The Iowa mansion
Why this seat
Open with Reynolds retiring, in a state where the president's party has historically bled in midterms. The open-seat term and the drag prior point the same direction here.
State of the field
Open on both sides; the Democratic field is the stronger one it has fielded in a decade.
The test
Iowa holds if the state's post-2016 rightward baseline outweighs the midterm drag. It becomes a race if the two are anywhere near equal.
The mansion model runs separately from the Senate one. It carries less of the presidential result into the race — 0.45 of a point per point, against 0.78 on the Senate board — and allows a wider miss per seat, because a governor's race turns on a personal vote a national baseline cannot see. Both numbers stand: the simulated one and the one the desk wrote first.
| Held now | Republican |
| On the ballot | Open (Reynolds retiring) |
| 2024 presidential margin | −13.2 |
| Modelled lean · 1σ | −1.7 · ±9.5 |
| Desk rating | 65% Republican |
| Band meaning | A real advantage. About a third of them will flip anyway. |
Model call · governors-2026.1
43%
Democratic nominee wins
Open, in a state where the president's party has historically bled in midterms.
Nothing written on this page feeds that number. The method.
No candidate ledger is published for this seat. A ledger requires a completed first-party source pass — every candidate's own published policy pages, read on the same day, under identical headings and an identical word budget. Until that pass is done, printing a partial board would rate the campaigns that publish against the ones that have not, which is the asymmetry the Standard exists to prevent.
See a finished ledger — GeorgiaThe Georgia room
North Carolina · Senate · Class 2The North Carolina room
Maine · Senate · Class 2The Maine room