There are a few ways to think about Iowa. You might imagine America’s 29th state as the land of corn and pigs (20 million hogs can’t be wrong, reads my favorite T-shirt for sale at the Eastern Iowa Airport). Maybe you associate it with Field of Dreams, Caitlin Clark, or the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk.
You might also picture Iowa as flat, like a pancake. But you would be wrong. Iowa is not even in the top five flattest U.S. states, which is a fact I was considering last month as I watched Josh Turek size up a daunting set of stairs in a hilly Cedar Rapids neighborhood. After a moment’s consideration, the 47-year-old Democrat, who uses a wheelchair, shook his head, deciding against it. It would be the only house that Turek would skip that afternoon as he knocked on doors in the warm spring sunlight. At all the other homes, he followed the same elaborate routine without appearing to break a sweat: lowering his body out of his chair and onto the ground; hoisting himself backwards up a step using just his arms; yanking the wheelchair up after him; and repeating that until he reached the doorbell, which is when he would announce, “Hi! I’m Josh Turek, and I’m running for the U.S. Senate!”
In his bid to replace Republican Senator Joni Ernst, Turek is hoping to correct what he believes is another popular misconception about Iowa: that it is a red state. For the past decade, if not longer, many Americans have thought of Iowa this way—and for good reason. Although voters here famously helped propel Barack Obama to the presidency by choosing him in the 2008 Democratic caucuses, they later chose Donald Trump in three consecutive elections. Every member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is, at present, a Republican. Terrace Hill, the governor’s mansion in Des Moines, has housed a member of the GOP for the past 15 years.
But lately, a sense of deep frustration—with rising costs, with Trump, with Republican leadership in general—is rippling across Iowa.
As a result, Iowa Democrats have found themselves in an unusually charmed electoral position. This year, they’ve got a more-than-decent chance of winning back not just a Senate seat, but at least two seats in the House, plus the governor’s office. The November midterms could, in other words, mark the beginning of a shift for Iowa, a turn back toward the state’s more aubergine roots. “Voters are in a mood to send a message, and it’s not gonna be a great message,” one state Republican strategist, who requested anonymity in order to be honest about this, told me. At least that’s the Democrats’ hope.
The task will be tough, mostly on account of the math: Active registered Republicans in the state outnumber Democrats by 200,000. But other factors, including a surprisingly strong slate of candidates and the remarkably grim conditions facing Trump’s party nationally, have collided to make circumstances for Democrats here sunnier than they’ve been at any point in recent memory. “Iowa is a commonsense state masquerading as a red state,” Turek told me after an hour of door-knocking. For the past decade, Iowa Democrats have been repeating some version of this phrase like a prayer or an incantation. In November, they’ll have a chance to prove it’s true.
Turek has an undeniably striking backstory—the kind that tends to stay with voters. Born with spina bifida from his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, Turek has used a wheelchair since he was a child. After college, he was a professional wheelchair-basketball player and a four-time U.S. Paralympian, before working for a wheelchair and mobility-assistance company. He grew up in a working-class family in Council Bluffs, a part of southwest Iowa that, despite its traditionally conservative bent—his own father voted for Trump not once but all three times—Turek was able to win when he ran for the state legislature. “I know that I can win” Iowa, he told me, “because the district that I represent is more red than the state as a whole.”
But there is another compelling candidate in the Senate primary, one known to many Iowans as a progressive folk hero. Iowans first met Zach Wahls back in 2011, when he was a 19-year-old college freshman testifying before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee about his two moms. As a high schooler, I watched as Wahls’s young face appeared on the local news, and later, on Ellen. (His now-wife was watching, too, and would catch his attention with a blog post titled, “Marry Me, Zach Wahls.”) Now a 34-year-old state lawmaker, Wahls was the youngest person ever chosen to lead the Iowa Senate Democrats. He stepped down from leadership in 2023 after a messy internal Democratic dispute, and reemerged to launch this Senate bid, during which he has positioned himself as part of a new generation of Democrats who loudly reject the stale maneuverings of one Chuck Schumer. Winning statewide in Iowa will be “a hell of a lot harder” if Democrats can’t “be honest with people about the failures of the national Democratic Party leadership,” Wahls told me.
