Iowa turns from purple to red

As Republicans across the United States on Wednesday celebrated an election sweep that gave the GOP control of the U.S. Senate, conservatives in Iowa were celebrating a wave of their own.

Not only did Iowa elect Republican Joni Ernst as its next U.S. senator, it elected an additional Republican, Rod Blum, to the U.S. House. Tuesday’s election has changed the state’s representation in Washington, D.C., to mostly Republican after a previous equal split with Democrats.

“It feels like we’ve made a seismic shift from what I would call a purple state to a red state, in one night,” said Bob Vander Plaats, the president of The Family Leader, a conservative values group in Des Moines.

Pundits had been closely watching Iowa for months as Ernst battled Democrat Bruce Braley in what became the most expensive race in Iowa history: The candidates and outside influence groups spent $79 million to sway voters, barraging them with more than 57,000 ads. Observers called it one of the most vicious races of the midterm elections.

For weeks leading up to Election Day, polls showed Ernst leading Braley by 2 or 3 percentage points. On Saturday a Des Moines Register poll showed Ernst leading by 7 points, while a Quinnipiac poll on Monday showed the two candidates tied.

Ernst outperformed both polls, trouncing Braley by an 8.5-point margin. She took 586,856 votes, compared to Braley’s 491,669 votes, according to final election tallies from the Associated Press.

Ernst will be the first female combat veteran to serve in the U.S. Senate—and the first woman Iowa has ever sent to either chamber of Congress. She ran a campaign emphasizing her small-town values, military service, and opposition to President Barack Obama’s policies and big-government spending. A television ad in which she promised to use her Iowa farm experience in castrating hogs to “cut pork” in Washington became a sensation.

During her victory speech to supporters Tuesday night, Ernst repeated that pledge: “Thanks to you we are headed to Washington, and we are going to make them squeal!”

According to an NBC exit poll, Ernst won big among Iowans over the age of 64, earning 57 percent of their votes. She also won more than half of middle-aged voters. Ernst courted such Iowans during a whirlwind tour of the state’s 99 counties, a 39-day RV trip that included a collision with a deer.

Ernst earned 58 percent of male voters, and won self-described independents by a margin of 11 points, the exit poll showed. Weekly churchgoers sided with Ernst by a 2-1 ratio.

Ernst, 44, will give up her seat in the Iowa state Senate to go to Washington. She is a lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, and served in Iraq and Kuwait. She is pro-life, and co-sponsored a personhood amendment in Iowa last year. Last month Ernst told me she opposed forcing businesses that have religious objections to abortifacients or contraceptives to provide those things for their employees: “I do support contraception, but not at the taxpayers’ expense.”

Braley, a U.S. Congressman, did well among younger voters on Tuesday but couldn’t shake off a perception that he was out of touch with regular Iowans. Braley’s campaign, which tried to paint Ernst as a radical beholden to the billionaire Koch brothers, suffered from several gaffes in which, for example, Braley derided Iowa’s popular Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley as “a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school.”

Braley’s defeat will leave him without a job in January. He gave up his seat in the U.S. House in order to run as the hopeful replacement for retiring Sen. Tom Harkin, who is a Democrat.

Braley’s loss came as a double blow. On Tuesday, Republican candidate Rod Blum won the seat Braley is vacating, for Iowa’s 1st Congressional District. Iowa has four representatives in the U.S. House, three of which will now be Republicans. Before, the four seats were split 2-2 with Democrats.

“It’s hard to argue away that this wasn’t a Republican sweep and a repudiation of Obama’s policies and leadership,” Vander Plaats said. “Americans are saying, ‘Time out, it’s time to hit the reset button.’” In the run-up to the election, the Des Moines Register poll found likely voters were more likely to trust Ernst than Braley to deal with national debt, Social Security, and foreign policy matters like the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Vander Plaats, a former candidate for governor in Iowa, said Republican wins in Iowa and elsewhere give him hope that conservatives may be able to “right the ship” on issues like religious liberty, marriage, the sanctity of human life, and the economy. But he said Republicans need to show they can make meaningful changes in Washington: “It’s great to have a wonderful election, but now you’ve got to lead.”

In the Iowa Legislature, Republicans gained four seats to strengthen their majority the House, but did not take control of the state Senate as they had hoped. It remains in Democratic control, split 26-24 as before.

But Iowa Republicans did win a race for secretary of state, and re-elected Gov. Terry Branstad to a sixth term. Branstad is the longest-serving governor of any state. If he holds his office until December 2015, he will surpass the tenure of George Clinton, an 18th century New York governor who held office both before and after America won the War of Independence.