Christina Bohannan

Christina Bohannan is a law professor, engineer, and former Iowa state representative running to represent Iowa's 1st Congressional District. After winning the June 2026 Democratic primary with roughly 81 percent of the vote, she advances to a third matchup against Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks. In 2024 she lost by just 799 votes (about 0.2 percent) after a recount, the narrowest Republican House hold in the country. IA-01, which includes Davenport, Iowa City, and Burlington, is rated a top 2026 toss-up.

Bohannan grew up in a mobile home in a Florida town of about 700 people, the daughter of a construction worker and a part-time daycare worker, neither of whom finished high school. When her father developed emphysema and lost his insurance over a pre-existing condition, the family had to choose between his medicine and other necessities, an experience that still shapes her focus on health care. She worked her way through school waiting tables and picking fruit to become the first in her family to attend college, earning an environmental engineering degree and a law degree from the University of Florida before moving to Iowa in 2000.

For more than two decades she has taught at the University of Iowa College of Law, where she also served as president of the faculty senate. In 2020 she defeated a long-tenured incumbent to win a seat in the Iowa House, serving from 2021 to 2023 and working across party lines. She accepts no corporate PAC money and has built her campaign around lowering costs, defending health care, and restoring trust in government, making her one of the cycle's most closely watched challengers.

Christina Bohannan is running to put Iowa's working families first. Drawing on her family's struggles and a career in engineering, law, and public service, her platform centers on affordability, health care, and honest government. In Congress, she has pledged to:

• Lower everyday costs by ending the tariffs raising prices for families and farmers, cracking down on price gouging, and expanding affordable housing
• Reverse the Medicaid cuts threatening coverage for more than 100,000 Iowans and rural hospitals, and fully extend the ACA tax credits that hold premiums down
• Let Iowans of any age buy into Medicare and cap insulin at $35 a month, while letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices
• Protect Social Security and Medicare, opposing efforts to privatize them or raise the retirement age
• Reinvest in public education from pre-K through apprenticeships, with a focus on rural schools, to make Iowa number one again
• Support family farms by passing a new Farm Bill, expanding markets, and curbing agribusiness monopolies on seed and fertilizer
• Defend reproductive freedom by working to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law
• Clean up Washington by banning congressional stock trading, rejecting corporate PAC money, and ending the influence of special interests

Across every issue, her message is the same: government should work for ordinary people, not the wealthy and well-connected, a theme that has drawn support from Democrats, independents, and even Trump voters.