Representative Ashley Hinson, the Republican nominee for Senate in Iowa, and her Democratic opponent, State Representative Josh Turek, sparred politely but sharply at their first televised debate over the war with Iran, Medicaid cuts, taxes and congressional stock trading.
The debate on Wednesday in Johnston, Iowa, came a week before early voting begins in a red state that has become increasingly competitive as President Trump’s approval ratings have sunk. Polls including a recent New York Times/Siena survey show a neck-and-neck race that could decide control of the Senate. The two candidates will debate on Tuesday night for a second and final time.
Here are five takeaways from their first onstage face-off:
Iowa has been rocked by Iran war fallout.
The unpopularity of the war with Iran has dominated these midterms, and Mr. Turek sought to capitalize on voters’ unhappiness early and often.
Ms. Hinson has voted against House resolutions calling on Mr. Trump to end the war or seek congressional approval for it. Mr. Turek criticized her for those votes and spoke about his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. As a result, Mr. Turek noted, he was born with spina bifida, a birth defect.
“I’m an example of the generational consequences to these forever wars,” said Mr. Turek, who uses a wheelchair.
He also sought to tie the Mideast conflict to voters’ daily lives: “Iowans out there, when you’re struggling at the pump, that is because of Ashley Hinson,” he said near the end.
Ms. Hinson, for her part, tried to thread the needle between supporting Mr. Trump’s efforts and expressing concern about how long the war had lasted. She said that the conflict needed to come to “an immediate and successful end” but that Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
The candidates tangled over Trump and his policies.
Ms. Hinson needs Mr. Trump’s voters — but she also needs some distance from him.
“I’ll be President Trump’s ally when it is important for Iowa,” she said at the debate when asked about her promise last year to be Mr. Trump’s “top ally in the U.S. Senate.” “But I will push back on him. He knows this because I talk to him regularly on things that are wrong for our state.”
Mr. Turek criticized Mr. Trump’s tariffs — he said farmers needed open trade “more than any other group” — as well as his sweeping tax and budget bill, which included major cuts to Medicaid. Mr. Turek argued that it was “fundamentally wrong” to cut Medicaid in a state with a “cancer crisis.” Iowa has one of the nation’s highest cancer rates.
Ms. Hinson fiercely defended the legislation, saying that its tax cuts had largely benefited the middle class and that she supported holding big health insurance companies accountable for denying and delaying care.
They bent over backward to appear bipartisan.
Both candidates sought to persuade viewers that they would work across the aisle and put Iowans before party loyalty.
Mr. Turek, who was once a registered Republican, emphasized that he had voted hundreds of times with Republicans in the State House, on matters including lowering taxes.
Ms. Hinson offered an even more surprising olive branch to voters of the opposing party — promoting her work with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a longtime villain for Republicans.
“I got things across the line with Nancy Pelosi as speaker,” Ms. Hinson said. “So I think that shows that I can work with anyone.”
They traded a few personal attacks …
Onstage, each candidate sought to respond to attack ads from the other, and they lobbed their own jabs.
Mr. Turek accused Ms. Hinson of corruption, bringing up her increase in net worth since her election to Congress in 2020 without specifying how her work as a lawmaker would have contributed to it. Ms. Hinson emphasized that she and her husband had sold their publicly traded stocks after her election and that she had backed a ban on stock trading for members of Congress.
“More liberal lies,” she said, adding, “I want Iowans to know the decisions that I’m making in Washington, D.C., have nothing to do with the inside information I might be getting as a public servant.”
She argued that Mr. Turek “stole” from taxpayers by taking a daily pay allowance while missing nearly half of the votes in the State House.
Mr. Turek responded by saying she had missed nearly 200 votes.
… but the debate was civil and unusually policy-focused.
Today’s political conversation can sometimes feel full of ad hominem attacks and explosive culture-war issues like abortion, gender and sexuality.
There wasn’t much of that in Wednesday’s debate. Ms. Hinson and Mr. Turek largely spoke in calm tones, digging deep into questions about issues like Medicaid, rural health care and the war. Both seemed focused more on substantive answers than on quippy attack lines.
They agreed on several points, including the idea that Congress should have term limits — a touchy subject, given that Iowa is home to the oldest member of either chamber, Senator Chuck Grassley, 93, a Republican who has served in Congress for half a century.
”It’s time to rotate the crops,” Mr. Turek said, adding that Mr. Grassley had “been a senator as long as I’ve been alive. He’s been involved in representative government since 1958. That is the Eisenhower administration.”
Ms. Hinson responded that “if there’s a term limit bill that comes to the floor, I’ll absolutely support it.”
“I do want to eventually retire and spend time with my husband and my kids at some point, too,” she said.
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