over the district since the Fourth of July 2023.”
Ryan Melton grew up in Nebraska and western Iowa. He attended Iowa State University, earning a bachelor’s in history and political science, before going to the University of Kansas for a Master’s in history. He works in management in the insurance industry, and lives in Story County with his wife and their two sons.
Melton had never run for office before entering the 2022 race. He didn’t expect to win, but said he knew he’d “make a better option than a blank spot on the ballot, which is what would have happened if I didn’t run.”
Feenstra beat Melton by 37 percentage points in 2022, but Melton did carry Story County. And Melton does feel he accomplished some important things in the 2022 campaign.
According to Melton, even Democratic Party stalwarts in the 4th were deeply discouraged after Scholten’s loss to Feenstra in 2020, following his strong showing against King in 2018, but his run in 2022 allowed him to engage in some party-building. In 2022, Democrats only fielded 10 candidates in the 25 statehouse seats in the district. This year there are 16 Democrats running.
“That means there are more conversations that are being had than there were last time,” Melton said. “There’s more accountability being pressed upon the Republican incumbents than there was last time. So, that’s a win.”
He also feels his 2022 campaign helped change the political discussion around carbon capture pipelines in his district. Farmers and homeowners throughout the 4th were opposed to the pipelines and the threats of using eminent domain to seize property for them by the companies behind the pipeline, but the companies had the backing of elected officials at the state and federal levels. Randy Feenstra even published an op-ed promoting the pipeline projects in 2021.
“I was the first major candidate in either party to fight against these carbon capture pipelines,” Melton said. “When I made that decision in 2022, pretty much right after I paperwork with the FEC, in many ways I was a man on an island, because a lot of people within my own party didn’t quite understand. They thought the pipelines were just a climate change mitigation solution, because they were greenwashed.” This year, politicians in both parties have come out against the pipeline projects or are quieter and more cautious in their support of them. “One of the big things that I continue to hear from Republican voters when I talk to them is the frustration that their Republican representatives are much more beholden to their corporate donors than they are to their voters,” Melton said. “I think that that’s why the carbon capture pipeline issue is so important. It’s a microcosm of this problem on the Republican side.”
Melton feels that the extreme policies and politics Republicans have been pushing in Des Moines and Washington D.C. are alienating traditional Republican voters in the 4th.
“We’re last in the country when it comes to the availability rate of ob-gyns,” he said. “We’re last in the country in mental healthcare bed availability rate. Our public education rankings are plummeting. We’re finding it harder to attract business here. We’re the toxic beach state. There’s been a clear hollowing out of our state that made our communities less safe. And that’s not going to get better anytime soon. The Republicans who are pushing this extremism, they’re not going to stop.”
“I’m running, which is to stem the tide of the hollowing out of our state. I am absolutely convinced that the Republican Party at the national level knows that they’re a dying party — they’re operating from a position of desperation, not power — and so they’re pushing extremism to hollow out red states. And Iowa has been victim to that.” Melton said he hopes to present “a long-term vision of sustainability, of growth for our communities” during the campaign, because current policies are “essentially turning our 4th District into one big open-lot CAFO.”
He remains realistic about his possibilities, but determined to push forward his priorities.
“I’m not going to out-fundraise most people, but I’m going to out-work them,” Melton said. “And that’s how we’re going to continue to put a dent in the status quo here.” This article was originally published in Little Village’s May 2024 issue.
