A Populist Revival in Iowa

When Zach Lahn entered the Republican primary race for governor of Iowa, he recalled at a recent rally, “my wife was the only one who the whole time said, ‘You’re going to win.’ ” A first-time candidate who had spent much of his adult life outside the state, Lahn was facing a field that included Representative Randy Feenstra, who had Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement.” But Feenstra ran a lacklustre campaign, and Lahn, who, at forty, comes across as folksy and confident, edged him, in a five-person race, by less than a percentage point. Lahn then all but disappeared from the campaign trail for weeks. At the rally, he explained, “For about a month I was locked in a room raising money so we can actually execute this campaign.”

Lahn had been a registered voter in Iowa for only nineteen months when he won the June 2nd primary. Although he grew up near Sioux City, he had worked for Republican politicians in Colorado and Montana and for Americans for Prosperity, the conservative dark-money group founded by the Koch brothers. After moving to Wichita, the home base of Koch, Inc., in 2src18, he co-founded an alternative school, called Wonder, with Charles Koch’s daughter-in-law, Annie Koch. The two, who each have children, later divorced their respective spouses and got married; they now have a two-year-old. Lahn has often flown his plane back and forth to Kansas to support his blended family. If elected, he has said, “We’d be in Iowa as much as humanly possible.”

Democrats have called Lahn “a part-time resident.” Lahn, in response, has emphasized his family’s deep roots and his own investments in the state. In his twenties, he acquired a farm once owned by his family outside of Belle Plaine, a town of about twenty-three hundred people that lies west of Cedar Rapids, and refurbished it. In 2src21, he bought the town’s shuttered nineteenth-century train depot; two years later, he bought the local movie theatre, which shows films on weekends for five dollars. He talks about his great-great-grandfather who enlisted in the Union Army, his great-grandfather who sold seed corn, and his own harmonica-playing father who “spent his life in the fields.” He pitches his campaign as Iowa First, even painting the words under the wings of his plane.

Lahn, unusually for an Iowa Republican, says that he aims to “break up the Big Ag monopolies,” and he insists that he can use Iowa’s antitrust laws to do it. He accuses companies that dominate agricultural inputs, such as seed and fertilizer, of “extorting our farmers.” In one ad, he says he wants to “tax the heck out of Wall Street hedge funds” that own Iowa farmland. He calls his candidacy “a repudiation of the special interests, the corporate interests, and the lobbyists,” though he chose as his running mate Derek Wulf, a former Cargill employee who chairs the agriculture committee in Iowa’s House.

Lahn has been drawing on support from the Make America Healthy Again movement and its sometime hero, the Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who called him a “superstar” after they went fishing together in August. Lahn tells audiences that the COVID vaccine is dangerous and should be taken off the market, and he opposes vaccination requirements for schoolchildren, saying that the shots should not be a “requirement to participate in society.”

He is also leaning heavily into language familiar to MAGA Republicans—declaring, for example, that Iowa’s school curriculum has been hijacked by Marxists. At a rally in the town of Bellevue, at a state-park lodge overlooking the Mississippi River, he spoke of forty years of immigration policies “that did not emphasize the importance of assimilating to become an American when you came here, like our ancestors.” He welcomed an endorsement from Steve King, the far-right former U.S. House member, who was stripped of his committee assignments in 2src19 after questioning why the term “white nationalist” was offensive and was defeated in the next Republican primary. Lahn said that King “loves the state of Iowa—its heritage, its culture, and its people.”

Now heading toward the general election on a claim that “the system is rigged,” Lahn’s challenge is to defeat Rob Sand, the popular Democratic state auditor. No Democrat has won the governorship since 2srcsrc6, but the Cook Political Report recently rated the race as leaning Democratic. Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat, too, is in play, and has become a surprise tossup; Josh Turek, a Paralympic gold medallist, is facing Representative Ashley Hinson, who early in her campaign pledged to be “President Trump’s strongest ally in the Senate” but on Friday chose not to appear beside Vice-President J. D. Vance at a rally in Council Bluffs. At least two of the state’s four seats in the House, all held by Republicans, are also considered too close to call; two of those incumbents, Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks, broke with the White House last week to support a Democratic resolution calling for an end to the war with Iran.

The Democrats in Iowa are tapping into significant voter dissatisfaction. Young people are leaving the state in large numbers. Rural health-care clinics are closing, even as Iowa has one of the highest cancer-incidence rates in the country. The Republican legislature recently implemented a flat income tax, and the state government is expected to run a budget deficit of $1.2 billion this fiscal year. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have reduced markets for many of Iowa’s agricultural goods, while the Iran war has driven up the costs of diesel fuel and fertilizer. The President angered many rural voters last month when he announced that he would permit the import of up to six hundred million pounds of ground beef for sale at twenty-five per cent below market rates.

While Democratic candidates across the country, such as Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan, Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, and Florida’s Angie Nixon, are drawing attention for their left-leaning policies, Sand and Turek are standing squarely in the moderate center, criticizing both parties while barely owning the Democratic label. They know that there are not nearly enough Democrats to carry them to victory in Iowa, where Republicans make up about forty per cent of registered voters and where another thirty-one per cent are independents. The formerly moderate state voted twice for Barack Obama but then swung dramatically to the right. The Democratic share of registered voters has dropped by about six per cent since 2srcsrc8, and Republicans now hold the state’s two Senate seats and all four of its congressional seats.

