Iowa Is Now In Play

On Tuesday, Iowa Democrats got the Zach they wanted.

Image courtesy of The Des Moines Register

Tuesday’s primaries stretched across six states—California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota. California was the night’s marquee contest, with a wide-open race to succeed term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom drawing more than 60 candidates. While at least one Democrat is likely to place in the top two slots, whether the other will go to Republican Steve Hilton isn’t clear. California’s high use of a mail-in ballots means votes postmarked by June 2 won’t finish arriving until June 9.

Iowa, by contrast, delivered clear results in both top-of-ticket races. Those matter beyond the state’s borders because Iowa is a bellwether on whether Democrats can translate a favorable national environment into actual wins. Iowa went for Trump by double digits in 2024. So if Democrats can compete statewide in Iowa, they can compete anywhere.

Tuesday told a tale of two primaries in the Hawkeye State. The narrative that emerged was that Trump’s endorsement is not a guarantee of victory, and that Democratic primary voters strongly preferred the candidate with the best chance to actually win.

The Importance of Beating Ernst’s… Replacement

Sen. Joni Ernst announced in 2025 that she would not seek a third term. Her departure created the first open Iowa Senate seat in a generation and a chance to add a critical +1 to the Democratic ledger.

Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate. To retake it, Democrats need a net gain of four seats (51, not just 50, because of JD Vance’s tie-breaker vote). That’s hard math. Democrats must defend every seat they currently hold while flipping four that Republicans control, often on red-tinged terrain.

Iowa is one of the relatively few Republican-held seats where the stars have aligned enough to make a flip plausible. Even so, the state hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since Tom Harkin won his fifth term in 2008. That was an Obama wave year, 18 years ago, when Harkin carried 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties.

Since then, Iowa has moved sharply right. Trump carried the state by 13 points in 2024. Republicans hold every congressional seat, and Democrats are outnumbered in voter registration by nearly 200,000.

And yet, with Ernst leaving and Trump’s approval sinking amid high tariffs on agricultural products and rising fuel and fertilizer costs, all of which squeeze Iowa farmers, Democrats believe the seat is flippable. “I think we are going to be the center of the political universe here in 2026,” said Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek. “There’s no other state where you’re looking at being able to flip three of the four congressional seats, flip the Senate seat, and flip this Governor’s race.”

The Man Who Crawled Up Stairs

Turek, 47, grew up in Council Bluffs, a working-class city along the Missouri River in western Iowa. It’s the kind of place that once voted reliably Democratic and now votes consistently for Trump by wide margins. He was born with spina bifida following his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during his service in Vietnam. By the time he was 12, he had endured 21 surgeries.

Turek overcame significant obstacles and went on to play for the U.S. men’s national wheelchair basketball team in four Paralympic Games, winning back-to-back gold medals in 2016 and 2021.

When his playing career ended, he ran for the Iowa House in 2022 in a district Donald Trump had won twice. And Turek won—by six votes. He became the Iowa Legislature’s first permanently disabled member.

In his Senate campaign launch video, Turek crawled up stairs and dragged his wheelchair behind him to reach a voter’s door. It was the central theme of his candidacy: he would go anywhere, reach anyone and not be stopped.

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Turek returned to his roots with a message of optimism: “In no other country on Earth could someone born into a working-class family from Council Bluffs, Iowa; who went to the Goodwill; shared clothes; had the wrong color lunch ticket; who was born with my disability of spina bifida due to my father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam; who had 21 surgeries before the age of 12, be able to represent the United States in four Paralympic Games and bring home two gold medals and represent their community in the Legislature.” He added, “My story is truly the American dream.”

Turek’s pitch for the Senate was built entirely around the general election. He repeatedly described himself as “the only candidate in this race who has even run against a Republican, let alone beaten one.” He emphasized Medicaid, working-class costs and union rights. His endorsement list was deliberately cross-spectrum and included moderate Senate Democrats such as Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto alongside progressive Rep. Ro Khanna of California and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He invoked Tom Harkin’s prairie populism by name, and Harkin himself backed the campaign.

