Blue Dot: Mike Frantz
Mike Frantz is a Democrat running for the Iowa State Senate in Iowa’s third district, one of the reddest districts in one of the reddest states in the U.S. He’s also one of my favorite people on the planet, and he has a lot to say about Iowa politics, Donald Trump, and being a loudmouthed blue dot in a sea of red.
I first met Mike Frantz on the porch of his house in Storm Lake, Iowa, on one of the many road trips I took with my then-boyfriend/now-husband in the early years of our courtship. We were in the process of Meeting Each Other’s Friends, which in those days meant a lot of schlepping, since most of my friends were scattered around the east coast and most of Brian’s friends were scattered around Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa.
[Aside: If you had told early-twenties me, a Jewish girl raised in Chicago with a family tree rooted in New England and Los Angeles, that I would end up spending a significant chunk of my life schlepping around Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa, I probably would have rolled my eyes and said OY.]
Mike and Brian became pals while they were both working at Buena Vista University, a small liberal arts college in Storm Lake. The BV gig was Brian’s first job out of college, and when he first arrived he was pretty lonely. Mike and his wife Andrea immediately scooped him up, and once I came on the scene, I got scooped up too. Mike and Andrea are amazing–funny, warm, smart, smartassed. I don’t remember much about that first visit, but I am sure it was full of goofiness. Case in point: I forgot a pair of underwear under the bed in their guest room, and when we returned on yet another schlep a few months later, they were flying my underwear like a flag from their porch. A few years later, we asked them to read a poem in our wedding ceremony. They are some of our favorite people.
Mike and Andrea are both Iowa born-and-bred and extremely proud of it. Mike was raised in Mount Vernon and Andrea in Grinnell, and they met at Simpson College in Indianola. They have spent their entire careers in education (Mike in higher ed admissions and financial aid and Andrea as a professor of journalism, communications, and digital media) and apart from a decade or so at two colleges in Pennsylvania, they have lived their entire lives in small-town Iowa.
Unlike a lot of their small-town Iowa brethren, however, they are die-hard Democrats. One of my favorite parts of the ho-ho-ho season is their annual holiday letter, which is authored by Mike, edited by Andrea (Mike’s initial drafts are apparently “unsendable,” in her expert opinion), and filled with updates about their work and travels, their daughter Hannah’s exploits, and, more and more these last ten years, increasingly furious diatribes about the Trump administration.
It’s worth noting here that politically, Iowa is a fascinating (and if you’re a Democrat, depressing) case study in how a state’s electoral identity shifts over time. For decades, the Iowa electorate was defined by (and proud of) its split-ticket-ness; Iowa voters backed Democrats for president in five of the six elections between 1988 and 2008, culminating in the legendary 2008 caucus victory that launched Barack Obama’s first Presidential campaign into the stratosphere.
But in 2016 Iowa experienced a massive political realignment as voters shifted heavily toward Donald Trump, who won the state in 2016, 2020, and 2024 (and by more and more each time). Although there are some promising shifts to the left in these upcoming midterms, especially in the governor’s race, Republicans have completely dominated Iowa politics at every level for the last decade, anchored by Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst in the Senate, every single congressional seat, and both chambers of the state legislature.
Mike and Andrea have watched this shift with a despair familiar to those of us who despise Donald Trump. But those feelings hit very differently when you are a blue dot in a sea of red, and Mike and Andrea’s porch in Storm Lake is a lonely blue buoy bobbing in a very red sea. Their congressional district in Iowa–the Iowa 4th, in northwest Iowa about 120 miles from Omaha to the southwest and 150 miles from Des Moines to the southeast–is one of the reddest districts in the entire state. In 2024, Trump won the district by a whopping 47 percentage points.
It’s one thing to rail against Trump’s fuckery when everyone else around you is railing against his fuckery too; that is one of the comforts and privileges of living in a blue state at this moment in history. But it’s another thing entirely to be the only person in the room, in pretty much every room you are in, who’s not in a red hat. It’s lonely, and terrifying.
