IOWA, USA — Voters in and around the Iowa Quad Cities will be casting their ballots in a hotly-contested race in Iowa's 1st Congressional District.
Incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks is facing off with Democrat Christiana Bohannan in a rematch of the 2022 election. Libertarian Nicholas Gluba is also running a write-in campaign after a state panel found that the Iowa Libertarian Party failed to follow state law in deciding their nominee.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has called the race a toss-up slightly favoring Republicans. Here's what you need to know about all three candidates:
Miller-Meeks was first elected to represent the 1st District in 2020 after beating out Democrat Rita Hart by just six votes. She then won reelection in 2022 in a matchup with Christina Bohannan, who she's facing again this time around, by a margin of approximately 6% of the vote.
Before her time in Congress, Miller-Meeks was an ophthalmologist and also spent 24 years as a member of the U.S. Army.
Bohannan is a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law, where she teaches courses on copyright law, intellectual property law and torts. She was elected to the Iowa Legislature in 2020 and represented the 85th District in the Iowa House from 2021 to 2023.
Bohannan ran for Congress in 2022 in her first matchup with Miller-Meeks but ultimately lost that race.
Gluba is writing a write-in campaign for Congress after a state panel found that the Libertarian Party of Iowa failed to follow state law in choosing their candidates. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld this decision, pulling Gluba and two other candidates from the ballot.
Gluba is a member of the city council in Lone Tree, Iowa, which is a small town of approximately 1,400 people. He is also a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and deployed as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
In his campaign, Gluba has been a firm opponent of eminent domain. The issue has risen in prominence as Summit Carbon Solutions has proposed a carbon pipeline that would have the company using eminent domain to acquire the property necessary for construction.