[From the March 2026 issue: Do the Democrats have a plan?]
But the truth is that Turek and Wahls are not all that different, ideologically. They seem equally likely, at least according to the polling on hand, to beat Ashley Hinson, the former newscaster turned representative who is the Republican nominee—which is to say, a little bit likely. Hinson’s biggest weakness in November will be the simple fact of her party affiliation, not to mention the pledge she made last year to be Trump’s “top ally” in the Senate, a vow that came before the president’s approval ratings plummeted like foreign demand for U.S. soybeans.
The Iowa playing host to this Senate race is different from the one I grew up in—and markedly so from the one my father did. Which is why some of the Democratic campaign rhetoric has taken on a Kodak Gold nostalgia. Turek, for example, invokes former Senator Tom Harkin’s “prairie populism” at every turn—Harkin endorsed Turek today—while Wahls conjures the bygone era of the blue-collar, river-town Democrat.
For much of the past 50 years, Iowa voter registration was roughly split between Democrats, Republicans, and no-party voters. Governorships passed back and forth between the parties like a pendulum. Thousands of pragmatic Iowa voters repeatedly chose to send Harkin, a Democrat, and the Republican Chuck Grassley to the Senate. But by the early 2010s, amid the rumblings of a new working-class realignment, Iowa Republicans began to outnumber Democrats. That shift cemented in 2016, when once-reliably-blue chunks of the state turned berry red, and then scarlet. Republicans took control of the state legislature. By 2024, Trump defeated Kamala Harris in Iowa by 13 points.
The focus of Turek, Wahls, and every other Democratic candidate in Iowa this year is on what they say are the consequences of that rightward shift. Some of the trends that these campaigners will highlight during the next six months include the historically high price of gas and fertilizer, and the fact that Iowa has one of the slowest-growing economies in the country. Voters will be reminded that Iowa Republicans banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and implemented a private-school voucher program that has undercut public education. They will hear the alarming statistic that Iowa has the second-highest rate of new cancer diagnoses in America.
Perhaps unsurprising, given the national party’s unique ability to wrest defeat from the hay baler of victory, Iowa Democrats have not managed to gain much traction before now. But circumstances are shifting fundamentally. In a previously unthinkable twist, more Iowans are now more unhappy with Trump than happy with him. Ernst’s polling numbers collapsed before she announced that she wasn’t seeking reelection, and this year, Governor Kim Reynolds was ranked the least popular governor in the country for the eighth quarter in a row.
Against this backdrop, Turek and Wahls aren’t the only Democrats trying their luck; candidates are running to replace Republicans in all four of Iowa’s House districts, at least two of which seem very competitive. Many more are running to take back the state legislature. The candidate currently getting the most attention is Rob Sand, the 43-year-old state auditor running for governor.
A baby-faced former prosecutor, Sand cuts a pleasantly inoffensive figure. He goes to church, and he hunts. He seems smart but not intimidatingly so—a good ol’ boy who reads. Sand’s ads, in which he pushes government efficiency and jail time for politicians who misuse taxpayer dollars, are difficult to categorize ideologically, which is, of course, intentional. He often professes his frustration with the two-party system, and one gets the impression that Sand is a Democrat in the same way that a platypus is a mammal: only technically. Even Republicans acknowledge this. “He tries to—and does—sound like a post-partisan truth teller,” the Iowa GOP strategist told me.
[Read: The most dangerous Democrat in Iowa]
Sand has raised more money than any other candidate in the governor’s race. None of his would-be opponents—including GOP-primary front-runner Randy Feenstra, a religious conservative whom much of the MAGA base views as insufficiently loyal to Trump, or Zach Lahn, an “Iowa First” Republican with a breathy new TV ad about taking schools back from “the Marxists” and protecting the “Western tradition”—seem to have the juice to beat him. Recent surveys have Sand leading Feenstra by 8 to 12 points.
Here is the part of the story where icy water rains down on all of the Democrats’ dreams. They will probably not take back either chamber of the Iowa state legislature. And on the federal level, let’s not forget that Democrats have had false hope before. In the last days of the 2024 election season, a report from the renowned Iowa pollster Ann Selzer showed Harris leading Trump by three points among likely voters in the state. Trump trounced her by four times that margin.
