Redistricting must really be making Ds nervous here. All the seats changing harms Democrats' incumbency advantage.
I’m sure they’re just retiring because of redistricting...
Anyway, IA will be an absolute slaughterhouse for Democrats in November — all the statewide elected Democratic officials (including Miller and Fitzgerald, finally) will lose, their Congressional delegation will be entirely Republican in 2023, and Democrats will suffer additional (heavy) losses in the legislature for historic R majorities in both chambers. Complete and utter decimation.
IA voting (slightly) to the right of KS and MO even in 2024 is very possible, btw. (the same people who are now adamant that there is "zero chance" of this happening already embarrassed themselves with awful IA predictions in the past and are just as confident now as they were back then). MO actually trended Democratic in 2020 and has rural/small-town areas that are very close to maxed out for the GOP (hardly the case in IA), in addition to more D-friendly suburban shifts than IA.
To the first paragraph - don't think it's wise to call Miller and Fitzgerald DOA quite yet. I do agree that Axne will most likely go down and the GOP attains a supermajority, however.
To the second paragraph - trends matter, but so do margins and results. KS is trending leftward and IA has trended rightwards, but KS nonetheless voted about 8 points right of IA in 2020. That gap won't be covered in 2024, regardless of trends. And MO will most certainly vote to the right of IA. It has trended sharply rightwards from 2012 to 2020, and the slight Democratic trend in 2020 is hardly enough to suggest that it will cover the 10-point gap between them in four years. Not everyone who understands this has a history of misjudging IA politics. Just because you have been right about IA in the past does not allow you to make such bold predictions, or mean that they are automatically correct. I'll remind you MO shifted some 10 points rightward in 2016, not too much less than IA did. And, contrary to the stereotype that IA is completely rural and has no leftward-trending areas, Dallas County is, in fact, trending rightwards, as is Johnson County. IA shifted 1.3 points leftward in 2020; MO 3.2. Please tell me that you don't think a difference of under 2 points between their shifts suggests that a roughly 10 point gap will be covered in that same time frame.