The national Democratic Senate leadership infrastructure, operating through VoteVets, organized quietly but substantially behind him.

His geography mattered, too. Turek is from western Iowa, the part of the state where Democrats have nearly ceased to exist at the ballot box. That stood in stark contrast to his progressive primary rival, Zach Wahls.

The Kid Who Went Viral

Wahls’s story is also remarkable. In 2011, Wahls was a 19-year-old University of Iowa sophomore when Iowa Republicans moved to overturn the state Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. He walked into a public hearing and in three minutes quietly dismantled the argument that his family—he was raised by two lesbian mothers—was anything less than whole. The footage became YouTube’s most-watched political video of 2011. He spoke at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. He wrote a memoir. He co-founded Scouts for Equality, which led the national campaign to end the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay members and leaders.

He won his Iowa Senate seat in 2018 at age 27, and by age 29 was the chamber’s youngest-ever minority leader. Sen. Elizabeth Warren endorsed him. He had real labor support: ironworkers, insulators, the kind of union backing that carries weight in a Democratic primary. On paper, he was the most nationally prominent Democrat in the race.

But there were complications beneath the surface. Wahls stepped down from the minority leader post in 2023 after a staff shake-up that rankled colleagues. Former state Sen. Pam Jochum, who had supported his rise, offered a blunt assessment to the New York Times: Wahls “thought he knew it all.”

His political base was concentrated in Iowa City, reliably blue turf that doesn’t necessarily battle-harden a candidate for a tough statewide race in a state Trump won by 13 points.

His campaign’s central argument was that the party needed new leadership in Washington as much as in Iowa. He wouldn’t commit to backing Chuck Schumer as Senate leader if elected. He railed against the outside money from VoteVets and Senate leadership-aligned groups that flooded into Turek’s campaign. Speaking to a few dozen voters in Keokuk, a southeastern Iowa town of fewer than 10,000, he closed his stump speech by declaring, “We are going to defeat Chuck Schumer on June 2nd.” It was not an isolated line.

The day before the election, he posted to Substack: “Ashley Hinson is Donald Trump’s choice for this seat. My primary opponent is Chuck Schumer’s choice. But this seat doesn’t belong to them—it belongs to the people of Iowa.” It was a sharp line. But Iowa Democrats didn’t buy it.

Playing to Win

Turek won the primary 62.6 percent to Wahls’s 37.4 percent. That 25-point margin made clear that Iowa Democrats had voted with the best chance to win in November firmly in mind.

In his victory speech, Turek reached out with grace. “Zach has been an exceptional representative for his district and a true public servant for the people of Iowa,” he said. “I am grateful for this primary. It has made me a stronger candidate.” In his concession, Wahls gave Turek the full-throated endorsement the party will need: “The work that we began together one year ago this month does not end tonight,” Wahls told his supporters. “It is going to end in November when Rep. Josh Turek defeats Ashley Hinson.”

Turek’s Republican opponent, Rep. Ashley Hinson, 42, is a former television news anchor who currently represents Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District. She had an easy primary, launching her Senate campaign the same day Ernst’s retirement was announced, and securing endorsements from Senate Majority Leader Thune and Trump within days. She beat her opponent by roughly 48 points.

In her victory statement, she pledged to fight for Iowa families and to “take on Big Pharma and Big Health Insurance”—notably populist framing from the establishment’s candidate. She immediately turned her fire on Turek, with her campaign declaring that his “values might fit in great in New York City with Chuck Schumer, but his liberal record won’t fly here in Iowa.”

Iowa GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann, speaking at Hinson’s watch party, previewed the general election attack with relish: “You all know exactly who Josh Turek is going to get his orders from. It’s going to be Chuck Schumer. It’s going to be the left. It’s going to be California. It’s going to be New York. All you need to know is where he’s getting his marching orders tonight.”

