Iowa

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund (Iowa CCI Action) is a grassroots power-building group with a long history of engaging people in Iowa’s rural communities, small towns, and big cities, organizing working class Iowans to craft solutions and demand change. For 50 years, Iowa CCI Action’s nonpartisan arm, Iowa CCI, has organized everyday people to win on measures that matter most to their communities, including making utilities affordable, combating predatory lending, restricting factory farms, and investing in neighborhoods. Current campaigns are focused on reducing corporate agriculture pollution and protecting Iowa’s waterways, stopping greenwashing schemes such as CO2 pipelines, and fully funding the state’s public schools.

Iowa CCI Action uses community organizing to win elections and hold elected officials accountable to enact public policy that puts people before profits and communities before corporations. Iowa CCI Action helps set the issue environment for elections so that Iowans connect the value of their vote to day-to-day matters that affect them. They also have supported candidates in specific races, pairing endorsements with voter mobilization to elect movement candidates to office.

Recent Achievements

Iowa CCI Action and Iowa CCI are on the organizing front lines to address their communities’ priority issues, raising awareness about and softening support for MAGA Republicans and their policies. These efforts are laying the groundwork for more progressive candidates to reclaim power in a state that was until recently a swing state that voted twice for President Obama. Iowa CCI Action’s advocacy has played a part in several recent successes:

  • Democrats flipped three Iowa State senate seats in 2025 special elections, altering the balance of political power by breaking Republicans’ supermajority

  • Defeated the pesticide industry's attempt to pass legislation in 2025 to make it nearly impossible for Iowans to sue pesticide manufacturers if they got sick from using their products

  • Organized communities in public school districts to address chronic underfunding and demand support for public education that matches inflation, passing resolutions in 10 school districts

  • Organized Iowans of all political ideologies in rural communities to get their city councils and county supervisors to pass objections and local ordinances to better protect their communities should a CO2 pipeline be built

Iowa CCI Action and Iowa CCI continue to grow their active member base, including in the counties that comprise Congressional Districts 1 and 3, which are the likeliest Iowa US House flips in 2026. Their statewide media strategy has an especially solid track record in rural Iowa, employing narrative shift tactics through social media, letters to the editor and earned media. Their “Brass Tacks from Rural Iowa” series of guest editorials appear across the state in over a dozen rural newspapers and outlets at least once a month, reaching a combined readership of 150,000 Iowans to combat disinformation, assign responsibility, and elevate common-sense solutions.

What makes Iowa crucial this cycle

  • Two toss-up Republican-held seats are essential to flipping the US House

  • A Republican-held US Senate seat is open, and flipping it could help Democrats take back the majority in the Senate

  • There are statewide races for governor, attorney general and secretary of state that can help protect voting rights and ensure a fair 2028 election

  • All members of the state house and half the members of the state senate are up for election, giving Democrats a chance to continue to make inroads in a state that, until recently, had Republican supermajorities in both bodies

What Flip the Vote’s support means for 2026

In 2026, Iowa CCI Action and Iowa CCI will educate and mobilize tens of thousands of Iowans to the polls based on the issues that most affect them, such as the fight for clean water, fairer tax policies, and funding for public schools. Together, they will employ a wide range of strategies to influence the upcoming elections, including field outreach, community events, earned and paid media, and candidate engagement and accountability efforts.

With Flip the Vote’s early investment, Iowa CCI Action and Iowa CCI can expand their direct voter engagement by hiring more canvassing staff, adding community events (such as house and park parties, town halls, etc.), and augmenting a field program that features neighbor-to-neighbor porch conversations and phone banking. Support from Flip the Vote donors also will help Iowa CCI Action and Iowa CCI train and mobilize their member leaders throughout the state. Those leaders are integral to carrying out the activities in the run up to elections – they craft strategy, drive the work, and are trusted messengers who can turn out their communities when it is time to vote.

“Everyday Iowans across the political spectrum are fed up with business-as-usual politics. Without strong, grassroots organizing and political engagement, Iowans will continue to be susceptible to narratives that pit neighbor against neighbor, encourage rugged individualism, and foster racism, bigotry, and nationalist tropes. We believe Iowans are ready to reject this line of thinking if they are engaged in deeper and transformational conversations and actions in their local communities.”