On a crisp September afternoon in Des Moines, Iowa, the front yard of state Rep. Sean Bagniewski’s house buzzed with anticipation. Nearly 400 people gathered to hear former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel—a Democrat with a storied resume that stretches from Congress to the White House and diplomatic posts—deliver a message that was as much a call to arms as it was a campaign preview. With the 2026 elections looming and speculation swirling about the 2028 presidential race, Emanuel’s appearance underscored Iowa’s outsized role in the national political imagination.
“Iowa, all eyes are on you,” Emanuel declared, according to the Des Moines Register. “When you think you’ve knocked on your last door, you’ve got 10 more to go.” It was a rallying cry, but also a nod to the hard work ahead for Democrats hoping to flip the state’s political map. Iowa, once a reliable bellwether, has drifted rightward in recent years, but recent special election victories and a slate of open-seat races have given party leaders renewed hope.
Emanuel, who has openly acknowledged he is considering a run for president in 2028, told the crowd he plans to make a final decision by the end of 2025. “I’m thinking hard about it (running for president), but I’m going to make a gut-check decision at the end of the year and I’ve gotta make sure that my heart’s in this,” he told the Register. “But I think I have something to say that nobody else is saying, say it the way I think it’s particularly important and I’m going to do that.”
His government experience is hard to match: former Democratic congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor, and U.S. ambassador to Japan. Yet, as reported by Dow Jones & Company, Emanuel’s centrist message puts him at odds with a Democratic base increasingly energized by progressive figures such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City’s democratic socialist mayoral hopeful, Zohran Mamdani. This ideological tension was palpable in Des Moines, where Emanuel’s remarks both embraced traditional Democratic values and challenged the party’s recent direction.
“Democrats are at a fork in the road,” Emanuel told the crowd, bluntly calling the party “culpable” in the erosion of the middle class. He argued that the American dream has become “unaffordable and inaccessible,” warning, “It’s the American dream when every child knows that if you work hard, play by the rules, do right, you achieve something, you don’t struggle. And people are holding on right on that window ledge and their nails are holding just to stay there. This should not be a struggle. You should strive to achieve it.”
Emanuel’s critique of his own party was unflinching. He has been among the more centrist Democrats to warn that the party has become too “woke” and lost sight of “kitchen table” issues that affect Americans daily. “We got wrapped around on a discussion about one child’s pronoun as the test score’s gonna show 30 kids in the class don’t know what a pronoun is, and I want to make sure that those kids can succeed,” he said in an interview with the Register, signaling his belief that education and economic opportunity must take center stage.
Indeed, education was the heart of Emanuel’s message. Reflecting on his tenure as mayor of Chicago, he touted the Chicago Star Scholarship program—a policy he called “the best thing I ever did.” The scholarship covers tuition, books, and transportation for community college students who graduate with a GPA of 3.0 or higher. Emanuel lamented declining reading proficiency among students and pressed for major improvements to America’s education system. “You tell me how we as a party who believe in equity can be complacent with the fact that our kids can’t read,” he challenged the audience.
The urgency was not lost on Iowa Democrats in attendance. Rep. Sean Bagniewski, newly elected House Democratic whip, told the crowd the party is ready to “take our state back next year” by personally knocking on doors and flipping red seats. “We’ve lost the message of Barack Obama,” Bagniewski said. “We think that Barack Obama won because he had the best consultants, the best data, the best fundraising, the best technology. All of you in this audience know Barack Obama was Barack Obama because he was the best organizer of people in American history.”
State Sen. Catelin Drey, who recently flipped a Republican seat in a special election, echoed the call for action. “As Democrats, we are the party of big ideas, and those are incredibly important—equality and fairness, diversity, free speech, justice. Those all deserve defense right now,” Drey said. “But we also don’t live every moment in our day-to-day lives in those big ideas. … It’s hard to defend democracy when for so many people in this country, it feels like it never worked for them in the first place.”
Emanuel’s presence in Iowa signals more than just a flirtation with a presidential run. He sees the state as a “target-rich environment,” with a real chance for Democrats to flip a Republican U.S. Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, and multiple congressional seats in 2026. “Not many states have a good competitive chance of flipping a Republican U.S. Senate seat, a good chance of flipping a Republican-held governor seat and a good chance of flushing one of the four congressional (seats), if not multiple,” Emanuel observed. “That’s a target-rich environment, and you just won an incredible special election in a place that nobody saw coming.”
The event in Des Moines also highlighted the anxieties many Americans feel about the current political climate. Reba Eagles, a 69-year-old Des Moines resident with a daughter who has Down syndrome, voiced her concerns about the direction of the country and the safety of people with disabilities. “At what point might someone just decide, ‘OK, we’re getting rid of all the Hispanics. We’re getting rid of people that are the wrong color,’” Eagles said, referencing a rising sense of fear and exclusion. “We’re getting rid of all these people, you know, and if you look at the playbook that (Trump is) following, at some point, people with disabilities are on the list.”
Emanuel responded empathetically, though Eagles felt his focus sometimes drifted too much toward health care policy. “Health care is not a policy,” Emanuel said. “It’s a piece of mind, which is how your statement reflects: an ability to whether it’s on Medicaid or private insurance, it allows you to know that when the chips are down, you don’t end up in the poor house. And you’re trying to make a fundamental choice as a parent that’s an impossible choice.”
As the sun set over Des Moines, the sense of urgency and possibility lingered. Emanuel’s message was clear: for Democrats, the path to national relevance may well run through Iowa’s neighborhoods, classrooms, and kitchen tables. Whether his centrist vision can bridge the party’s ideological divides—and whether Iowa Democrats can convert energy into electoral wins—remains to be seen. But with 2026 fast approaching and 2028 on the horizon, all eyes are, indeed, on Iowa.