First Person is a series of quick videos from the Cook Political Report editors exclusively for our premium members.
This week, Matthew discusses the reasons for our rating change in the Iowa governor's race.
Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to First Person. I'm Matthew Klein, US House and Governors Analyst at the Cook Political Report. This week, we took the rare step of making a double jump rating change, shifting Iowa's gubernatorial race from solid Republican all the way to lean Republican. There were a couple of reasons we did that, and today I wanna walk you through them.
The most immediate cause of the change was that Democrats landed their dream recruit, state auditor Rob Sand. Sand, who's forty two, is the last Democrat still holding statewide office in Iowa, which has shifted sharply to the right in the Trump era. In twenty twenty two, Sand was reelected as auditor even as his party got clobbered in the gubernatorial and US senate races by double digits.
Sand is framing himself as a different kind of Democrat,
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