The truth of the matter is that politics is a numbers game, and the Democrats will probably enter November with an enormous voter disadvantage. Even if they can persuade some independents to pull the lever for them, will it be enough?
Only 15 or 20 people showed up to the United Auto Workers hall in Burlington to see Wahls speak on April 23. Burlington, my hometown, is one of those Iowa river communities that used to be home to a highly organized labor movement and a reliably Democratic electorate. That movement is weaker now, as manufacturers keep leaving, including, most recently, the Case New Holland backhoe-manufacturing plant. I arrived early to Wahls’s event, where a handful of people were taping up posters and unpacking containers of Billy Sims Barbecue. A gray-haired woman introduced herself. “I’m Tall Mom,” she said. It took me a second to realize that she was Terry Wahls, the taller of Zach’s mothers. The shorter one, Jackie Reger, was busy pouring ice over a bucket of pop cans. Tall Mom and I spoke for a minute about her son, until she broached the subject of Turek and the fact that he, not Zach, had been endorsed by the national political-action committee VoteVets. “One thing I think is interesting—” Tall Mom began, before a Wahls campaign aide rushed over to assign her an urgent task.
Iowa’s Democratic Senate primary hasn’t felt nearly as ugly as the one currently playing out in Michigan, or the race that just wrapped in Texas. Still, discussion about Turek and Wahls has lately taken on a fevered quality. Wahls is accusing Turek of being a Washington insider; in response, Turek has accused Wahls of spending too much energy campaigning against Schumer, rather than Republicans. Online, East Coast party strategists post elaborate X threads about Who Is More Electable.
[Read: Things are about to get ugly in Texas]
The people who will actually decide the race—Iowa Democrats—seem caught in the middle. Talking to them about Sand is one thing; the state auditor seems so universally beloved by state Democrats that one wonders how he escapes party events without being smothered by kisses. But talking with those same voters about Turek and Wahls reminded me of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, when Iowans, tasked with choosing the most electable candidate from a pack of popular ones, seemed frantic. Now, as then, they are painfully aware of the opportunity before them, and desperate not to squander it.
Wahls is better known in Iowa. Plus, he’s younger. “It’s time for new leadership,” Tom Courtney, a former state lawmaker, told me in the UAW hall. Iowa labor groups have mostly aligned behind Wahls. He’s more electable, former Representative Dave Loebsack told me, because he’s had more experience in the state house, and therefore more experience working with people who don’t agree with him.
But Wahls has never campaigned against a Republican, and many Iowans see Turek as more electable, given that he flipped a red district. “When we made the decision, it was not cavalier; it was extremely thoughtful,” Sue Dvorsky, a former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, told me. Given the uncertain political dynamics, it is “critical who we put at the top” of the November ballot, she said. Turek “wins,” she added. “And he wins hard, hard places.” The race might ultimately come down to geography. Hailing from a part of the state so incorrigibly blue as to have earned itself the nickname the “People’s Republic of Johnson County” will be a difficult burden to overcome. “It’s not anything Zach has done,” Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist, told me. “It’s the fact that he’s from Iowa City.” (During my interview with Turek, he assured me that he would never, under any circumstances, deign to live in eastern Iowa.)
We don’t have much in the way of pure, unbiased polling. A survey sponsored by VoteVets had Turek up 20 points over Wahls. Another, brought by a Teamsters local union, showed Wahls up 18. Which helps to explain all the deliberation and careful couching from Democrats, who seem to recognize the hurdles ahead. They’ve watched demographics shift, counties transform, and voters lose interest, all in the span of a decade and a half.
[Read: Trump voters are over it]
Still, opportunity glimmers.
During Turek’s door-knocking expedition in Cedar Rapids, he’d rang a few bells at the houses of voters who weren’t home, left a flyer, and carried on. But as he rolled through the neighborhood, with me trotting alongside him, three different residents—two on foot, one by car—chased him down to say hello. They’d been so disappointed to have missed him, and each was eager to assure Turek that this year, things just feel different in Iowa. One of them, a former teacher named Tom Holmes, spent a moment lamenting the “Republican domination” of the state. But Holmes also had urgent advice for the Democrat: “Keep it going, keep it going, keep it going.”
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