But Mike is not one to give into loneliness or terror. Instead, he’s spent the last ten years screaming about the very real damage Trump is doing in Iowa. This is because he’s a stubborn and loudmouthed kind of guy but also because he was raised to believe that helping other people is the most important thing one can do in this life. His parents were both teachers early in their careers; his mom later worked as a special ed consultant with the Area Education Agency. His dad started out as a high school shop teacher who also taught practical skills at a reformatory in Anamosa; he eventually left teaching to work at Job Service of Iowa, helping welfare recipients find work that allowed them to live on their own with a decent wage and their dignity.
Mike’s parents taught him to hunt, to fish, to golf, and to value the contributions of everyone he encountered. They were also Republicans, as were their parents. As was Mike, until he realized, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s destruction of so much of the infrastructure that actually helped people live with dignity in this country, that the GOP no longer represented the values his parents had taught him. He was the first Frantz to register as a Democrat, and his parents soon followed suit.
So it was not entirely a surprise when Mike decided to run as a Democrat for the state senate seat in his ruby-red district. The seat is currently held by a fellow named Lynn Evans, who won the seat in 2022, although “won” might be a stretch because there was no Democrat on the ticket. Evans proudly calls himself a “MAGA Republican”: he introduced Trump at a rally in Sioux City during the 2024 campaign, and he was part of what Mike calls “the fucking Trump flotilla” that summer, when Storm Lake, a gorgeous body of water that is the town’s namesake, turned into a literal Red Sea, with Lynn Evans and his fellow MAGAs flying their Trump flags on their pontoons and fishing boats.
Originally, Mike had no intention of running for anything; he was perfectly happy going to legislative forums whenever the Iowa legislature was in session and “asking a pointed question or two hundred” of his representatives. But after one such event, he got a phone call from a friend, a former congressional candidate herself who was also a regular at the district forums. “She pitched me on the idea of running for Evans’ seat, and I told her to go pound sand,” Mike says.
But then his phone kept ringing. “The Senate Minority Leader called me, and other candidates that had been recruited called me, and then someone from the Senate Majority Fund [the Democratic fundraising arm of the state senate] called me. They kept calling me,” says Mike. But he kept taking their calls, and then he thought about it for a bit, and then he started collecting signatures for his filing papers to run for Evans’ seat just two weeks before the deadline.
I asked him why he changed his mind. “They all kept hammering on one premise–that Democrats needed to run in every single race,” Mike says, “and I knew they were right. Evans ran unopposed” he says, “so Democrats have no way of knowing how competitive we really are in this down-ballot race. The only marker is what happened in the presidential election last year. But you can’t assume that the same will be true for local races, because there's a greater chance that in my district they've actually met me and know what I stand for.”
There’s a greater chance of that because Mike has spent the last five months in his car, criss-crossing the district, knocking on doors and talking to his neighbors. He guesses that he’s knocked on more than four thousand doors so far. He obviously doesn’t have time to knock on every door, and he avoids the doors that his voter database tells him are owned by what he calls “the MAGA crazies.” “They’re unconvincible, so why waste my time?” he says. “I need to talk to the Republicans and independents that I can persuade, and the Democrats to get them out to the polls, get them excited to vote for me.” On a good day, Mike estimates that maybe one in four of his doorknocks is actually answered, and of those, less than ten percent result in a real conversation.
Sometimes those conversations get hijacked by what Mike calls “Fox News spew,” but if he can get past the spew about rigged elections and open borders and how Democrats tax everyone to death, it turns out that his neighbors care about the same things he does: education, their family’s health, and the economy.
Education is top of the list, for both Mike and his neighbors. “When I was growing up in public schools, Iowa was always ranked in the top one or two in the entire country for education,” Mike says, “but those days are long gone. I think we’re down to 27th right now, and that’s unacceptable.” Funding for Iowa’s public education system is not even close to keeping pace with inflation or the consumer price index, and adding to the lack of public funding is the state legislature’s decision three years ago to start “educational savings accounts”--a fancy term for school vouchers–that redirect tax dollars to parents who send their kids to private schools. “There was no demand for it and 90% of the people who've taken it were already paying tuition,” says Mike, who also points out that the ESA program is completely unregulated because by law the state auditor is not permitted to track where the dollars are going.
