One lesson about elections reinforced time and again this year is that states get to decide almost all their own rules, Washington bigfooting with its own decisions only rarely.
The closest congressional contest in four decades looks to be one of those times.
A Democrat who fell a scant six votes short, in a district covering southeastern Iowa, says she will challenge the result in the House itself — triggering a highly unusual process that threatens to eradicate any small measure of bipartisan collaboration that might germinate in the new Congress.
The last race that was single-digit close was decided 36 years ago by the House. And the fight over what got dubbed the "Bloody 8th" district of Indiana was one of the bellwether moments in the transformation of the House from a place of policymaking collegiality to a chamber wracked by dysfunction and scorched-earth partisanship. Democrats who already held a significant majority voted to seat one of their own despite final results in favor of the Republican, and the GOP collectively vowed to neither forgive nor forget.
The move by the aggrieved Iowa candidate, former state Sen. Rita Hart, pushes Speaker Nancy Pelosi toward a highly awkward choice — with consequences for the public's rattled faith in the integrity of elections as well as its dim view of Congress.
Arranging a party-line vote to seat Hart would pad ever so slightly the smallest Democratic majority since World War II, probably five seats without her. But to do so the party would need to sacrifice any hope of GOP comity next year while weathering passionate and plausible allegations of hypocrisy in the pursuit of power.
That's because the move would require the House to disregard the finalized election results in Iowa, at the same time Democrats are of once voice about how the presidential race is over and Joe Biden is definitely president-elect now that all six states where President Trump is contesting his defeat have certified their results.
The Republican winner, at this point, is state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, a physician who has lost two previous bids for the seat. A recount finished Monday cut her original victory margin of 47 votes down to only six out of 394,000 cast, and that result was certified.
Hart could have appealed under a state procedure that would have given her only until Tuesday to make her case to a specially convened panel of five judges, a timeline she said was implausibly fast.
Instead, she will contest the election under a 1969 federal law that sets out procedures for the House to use. It says the state's result is presumed valid and she must prove Iowa got it wrong. Hart contends several batches of valid votes were improperly excluded from the state's tabulations.
She has a month to file her complaint, at which point the House Administration Committee could conduct an investigation of its own for as long as it wants before making a recommendation to the full House, which would decide who to seat by a simple majority vote. In the meantime, the House would decide if Miller-Meeks could occupy the 2nd District seat, which takes in Dubuque and Iowa City.
The Constitution says the House is the ultimate judge of the "elections, returns and qualifications" of its members.
In southwestern Indiana in 1984, the GOP secretary of state certified a 34-vote victory for Republican Richard McIntyre over Democratic incumbent Frank McCloskey. A recount expanded McIntyre's margin to 418 votes, but Democrats contended the process was spoiled by different standards used to accept or reject ballots in the 15 counties.
The House refused to seat McIntyre during its inquiry, which culminated in the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the audring and investigative arm of Congress, conducting its own recount and deciding McCloskey had won by four votes. Republicans walked out in protest after the House voted to seat him. (He was ultimately defeated a decade later.)
The next time the process was pursued to the end was after the 1998 election of California Democrat Loretta Sanchez. The losing GOP incumbent, Bob Dornan, spent 13 months pursuing his allegations of widespread voting by illegal immigrants and found 748 such ballots. But that only cut his margin of defeat down to 180 votes and a Republican-majority House dismissed his claim.
The Iowa congressional contest is not the only race still in dispute. In upstate New York, challenges to more than 2,000 absentee and provisional ballots have not yet been heard a month after Election Day. And a rural county just this week said it had discovered 55 ballots that had not been counted — enough to tip the race between incumbent Democrat Anthony Brindisi and the Republcian he ousted two years ago, Claudia Tenney. At the moment, she is ahead by 12 votes.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.