That is the argument Republicans will run. It’s also the same argument Wahls unsuccessfully made in the Democratic primary.

The Cook Political Report moved the Iowa Senate race from “Likely Republican” to “Lean Republican” the night of Turek’s win. This was driven in part by the strength of his candidacy but also by the overall Iowa environment: backlash to tariffs and rising costs tied to the Iran war.

There was also a revealing result in the Iowa governor’s race that unfolded on the same night.

MAHA v. MAGA

Gov. Kim Reynolds announced in April 2025 that she would not seek a third term, setting off a scramble that looked, from the outside, like it would resolve itself quickly. One GOP candidate had far more money, far more establishment support, and, eventually, a nod from the White House itself.

Rep. Randy Feenstra, 57, had every advantage a Republican primary candidate could want heading into 2026. He had represented Iowa’s heavily rural 4th Congressional District since 2021, winning re-election in 2024 with 67 percent of the vote. He had the backing of retiring Sen. Joni Ernst and former Gov. Terry Branstad. He had raised a record $4.3 million. He had internal polling as late as mid-April showing him at 41 percent while his opponents were still in single digits. And days before the election, he received what his campaign had been waiting for: Donald Trump’s endorsement.

But Feenstra had chosen to skip every debate to protect his lead and avoid any chance of a gaffe. He skipped the KCCI televised debate after the other four showed up. When WHO hosted a forum, the same thing happened. Feenstra even skipped a candidate forum in his own House district.

His absence allowed his rivals to allege Feenstra was afraid to face scrutiny, that he was unaccountable to Iowa voters, and that the man most likely to win the nomination might also be the man most likely to lose to the Democrat in November.

The Iowan From Kansas

Feenstra’s top opponent was Zach Lahn, 40, who is, depending on how you look at it, either a sixth-generation Iowan rooted in the land or a Kansas voter who relocated to Belle Plaine just in time to qualify for the ballot.

Both are true. Reporters from the Kansas Reflector documented that Lahn voted in Kansas as recently as the August 2022 primary and only re-registered in Iowa in October 2024, the bare minimum to meet the state’s two-year residency requirement for governor. His “Iowa First” campaign slogan took on an ironic cast in light of that timeline.

But Lahn had other things going for him. He put a $2 million personal loan into the race and eventually outraised Feenstra in the final reporting period. He affiliated himself with the MAHA movement and campaigned on Iowa’s water quality and the state’s rising cancer rates, framing corporate agriculture as a threat to family farmers. “Big ag and big pharma have rigged the system against farmers and poisoned our families for generations,” he said when he entered the race, pitting right-wing economic populism against establishment interests.

Lahn was also a close personal friend of the late Charlie Kirk. Turning Point Action, the political arm of Kirk’s organization, endorsed his far-right campaign days before the election. On policy, Lahn champions a total ban on abortion, with no exceptions, framing it in explicitly religious terms: “Every life is a gift from God,” his campaign website declares, “and it is our duty to protect life before birth.” He supports school vouchers and the removal of what he calls “liberal ideology” from public school classrooms, and has pushed to expand Iowa’s private school system at the expense of public education. On immigration, he has called for banning benefits for undocumented immigrants and halting H-1B visas for any jobs “that Iowans can do” in state government and universities. He opposes Medicaid expansion entirely.

And then there was Steve King, the former Iowa congressman stripped of his committee assignments in 2019 over his open embrace of white nationalism and then defeated in a bitter 2020 primary by Feenstra himself. King had endorsed Lahn, and it was the most consequential backing of the race. Lahn led Feenstra in 16 of the 19 counties that King had won in that 2020 contest. The man Feenstra had unseated helped finish him off.

At his watch party Tuesday night, Lahn framed his win in the populist register he had used all campaign. “They said Iowa doesn’t belong to the political class,” he told supporters. “They said our state does not belong to the lobbyists, special interests and corporate giants who, for far too long, have had way too much power in our state. Instead, you all said this belongs to the people.” Then he turned to November, warning that Democrats like Rob Sand “claim to be moderate on the campaign trail” but would “govern like radicals” if elected, citing transgender athletes in sports, abortion access, and immigration enforcement as his evidence.

