Voters in Iowa special election reject transphobia at the ballot box

Democratic candidate wins Iowa State House District 82 special election in race that featured blatantly transphobic attacks from Republicans

Aaron Camp
Aug 9, 2017 · 3 min read

Democratic candidate Phil Miller, a veterinarian and local public education official from Jefferson County, Iowa, defeated Republican candidate Travis Harris, a farmer from Davis County, Iowa, by a margin of 4,021 votes to 3,324 votes in a special election to fill the vacancy in the 82nd State House District of Iowa:

Iowa Democrats pulled off an impressive and important victory in a Southeast Iowa special election this evening, boosting the party’s hopes that 2018 could be a bounce-back year. Democratic veterinarian Phil Miller of Fairfield comfortably defeated Republican farmer Travis Harris of Davis County, 4,021 to 3,324 (about 55% to 45%), thanks largely to a massive victory in his hometown of Jefferson County. That means Democrats will hold on to a key rural swing district that Donald Trump won in November by 22 points.

Miller will fill out the remainder of Curt Hansen’s term in the Iowa House for District 82, which includes Jefferson, Davis and Van Buren counties. Hansen passed away in mid-June, who himself won the seat in a 2009 special election. He was one of the few Democrats to still represent a rural district in the Iowa Legislature, and today’s special election was seen as an important test for whether local Democratic candidates could still win in Trump-leaning areas of the state.

Miller won in large part because Republicans in Iowa ran one of the most transphobic political campaigns in U.S. history in the 82nd State House District special election. Long story short, Republicans attacked Miller for his vote as a Fairfield, Iowa school board member in favor of a school district policy allowing transgender students to use the school bathroom corresponding to the gender that they identify with:

Miller was about as ideal of a candidate as you could hope for in this race: a well-known community leader who locals trusted from his work as a large and small-animal veterinarian. But Republicans ran an intensely negative campaign on TV, attacking Miller for his vote on the Fairfield School Board to keep a policy on transgender bathrooms in place. The ordeal was a huge local controversy in Fairfield for most of 2016, and Republicans whipped up the anti-transgender sentiment despite a recent transgender teen’s suicide in June.

While cultural issues like that may have contributed to Trump’s victory in Iowa in 2016, the Republican Party here had not been so brazen in their advertising on issues like bathrooms in the past. Many LGBTQ advocates worried that had the Republican candidate been successful tonight, it would give the GOP incentive to push for anti-transgender policies at the Statehouse next session and run on that issue in 2018. Instead, many Republican political consultants and party leaders may now second-guess whether that’s a winning issue to run on. Miller won a massive victory in Jefferson County, where the controversy burned the hottest, racking up a margin far larger than Hanson’s there in 2009.

Republican attacks against transgender Americans have only resulted in political losses for them, with the North Carolina gubernatorial election last year and the state legislative special election in Iowa last night being two examples of Republicans publicly opposing transgender rights and losing elections because of it. That’s because a significant number of the American people support LGBTQ rights.

The Progressive Midwesterner

Midwestern politics, as viewed from the left

Aaron Camp

Written by

The Progressive Midwesterner

Midwestern politics, as viewed from the left

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