Iowa has a cancer problem: The state has the fastest growing rate of new cases in the nation. On the margins of a high school gymnasium, I talked to a young man whose father died of leukemia that he attributes to herbicides or pesticides. On local radio, a woman described spending thousands of dollars on a home system to filter nitrates from her drinking water.
Rob Sand, the state auditor, is running for governor with a slogan “Costs, Corruption and Cancer,” and I followed him to several town halls recently. In 2007, I’d spent months idealistically canvassing the state for Barack Obama’s caucus campaign. Now, well into middle age and the Trump era, I still recognized the neighborliness of the people and postcard Americana of the venues. But in addition to the sweltering heat, there was a heaviness in the political air. Young people are moving away. Crops are being replanted on account of tariffs. More Iowans are getting sick.
At each venue, Mr. Sand lamented a government in Des Moines that is so cozy with agribusiness that it gave polluters immunity from penalties. He never said the name Donald Trump. Instead, he talked up his plan to clean Iowa’s water supply while connecting with voters hungering for community. At one stop, he walked into the middle of an audience of hundreds and asked folks to turn their folding chairs to face him in one giant circle.
Just shy of 44 with boyish good looks, Mr. Sand is very much a moderate, but he has a withering critique of the political establishment in this country. He expresses disdain for a system dominated by “two private clubs.” He blames Republicans and Democrats equally for rewarding special interests and making voters “hate the people they love.” And he is unusually specific on how to change a system rigged for politicians and special interests. He supports nonpartisan primaries and approval voting; age and term limits for politicians alongside cognitive and civics tests; a ban on stock trading for public officials, and prison time for the ones who steal from taxpayers.
From North Carolina to Alaska, effective red-state Democrats, such as Roy Cooper or Mary Peltola, often talk down partisanship while emphasizing problem solving (Ms. Peltola’s message is even a similarly alliterative: “Fish, Family, Freedom”). What sets Mr. Sand apart is his youth, discipline (he’s currently on a “100 Town Hall tour”) and relentless determination to connect his critique of the party system to local outcomes. For now, that seems to be working. Mr. Sand holds a narrow lead in a state that hasn’t had a Democratic governor since 2011. His approach could offer a blueprint for how to break the Republican grip on red states.
It helps that Mr. Sand has a near perfect résumé. He turned down Harvard to attend law school at the University of Iowa, served as the state’s chief public corruption prosecutor and has spent two terms as auditor burnishing his reputation as a crusader against waste. An avid bowhunter and churchgoer — his one misstep may have been a brief stint as a men’s wear model in Milan — he speaks with a self-assuredness that could tip into arrogance if he wasn’t assiduously polite. While not the most dynamic speaker, he holds the attention of his crowds through a blend of unabashed earnestness, folksy religiosity (“Jesus was on the side of the little guy”) and common sense; because he’s comfortable in his own skin, his audiences are put at ease.
Those audiences — like the state — are largely old and white. It was easy to see Mr. Sand through their eyes as an ideal son or grandson. He begins his town halls by asking for a show of hands — who is a Republican, an independent or a Democrat — with a round of applause for each faction. Then, he asks the audience to sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.” Gimmicky? Yes. Corny? Definitely. But as the awkwardness subsides, a few hundred voices build into something resembling harmony, and a soft patriotism envelops the room.
Mr. Sand has proposed making town halls mandatory for public officials. “I think that they would be less corrupt,” he told me, “and they would do fewer things that are obviously bad for their constituents, if they knew they were going to have to look their constituents in the eye and defend their own actions.”
The cynic in me worried that he was ignoring the harsh realities of American politics, including the selfishness and immorality of people who choose their own incentives and ignore disincentives; it was in Iowa, after all, where Mr. Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
But cynicism entraps you in the status quo, and I left Iowa believing that Mr. Sand’s message holds an important lesson for Democrats: For all the fights between left and center, the candidates gaining traction are often younger and in touch with the attitudes and concerns of their own communities. America is a big and complicated country. In New York, a democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani wins by exposing the corruption that drives up rent and prices at a halal cart; in Iowa, a moderate like Rob Sand is focused on getting carcinogens out of the water. What they and other rising Democrats share is a determination to overhaul a broken system so that power solves the people’s problems instead of perpetuating them.
For all our obsession with national politics and policies, the path out of corrupt, one-party government starts at the local level. That’s where you can take advantage of a party that has become lazy in power, build organizing muscle and test approaches that can be repurposed for other states or scaled up nationally.
Iowa is ripe for that kind of effort. After a decade of one-party rule, the state is struggling not just with cancer but also rising health care costs and anemic economic growth. The agricultural sector has been battered by Mr. Trump’s tariffs and a war with Iran that is driving up the price of diesel fuel and fertilizer. Meanwhile, Republicans in Des Moines have followed the national party, demonizing Democrats over immigration, deregulating industry and banning abortion.
