Rob Sand, the Iowa state auditor who ran as a Democrat fed up with partisan politics, won the race for governor on Tuesday, defeating Zach Lahn, a Republican, according to The Associated Press.
The win ended a nearly 16-year stretch of Republicans’ occupying the governor’s mansion in Des Moines — a sign that the grip of conservative control in once deep-red Iowa has weakened.
Mr. Sand, 44, won over Iowans with a pragmatic pitch: He was a former prosecutor practiced at rooting out fraud who would work closely with Republicans if elected.
The rest of his biography was also an unconventional mix. A churchgoing Ivy League graduate from a small town in northeast Iowa, he drove a Ford pickup truck and talked on the campaign trail about his passion for hunting and fishing. Rows of taxidermied deer heads hang in his office at the State Capitol.
He will still face a wall of opposition in the Republican-controlled State Legislature. For years, Republicans have dominated both chambers of the Legislature and filled all six of the state’s seats in Congress. President Trump won Iowa in 2024 by more than 13 percentage points.
But Mr. Sand’s ascendance suggests that Mr. Trump’s popularity has sunk and that Iowans are fed up with the direction of their state.
At campaign rallies and town halls, voters said that they were frustrated by the high price of gas, groceries and housing, blaming not just their state leadership, but also the Republican Party. Farmers in this agriculture-heavy state have been furious about tariffs, trade wars and diesel costs, and Iowans in rural areas and cities said they were alarmed by the rising cancer rates that made the state an outlier.
Mr. Sand, a longtime Democrat, made a pitch to voters that he was not a typical partisan. He repeated the campaign slogan, “Not redder or bluer, but better and truer,” and promised to be a “governor for all.” His campaign signs explicitly avoided the usual Democratic blue, instead designed in shades of forest green and blaze orange that nodded to Iowa’s hunting tradition.
“I think one of the biggest problems that we have right now is that the Democratic and Republican parties basically are functioning like two private clubs,” Mr. Sand said. “They’re more interested in beating up on each other and in following their leaders for the most part than they are in actually serving the people that elect them. And you can see that pretty clearly in Iowa.”
Mr. Sand ran unopposed in the Democratic primary. In the general election, he faced Mr. Lahn, who lives on his family farm in Belle Plaine, Iowa, but who also spends significant time in Wichita, Kan. Mr. Lahn answered accusations that he was only a part-time Iowa resident by saying that he and his wife travel to Wichita to spend time with their children in their blended family.
But the carpetbagger label stuck, and Mr. Lahn struggled to break through with moderate Republicans.
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