Another frequent topic: cancer rates in Iowa, which are the second highest in the US. Iowa is one of only three states where cancer rates are rising. There are a lot of reasons for (and opinions about) that rise, but there’s widespread agreement that it has to do with the nitrates leaching into Iowa’s drinking water from farm runoff. And yet, Iowa’s state legislature has done almost nothing; “almost nothing” also describes the legislative action taken about the levels of radon, another carcinogen that makes its way into Iowa homes at very high levels. “Radon is a byproduct of having really good fertile soil,” says Mike, who, like a lot of Iowans, is not far removed from the family farm (the Frantz farm was sold in the 80s to pay for his grandparents’ medical care, a loss that haunts Mike to this day).
Radon causes lung cancer, but the only move the state legislature has made on this front is to require radon mitigation units in new housing construction in Iowa. “Great idea!” Mike says with customary snark, and then asks me to guess what percentage of housing in Iowa is new construction. “Uhhhh, maybe five percent?” I hazard. He laughs. “Oh jeez, not even 5%. It's minuscule. So, what are we doing to help people put mitigation units in their already-existing homes? Nothing. A mitigation unit is $1500, maybe $2000. Doesn’t sound like much to some, but it’s way out of reach for most people around here, especially in this economy.”
Speaking of which: the current economy definitely comes up in those porch conversations–even more than it did when Mike started his campaign, thanks to tariffs and the war in Iran and all of Donald Trump’s other garbage economic policies, many of which hit an agricultural economy like Iowa’s particularly hard. And the penny really hasn’t fully dropped yet for Iowa’s farmers. Mike told me that farmers typically buy their supplies for the growing season before the end of the previous calendar year for tax reasons; this means that for many of Iowa’s farmers, the 2026 season will be relatively okay from a cost perspective because supplies were already locked in last year, when prices were much lower. But now, as farmers look ahead to the 2027 season, they have a tough choice. “Do I buy now at these high prices, or do I hope that Trump will actually make good on one of his four million promises that the war is gonna end tomorrow, prices are gonna drop like a brick, blah blah blah,” says Mike, who points out that Iowa farmers’ tough economic decisions are actually everyone’s tough economic decisions because they are the ones growing our food.
In Mike’s mind, these are not blue and red issues. They are literally life and death issues, and that’s what keeps him on the campaign trail, knocking on doors, even though he is very, very aware that he is not going to come anywhere close to winning this race. But that doesn’t bother him in the least, because he knows that a “win” is not getting elected: it’s building a foundation for the next Democrat to run after him, and then the next one after that, and then another one and another one and another one until enough of his neighbors decide that underfunded public schools and rising cancer rates and a shitty economy aren’t their values after all.
“As a Democrat in this district I’m starting out 47 points underwater,” Mike says, alluding to Trump’s margin of victory in 2024. “Can I cut that to 30 points? 20 points? People need to understand that if I lose this race by 20 points, that’s actually a win.”
Like his farming ancestors before him, he’s planting seeds and (hopefully) watching them grow.
“We named this campaign ‘Plant Hope’ because that’s the whole point,” Mike says. “We are planting hope that someday it’ll be different. I could sit on the couch and watch the news and be angry, or I could get off the damn couch and do something about it. And if we actually make progress in November, it won’t be because Mike Frantz was this rock-star superior candidate. It’ll be because we put a Democrat on the damn ballot and gave the voters a choice.”
You can learn more about Mike and his “Plant Hope” platform on his campaign website and his campaign Facebook page. And if you’ve got a few bucks to spare, you can donate to his campaign via ActBlue here.
This essay originally appeared on The Politics Chicks Substack, where I write a regular column.
