Iowa’s 2020-cycle state maps drew the headlines, but the past four years have also reshaped local power centers across the state. Polk County, home to Des Moines and more than half a million residents, used the Legislative Services Agency (LSA) for the first time to redraw its five Board of Supervisors districts. Draft lines released in February 2022 paired two long-time incumbents and, according to one UVA analysis, created two genuine toss-up seats, raising the prospect of the county’s first GOP majority in decades. Public hearings that spring highlighted concern over Des Moines high-school clusters and partisan balance, but supervisors ultimately adopted the LSA plan ahead of the 2022 elections.
Smaller localities followed suit. The Des Moines City Council redrew its four wards and 80 precincts on a fast statutory calendar, holding a public workshop on Nov 30, 2021, and adopting new boundaries before the state’s Jan 3, 2022, filing deadline; ward lines were aligned more closely with existing neighborhoods than with the county’s proposal. Most recently, Johnson County, spurred by 2024’s Senate File 75, which requires populous or university-host counties to elect supervisors by district rather than at-large, convened a three-member redistricting committee this summer. The panel’s precinct map, on track for state submission by Oct 1, 2025, will trigger LSA-drawn supervisor districts that debut on the November 2026 ballot, ending decades of countywide elections. With Story and Black Hawk counties on the same path, Iowa’s once-quiet local redistricting landscape is becoming as consequential as the statewide maps that set the process in motion.
Find us on:
