He got out of his wheelchair and onto his butt and lugged his legs and his chair up a pair of concrete steps. He climbed back into his chair with a grunt and pushed up the path toward the house. He scooched up four more steps and hoisted himself back into his chair and rolled to the door and knocked.
“I’m Josh Turek,” he said to the woman who answered, his jeans flecked with dirt, his United States Paralympic Team polo shirt tight around his upper arms. “I’m running for the U.S. Senate.”
“I’ve heard wonderful things about your character,” said the woman, Sophia Joseph, a progressive activist in Cedar Rapids. “My biggest concern is probably just that you’re kind of the establishment.”
Mr. Turek crossed his arms.
“I view myself,” he told her, “as completely the opposite.”
The Democratic Senate primary here hasn’t packed the stark ideological and generational differences or the jaw-dropping fund-raising figures of its higher-profile counterparts in Maine, Michigan, Texas and beyond, but Iowa is potentially just as important.
Iowa has not been fertile ground for Democrats in recent years — the state, after all, voted for President Trump three times. But the retirement of Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican, has given Democrats hope. In a year that promises to be challenging for Republicans, with many Iowans bristling at tariffs, rising fertilizer prices and gas prices driven up by the Iran war, Democratic Party officials think they have at least a long shot of flipping the seat.
In Mr. Turek and the opponent he will face in Tuesday’s primary, Zach Wahls, Democrats have two candidates with unusually compelling personal stories. The winner of the primary is likely to face Representative Ashley Hinson, a Republican, in November.
And in a year defined by anti-establishment zeal, this unexpectedly testy tussle has become an argument over which candidate makes a more credible case as a Washington outsider.
Mr. Wahls, 34, was raised by a doctor and a nurse in Iowa City. He is best known for a three-minute speech he made as a teenager at the Iowa Capitol defending his lesbian parents — an episode that turned into one of the first veritably viral videos in American politics. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 and was an intern at the White House in 2014. He was elected to the State Senate when he was just 27.
But Mr. Wahls is running an ardently anti-establishment campaign — so much so, his critics scoff, it sometimes seems as if he’s running against Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, more than he is against Mr. Turek. He’s been endorsed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and an array of unions and labor leaders. His campaign mantra: “Iowans Over Insiders.”
Mr. Turek, 47, was born with spina bifida, a neural tube defect, and had more than 20 surgeries before he turned 12. His father, a Vietnam veteran, was a vocational school administrator, and his mother was a social worker and community college instructor. He has three sisters and a brother with whom he shared clothes from Goodwill. Bullied as a boy in Council Bluffs, he went to Southwest Minnesota State University on a wheelchair basketball scholarship and won two gold medals in the Paralympics. He was elected by six votes to the State House in 2022 and re-elected in 2024. Endorsed by former Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa — the architect of the Americans With Disabilities Act who also officiated Mr. Wahls’s wedding — Mr. Turek is running as a self-described “prairie populist.”
In Cedar Rapids, after making his pitch to Ms. Joseph, Mr. Turek vented about her response to his campaign.
“‘Establishment,’” he said. “What are you talking about?”
‘Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful’
At a brewery in Bettendorf, one of the Quad Cities of Iowa and Illinois on the Mississippi River, Mr. Wahls was wearing Levi’s 505s and a white button-down shirt with rolled-up sleeves. A union ironworker introduced him by giving him a hard hat.
“I was an Eagle Scout,” Mr. Wahls said, reciting the 12-point Scout Law to a crowd of a couple dozen voters — “trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And wouldn’t it be nice to have that in the United States Senate?”
As a kid, he liked Magic: The Gathering, “The Lord of the Rings” and the Green Bay Packers. As a teenager, he did speech, debate and theater. And on Jan. 31, 2011, he stood up on the House floor in Des Moines during a hearing on same-sex marriage and defended people like his mothers against discrimination.
“I’m a sixth-generation Iowan, and an engineering student at the University of Iowa,” he began, “and I was raised by two women.” The Iowa House Democrats posted the video on YouTube, which led to appearances on MSNBC, “The Daily Show” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” In the end, his speech was YouTube’s most-watched political video of the year — more than even Barack Obama’s fateful White House Correspondents’ dinner roast of Donald J. Trump. He wrote a memoir called “My Two Moms” that was published before he could legally drink. “Marry Me, Zach Wahls,” wrote a feminist blogger from Australia. He did.
With his sister, Mr. Wahls started a feminist playing cards company amid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign against Mr. Trump. He started Scouts for Equality in an effort to end the anti-L.G.B.T.Q. policies of the Boy Scouts of America. Over the past 10 years, he’s been a co-owner of his family’s tree farm, a vice president of a local credit union and the executive director of the Next 50, an organization that helps up-and-coming Democrats.
He won a State Senate primary in June of 2018 — on the same day he graduated with a public administration master’s from Princeton — and then beat a libertarian in the general election. He was unopposed in 2022. And he was the State Senate minority leader from 2021 to 2023, stepping down amid fallout from his decision to fire two longtime staffers.