The Democrat Now Favored to Win

Rob Sand, 43, is the only Democrat currently holding any statewide elected office in Iowa. It’s a distinction that sounds modest until you realize what it took to achieve.

Sand grew up in Decorah, a small town in northeastern Iowa. He graduated from Brown University as a Truman Scholar; earned his law degree from the University of Iowa; and went to work as a public corruption prosecutor in the state attorney general’s office, where he won a conviction in a case against a man who had rigged Hot Lotto jackpots across five states.

In 2018, he ran for state auditor as a Democrat in Iowa. He defeated the Republican incumbent and broke a Republican hold on that office that had held since the 1960s. In 2022, in a cycle when Republicans swept nearly every other statewide race in Iowa, knocking out the Democratic attorney general and state treasurer and maintaining supermajorities in both legislative chambers, Sand won re-election by roughly 2,600 votes. He was, in his own telling, bowhunting in Madison County when he got the call. “It would have been a little easier to have it called Tuesday night,” he told reporters afterward, while field dressing a nine-point buck, “but a win is a win.”

That 2022 win carried a remarkable geographic fact: Sand won in three of Iowa’s four congressional districts, even while all three districts simultaneously elected Republican House members. (One of those districts was Ashley Hinson’s.)

Sand has raised roughly $18 million and ran in Tuesday’s primary unopposed. He has spent the time making the case that his election is less about party than about accountability. “Our political system is broken,” he has said on the trail, “and a small group of powerful insiders have spent the last decade putting special interests and themselves ahead of Iowans.” He has attacked the Republican legislature’s state budget as “a ticking fiscal time bomb” that relies on draining reserves to mask structural deficits. The Cook Political Report has rated the general election a toss-up. That’s quite a call for a state Trump won by 13 points.

Sand’s general election opponent was supposed to be settled weeks ago. Instead, Republicans handed him something he didn’t expect: an opponent who had barely lived in Iowa, had never run for office, and beat the establishment’s candidate by less than a percentage point.

The Trump Endorsement Wasn’t Enough

The Feenstra result is the first time in the 2026 midterm cycle that a Trump-endorsed candidate—for governor, the House or the Senate—has lost a primary outright. Before Tuesday night, the endorsement had been treated as something close to a guarantee of victory.

The Iowa result complicates that. Granted, Trump endorsed Feenstra only days before the election. It was a late, transactional blessing that felt more like a stamp of approval than an active campaign commitment. But it couldn’t compensate for months of self-imposed invisibility on the debate stage, a residual conservative grudge toward Feenstra from the Steve King right-wing coalition, and a challenger who had consolidated the MAHA lane, the Turning Point Action lane, and the anti-establishment lane all at once.

The structural case for Democrats is straightforward. Iowa hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in two decades. And Kim Reynolds, who won re-election by 18 points in 2022, has since seen her approval rating sink to among the lowest of any governor in the country, dragged down by her polarizing agenda and a decade of one-party governance.

Prediction markets have already absorbed the contrast between the far-right Lahn and the moderate Sand. Polymarket currently has Democrats at 67 percent to Republicans’ 29 percent to win the Iowa governorship. Kalshi similarly prices Democrats at 64 percent. Recent general election surveys show Sand ahead of Lahn by 8 to 12 points.

A Trump world strategist, texting NBC News, offered a disappointed and blunt assessment of the results. “Clearly a Randy problem. Barely won his own district. But, it is what it is. So we go with Lahn.”

In the end, across the two primaries, the Democrats got the Zach they wanted: the far-right, inexperienced extremist who would run against their own proven moderate for governor. At the same time, they avoided the Zach who, despite strong progressive bona fides, had never won in Trump country the way Turek has.