IA-4 · House

The district, in brief

Iowa's 4th district is based in northwestern Iowa and includes the cities of Ames and Sioux City. The facts record no redraw for this cycle; the lines are the map first used in 2022.

The seat is open. The incumbent, Republican Randy Feenstra, was re-elected with 67.0% of the vote in 2024 and announced on October 28, 2025 that he was retiring to run for governor; he placed second in that Republican primary, losing by less than 1%. The Republican nominee is Chris McGowan, president of the Siouxland Chamber of Commerce, who was unopposed in his primary with 100.0% after Douglas Jensen, Kyle Larsen, Ryan Rhodes and former Iowa House majority leader Matt Windschitl withdrew, the last three endorsing him. The Democratic nominee is David Dawson, a former state representative from the 14th district (2013–2017), who beat Stephanie Steiner and Ashley WolfTornabane in a primary for which the text gives no vote figures; Ryan Melton, the nominee in 2022 and 2024, withdrew. As of June 30, 2026 McGowan had raised $679,844 with $328,850 on hand; Dawson had raised $135,722 with $49,762 on hand.

Every rater that shows a call has the seat R: Decision Desk HQ (July 14, 2026), the Cook Political Report (February 6, 2025), Inside Elections (March 7, 2025) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (April 10, 2025); Silver Bulletin is listed with an August 20, 2026 date but no ranking. The text records no district polls and its endorsement section is empty.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The Democratic primary results box is mangled; the text gives no vote counts or percentages for Dawson's primary win.; The Silver Bulletin row in the predictions table carries a date but no ranking.; No district polls appear in the text, and the model's basis says no district polls.; The text gives no presidential result for the district; only the facts carry a presidential baseline.; The Endorsements section is empty.; facts.candidates marks no candidate as incumbent and lists the Democrat as Dave Dawson; the text uses David Dawson in the candidate list and Dave Dawson in fundraising tables.

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as e7db07292d11; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

Who holds the seat now

Randy Feenstra (Republican), in this chamber since 2021, 3 terms. Committees: House Committee on Agriculture; House Committee on Ways and Means.

From the congress-legislators dataset (CC0), archived as ae8cb9477c48. For a Senate race this lists both of the state's senators; the one whose term ends in the election year holds the seat on the ballot. For a House district redrawn for 2026 it is the member elected under the old lines with this number, who may be running elsewhere; the dossier above names who is running here.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 3.0 points toward the Republicans from 2016 to 2024. county returns placed on the current lines by 2020 block population; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

Who are the voters?

Of about 522,685 adults 25 and over. In 2020 the district voted 36.8% Democratic (two-party) for president. With the same preferences and a 2022-style midterm turnout, it would vote 37.0% Democratic: the midterm electorate alone moves the margin 0.4 points toward Democrats. Group shares are estimated from how results vary across the state's census tracts (ecological inference, anchored to Pew's 2020 validated-voter figures) and calibrated to this district's actual 2020 vote; turnout is the Census survey's state rate by race and national rate by education, whose state samples carry margins of several points.

Not answered here: how each group will vote in 2026. These are 2020 preferences; this profile is description, not yet an input to the forecast.

The money

FEC bulk candidate summaries through June 30, 2026; $172,668 of independent expenditures for or against these candidates this cycle (FEC Schedule E, types 24E and 24A), which is the parties' and outside groups' own revealed view of whether this seat is in play.

The district in numbers

ACS 5-year 2023, the Census Bureau's own tabulation of this district (118th Congress lines). Unemployment is the BLS county series placed on the district by block population, not seasonally adjusted, so changes are same-month comparisons. Income, transfers and jobs are BEA county accounts placed the same way, compared with the average district. Every other figure is a named column of a named table in the Bureau's summary file, archived before it was read. This is what a reader knows about a district before looking at a poll; the model does not yet use it, and whether it should is a registered question.

Who is favoured, and by how much?

The 90% interval runs from -28.5 to +1.2 points, D-R. It is wide because this district has never been polled.

What is this built on?

A model trained on every contested House race 2012-2024 predicts this district's lean from its own record: presidential and House results on the current lines, incumbency, both candidates' prior offices, outside and party money before 1 October, demographics and public-assistance shares from the Census release before the election, local unemployment and income, and religious tradition. The national margin comes from presidential approval, the economy, the midterm penalty and the generic ballot corrected for its measured lean. Draws share national and state errors, so the seat total and this district come from the same simulation.

Not answered here: district polls, which are not yet folded in.

Why does the model say this?

Each figure is how far this district's predicted lean moves when that one feature is set to the typical value across 2026 districts, everything else held: 2024 presidential lean (R+30.4): 10.9 pts toward the Republican; experience gap (+2 levels, D minus R): 9.0 pts toward the Democrat; 2024 House lean (R+31.7): 3.0 pts toward the Republican; asian share (2.1%): 1.2 pts toward the Republican; PAC money balance: 0.6 pts toward the Republican.

How sure is it, and of what?

Total sd 9.02 points, made of the seat's own volatility 91%, correlated polling error 9%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

Not answered here: a nowcast. 'If ballots were cast today' needs something that observes today, and for a House district nothing does. Publishing the election-day figure under both labels would make one forecast look like two.

How was this number made?

Run 6f211e6f-2bdc-4dda-8f72-81fc628dab0b, house_district_prior/0.2.0, as of 2026-10-02. Promoted by a pre-registered gate: on 2016-2022 its Brier score was 0.036 against 0.049 for the previous method, and on a single 2024 run 0.023 against 0.032 (experiments/district_gate_result.md, with an independent review).