Mr. Sand’s agenda focuses on what they’ve ignored. At every stop, he details his plan to clean up the water supply. He wants to reverse the privatization of Medicaid to bring down the cost of health care and reform a wasteful school voucher program. He supports investments in tele-health and remote work for state employees so it’s easier to stay in rural communities. He wants to ban social media for children under 16.
Most of those issues have a nexus to corruption. Lawmakers turn a blind eye as agribusiness pollutes the water and enable the health care industry to pad profits while rural clinics are shuttered. The tech sector has spread plenty of money around to avoid regulation of social media and artificial intelligence.
The Republican nominee is a political operative and entrepreneur named Zach Lahn who edged out a Trump-endorsed opponent in the primary by framing himself as a reformer. Now, he casts Mr. Sand as a closet radical and holier-than-thou hypocrite. When I asked Mr. Sand how he would overcome Republican attacks, he shrugged. “I go everywhere and talk to everybody,” he said. He also likes to remind voters that Mr. Lahn didn’t switch his voter registration to Iowa from Kansas until 2024 (just in time to run for governor).
Mr. Sand also makes a virtue of the fact that if he wins, he will almost certainly be governing with a Republican legislature. Unusually for a politician, he refused to suggest he’d fight for things that won’t have a chance of passing. Instead, he told voters that he simply wouldn’t be able to do something, whether it was restoring reproductive health care or collective bargaining rights. It all feeds into his broader critique of politicians. “I wish they just would have been upfront to begin with,” he told me. “I oftentimes feel like I’m burying the weight of decades of people just expecting lies from politicians.”
In the middle of one town hall, Mr. Sand’s vision of a nonpartisan future was clouded by the present. A retired school nurse recalled paying for her students’ supplies because of budget cuts. Then, her voice broke: “We got to get back to being a state where we help everybody. And I don’t care if they’re an immigrant. I don’t care what color they are.”
After leading the crowd in a round of applause for her public service, Mr. Sand praised Bob Ray, a Republican governor who welcomed refugees to Iowa in the 1970s while expressing support for people who “want to work and follow the rules.” Then, he quickly pivoted from the fraught terrain of migration and race to focus on costs and corruption, criticizing the current government for raising taxes to pay for the profits of private health insurers and wasteful spending on school vouchers. “If you’re being told to be scared of your neighbors,” he concluded, “it’s so that your pocket can be picked.”
While very much on message, something about the exchange felt unsatisfying. Mr. Sand’s questioner was speaking to issues of morality and identity that cast a dark shadow over American politics. Tactically, I understood the impulse to set those issues aside in favor of a conversation about how politics should work; to level with people about what you can and cannot change. But if he manages to win, I’m not sure that changing the incentives and disincentives for politicians, which Mr. Sand focuses on, would be enough to change the vagaries of politics today.
Perhaps mindful of these doubts, Mr. Sand ends each of his town halls with an appeal to values. How is it, he asks, voice lowered and grave, that we have reached this “abyss”? Once again, the antagonist is not Mr. Trump or big business or the cruelty raised by that former school nurse: it is a broken political system where politicians want to turn a state “red or blue.” By contrast, he describes sending his kids to school urging behavior that is missing from politics today. Respect your teachers. Be kind. Listen to everyone.
It was a message I recognized from my time as a speechwriter for Mr. Obama when he campaigned in Iowa. There are no red states or blue states. Special interests have too much power in Washington. A different kind of politics was possible, particularly with a young outsider.
But Republicans never came to the table. By the end of Mr. Obama’s eight years in office, they had fallen in line behind Mr. Trump, and now many Iowa voters — and legislators — consume a steady diet of right-wing media that is pugilistic by design.
Can Mr. Sand’s anti-partisan localism overcome those forces? He connected his own disgust with the system to that of rank-and-file MAGA legislators. “A lot of the people who I get along with best are some of the people who are most ‘Trumpy’ in the legislature,” he told me. “They look at the way the system works, especially after they’ve been there for a little bit, and they’re like: This isn’t what democracy is supposed to be about.”
While I don’t agree with Mr. Sand’s equal apportionment of blame between right and left for the sorry state of our politics, his pox-on-both-parties message may offer Republicans a permission structure to try something new. An earnest, moderate white man at the state level may also be more capable of reaching across the aisle than a Democratic president. And perhaps the wreckage of the Trump era will pull enough voters — and even some politicians — out of the “abyss.” After all, Iowans tried it one way for a decade and got rising cancer rates, rising costs and more young people leaving home to find opportunity.
Rob Sand offers an Iowa flavor of a recipe that has been coming into focus since the Democratic Party imploded in 2024. Instead of nominating candidates who look or sound like the establishment, get behind people running against it and appeal to Trump voters who were drawn to populism. Instead of debating a national platform, get in touch with voters at the local level. Embrace generational change.
Along the way, Democrats must also confront the immorality that brought that school nurse to tears — insisting that everyone be treated with dignity and remaking a system to solve problems instead of just blaming others for them. That’s the only way to become a country where power serves people instead of the other way around.
Ben Rhodes is a contributing Opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “All We Say.”
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