3rd Congressional District

Iowa 3rd Congressional District Democratic candidate Lanon Baccam speaks.

Former Agriculture Department aide Lannon Baccam has already outraised the freshman Iowa Republican in the past two quarters.

MADISON FERNANDEZ

Lanon Baccam, the Democrat challenging GOP Rep. Zach Nunn in a battleground seat in Iowa, raked in more than $1.3 million last quarter — a notable haul for a first-time candidate.

For Baccam, a former official in the Agriculture Department, April through June represented his highest quarter since jumping into the race last November.

Nunn has not yet announced his fundraising haul from the second quarter. Baccam outraised the incumbent in the past two quarters — the final three months of 2023 and the first three months of 2024.

National Democrats are targeting Iowa’s 3rd District, which Nunn flipped from then-Democratic Rep. Cindy Axne in the midterms. The seat encompasses Des Moines and would have voted for former President Donald Trump by less than 1 percentage point in 2020.

The sizable fundraising haul demonstrates momentum for Baccam — and internal polling, first shared with POLITICO, shows a tight race. A survey conducted for Baccam’s campaign by GQR Research shows both tied at 43 percent. “With the resources to build his profile in the four months before Election Day, Lanon Baccam will be well-positioned to flip this crucial seat,” the memo says.

There’s not much publicly available polling for the contest. A generic ballot in a June Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll found 55 percent of likely voters saying they’d vote for a Republican, and 40 percent voting for a Democrat.

The internal Baccam poll was conducted among 550 likely general election voters, contacted via landline and cell phone, from June 24-27 — prior to last month’s presidential debate. It has a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percentage points.