Dean Fisher wins State House District 53

Republican incumbent Dean Fisher, 68, beat out Democrat Tommy Hexter, 25, by a large margin in the race for Iowa State House District 53. Fisher won 56.9 percent of the vote and Hexter won 43.1 percent of the vote.

“I’m certainly honored and humbled to win,” Fisher said. “I just want to thank the voters and look forward to serving them for two years.”

Fisher has held office since 2013. He said that he would not act differently in his sixth term and will focus on tackling property taxes and gender identity issues.

“I think I’ve been very consistent and solid on the issues, and I think my values are right in line with the values of the district,” Fisher said. “I am just going to keep on … working on cutting taxes and keeping our spending down and dealing with all these social issues.”

Fisher defeated his last opponent, Sarah Smith, in 2022 with 56.6 percent of the vote. He said that he has run all of his campaigns the same way. 

Hexter said he was proud of the campaign he ran, and that he plans to run again. 

“Our biggest goal was to keep a 100 percent positive campaign, not feed into any divisive rhetoric, and show voters an honest choice between two candidates, and we definitely succeeded with that,” Hexter said. 

According to Hexter, his campaign was not able to send out as many Facebook ads as they would have wanted in the last stretch of the campaign. He said he plans to give back the leftover funds to the local Democratic party. 

“We had a super unfortunate thing happen, which was that our Facebook ads account got hacked about two weeks ago, and we had been planning to spend a good amount of money on Facebook ads, and then that was unable to happen,” Hexter said.

Hexter said that he hopes to continue cooperating with Fisher.

“It’s always been all respect between Dean and I have no doubt that he will continue performing the civic duty that he has been for the last 12 years in a similar manner to how he has been,” Hexter said. “I look forward to working with him as he serves in this next session.”