Focus on Schumer
People in Washington have known Mr. Wahls since the Obama administration. People in Iowa’s unusually active political circles have known him since before that.
Even so, he has sought to be seen as an outsider in this race, deploying Mr. Schumer’s name as a kind of code for ties to Washington’s powers that be and pointing to various contributions Mr. Turek has received: $10,000 from a leadership political action committee aligned with Mr. Schumer; $5,000 from a PAC aligned with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, the chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee; and about $10 million in ads by VoteVets on Mr. Turek’s behalf since just late March. VoteVets, a Washington-based PAC, typically supports veterans but is backing Mr. Turek because his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam contributed to his disability.
“Senator Schumer is trying to come into Iowa, trying to buy an election,” Mr. Wahls claimed in a debate last month. He reaffirmed his pledge to vote against Mr. Schumer as leader should he be elected, and invited his opponent to do the same.
Mr. Turek declined. “I’m not a D.C. insider,” he said. “I don’t know these folks.”
Mr. Wahls then told viewers to go to JoshTurek.com — which Mr. Wahls’s campaign purchased before Mr. Turek began his campaign and now serves as a domain name turned attack ad contending there is a “shadow machine behind Josh Turek.”
Mr. Schumer has not formally endorsed Mr. Turek. Neither has Ms. Gillibrand. Mr. Turek says he is “grateful” for the support of VoteVets.
Iowa Democrats, perhaps unsurprisingly, are of two minds on the insider-outsider debate.
Jill Shudak, the mayor of Mr. Turek’s native Council Bluffs, is supporting Mr. Wahls. She thinks Mr. Turek’s support from groups in Washington could be problematic with voters in Iowa.
“He is backed by the establishment,” she said.
Jennifer Konfrst, a state representative who supports Mr. Turek, finds Mr. Wahls’s positioning far-fetched. “It feels disingenuous at best for Zach to claim that he’s an outsider,” she said. “He’s not.”
At the Bettendorf brewery, after his speech and a question-and-answer session, Mr. Wahls sat at the back of the bar.
“I think it’s a lot harder to take on the insiders,” he said, “if you owe the insiders your nomination.”
Is Mr. Turek, he was asked, benefiting from the status quo?
He took a sip of his second Butcher’s Blood Lager.
“You tell me,” he said.
‘The Poor, Disabled Kid’
Dressed in a white Paralympic Team T-shirt, Mr. Turek sat on a bench at the Y.M.C.A. in Des Moines and strained through a shoulder press set.
“I’m the poor, disabled kid from Council Bluffs that had no friends,” he said. “You can use that as a crutch, or you can use that as motivation.”
When Mr. Turek was a boy, doctors at Shriners Children’s Twin Cities in Minnesota tried with limited success to improve the function in his hips, legs and feet. Still, like his siblings, he had a paper route, delivering Council Bluffs’s The Daily Nonpareil. He went to the Royal Fork Buffet on family nights when children under 12 ate for 10 cents times their age. At Abraham Lincoln High School, he was a member of the student council and Junior R.O.T.C. None of his classmates came to his graduation party.
He started playing wheelchair basketball with a team in Omaha called the Nebraska Red Dawgs and made the national semifinals. At Southwest Minnesota, he scored more than 4,000 points. He made his first Paralympic team in 2004. He won a bronze medal in London in 2012, a gold in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and another in Tokyo in 2021. He played professionally for nearly 20 years, mainly in Europe — including in Spain, where he met his wife.
With an undergraduate degree in history and a master’s in business from DeVry University, he told a local reporter he was interested in “maybe running for something state level or city level.”
While working at a wheelchair company called Numotion, Mr. Turek ran for the state House in 2022. Knocking, by his count, on more than 14,000 doors, he got 3,403 votes to his Republican opponent’s 3,397 — succeeding a four-term Democrat in a district in which Mr. Trump won as well. In 2024, he upped his vote margin to 561. He announced his candidacy for Senate in August.
In this race, Mr. Turek has sold himself as an underdog, a working-class go-getter and an adaptive athlete in red, white and blue. So has VoteVets, and since the group’s ads started running, polling has flipped drastically in his direction.
On the stump, Mr. Turek describes as “poetic” the prospect that he, a beneficiary of Mr. Harkin’s signature law benefiting disabled Americans, might ultimately win the former senator’s seat.
In an interview, Mr. Harkin lauded Mr. Turek’s “determination and grit.”
At the Y in Des Moines, Mr. Turek re-racked his weights.
“There is something that is disarming about seeing somebody that’s willing to nearly humiliate themselves,” he said. “Most people aren’t willing to do that — get dirty, get on your hands and knees and drag the wheelchair.”
“That’s not what you’re used to from your classical politician,” he added.
“So when he’s, like, ‘Oh, you’re the Schumer candidate,’” Mr. Turek said of Mr. Wahls, “it’s, like, ‘Hell no. I’m not.’”
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