State Senator Zach Wahls of Iowa, a fast-rising progressive who as a teenager delivered a speech on same-sex marriage that went viral, is one of two candidates on the ballot in his state’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday.
Here are five things to know about Mr. Wahls, 34, of Coralville, near Iowa City. Mr. Wahls is running to succeed Senator Joni Ernst, a Republican who is not seeking re-election.
1. He turned heads with a speech when he was 19. Mr. Wahls, then a sophomore at the University of Iowa, gave a three-minute speech defending marriage equality during a 2011 public hearing in the Iowa House. In his remarks, he drew on his experience being raised by a lesbian couple. (Iowa legalized same-sex marriage in 2009.) The video drew millions of views on YouTube. The Economist wrote that he had “schooled” Republicans in the state. The next year, he was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention, where he praised President Barack Obama for supporting same-sex marriage.
2. He was the Democratic minority leader in the Iowa Senate. Mr. Wahls was 27 when he reached the State Senate in 2019. By age 29, he had become the chamber’s youngest minority leader on record. Today he remains its youngest member, though he stepped down from leadership in 2023 after he carried out a major staff shake-up that rankled some of his colleagues. Former State Senator Pam Jochum, who succeeded him as minority leader and had supported his rise to the post, described him as a “good fund-raiser” who struggled to build relationships in the caucus. “He thought he knew it all,” she said.
3. He has urged new Democratic leadership. Mr. Wahls has built his campaign on a call for generational change. He has been a consistent critic of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the 75-year-old Democratic minority leader, calling for him to step down from leadership. “If you’re happy with the status quo, what’s currently happening in our state or our country, I’m probably not your candidate,” he said in a recent interview. But he added, “A lot of folks can see how broken things are, and they’re ready for change.”
4. His opponents have targeted his digital footprint. Mr. Wahls, like many young politicians, might wish he had shared a bit less online when he was younger. Some Democratic operatives have circulated old message board posts in which, as a teenager, he described his pornography preferences. Mr. Wahls has dismissed the issue, casting it as the cost of growing up online. “I don’t care if they push around old Reddit posts,” he said last year.
5. He co-founded the nonprofit group Scouts for Equality. Mr. Wahls, an Eagle Scout, helped create the group when he was 20. It was aimed at ending the Boy Scouts of America’s policies of exclusion toward gay members; the Boy Scouts’ ban on openly gay youth ended in 2013 and their ban on openly gay adult leaders ended in 2015.
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