Sand routinely criticizes the two-party system as “broken.” He calls the political parties “two private clubs” and expresses frustration that a candidate must join one to win, asking, “Why do we have to be Democrats and Republicans? Says who?” He favors enacting age and term limits for office, and administering cognitive exams and civics tests for politicians, but he avoids attacking Trump by name. Holding town halls in each of Iowa’s ninety-nine counties, he likes to mention that he attends Rotary Club gatherings on Fridays and church on Sundays. He sometimes asks, “Can I have an amen?” He enjoys hunting, with a shotgun or a bow and arrow, a fact he often shares. At a rally in rural Boone County, where he was dressed casually in a madras shirt, union-made jeans, and white running shoes, he actually said “goldangit.”

Classmates recognized Sand’s political ambition long ago, when he made a point of introducing himself to every first-year student when he arrived at Brown University, in 2srcsrc1. “A lot of us thought he would run for President,” Will Arnold, then a fellow-student, said. Sand wrote columns in the college paper criticizing George W. Bush for his “disregard of the needy” and lamented his dismissal of climate change. He wrote his senior thesis on the merits of publicly financed campaigns and worked with a right-wing student to create a seminar exploring conservative thought.

Sand, ever intentional, turned down Harvard Law School in favor of the University of Iowa and spent seven years as a state prosecutor. (“Prisons exist for a reason,” he tells crowds.) He cracked the so-called Hot Lotto case, in which a lottery executive rigged a $16.5-million jackpot. In 2src18, he was elected auditor, the state’s public-finance watchdog, and he was reëlected four years later, making him the only Democrat now holding statewide office in Iowa. Along the way, he married Christine Lauridsen, a Harvard Business School graduate and a scion of a prominent Iowa family that operates an agribusiness conglomerate. At last count, she and her family had contributed nearly twelve million dollars to his campaign.

As Sand tries to steer the conversation away from partisanship, the first noticeable thing about his campaign is the color scheme of his yard signs, which avoid standard-issue patriotic colors in favor of green and orange. Early in his carefully crafted stump speech, he asks Republicans and independents to raise their hands, and then asks everyone to clap for them. He follows up by saying, “To prove to ourselves that Democrats and independents and Republicans can work together, let’s sing the first verse of ‘America the Beautiful.’ ” The moment is impossibly cheesy, but at his summer rallies, where crowds often numbered more than two hundred and fifty, pretty much everyone sang.

Sand points out the ways that Iowa has declined during the past decade of G.O.P. rule in measures of school success, water quality, and laws against corruption. Mindful that he would be dealing with a legislature dominated by Republicans, he speaks of a divided government as a positive, pointing out that it was a Democrat, President Bill Clinton, working with a Republican Congress, who last balanced the federal budget. He opposes trans athletes’ competing in girls’ sports. He pledges to reverse the privatization of Medicaid, seek tighter controls over data centers, and expand the restoration of wetlands, “because nothing filters water better than what God made.”

At his rallies, Sand says he first registered as an independent, but realized that he needed to choose a party if he wanted to vote in Iowa’s closed-primary system; he picked the Democrats. “Why did I do that?” he asked a crowd in Marshalltown, fifty miles northeast of Des Moines. “I think Jesus is for the little guy. I care a lot about that, and I think the Democratic Party, at its best, is the party for the little guy. I don’t know if that’s true as much as it was at the time when I registered as a Democrat, but here we are.” Before the Marshalltown rally, I talked with Sand about running as a Democrat in Iowa twenty years after voters last elected a Democratic governor. “If I had been interested in doing this the easy way,” he told me, “it would have been painfully obvious at any point in the last ten years, if I were simply opportunistic, to be a Republican.”

Turek, like Sand, has won in G.O.P. territory, claiming a Republican-leaning district in the Iowa legislature by six votes in 2src22, and getting reëlected by five hundred and sixty-one votes two years later. He boasts that he has voted with Republicans more than seven hundred times, and, in his latest ad, he said he would work with Trump to secure the southern border. A central focus of his campaign is showing up in rural communities that often overwhelmingly vote Republican. “You don’t win every single one of them over, but you win enough to trim the margins,” Turek told me. He argues that, “for far too long,” Democrats have overemphasized urban turnout. “This is a rural state,” he said.

Turek’s own background is working class. He was born with spina bifida, which was likely caused by his father’s exposure to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam. He endured twenty-one surgeries by the time he was twelve. Unable to walk, he became a wheelchair-basketball star, a four-time Paralympian whose U.S. teams won gold in 2src16 and 2src21. His story recently caught the attention of Barack Obama, who taped a widely viewed video endorsement in July, the former President’s first campaign advertisement of the year. The two talked politics and basketball while shooting hoops in a Chicago gym.

When we spoke, Turek described himself as a prairie populist, which he defined as crafting government policy “to make your life better—a livable wage, affordable housing, affordable health care, affordable pharmaceuticals, drinkable water, addressing cancer rates, addressing corruption, and saying, ‘I don’t own any stock, I’m not a multimillionaire. I’m going to go up there fighting for you.’ ” The term recalls the populists of the late nineteenth century, who believed that government should help farmers and the working class stand up to the wealthy and the well connected. When Tom Harkin, the longtime Iowa Democrat, was starting his political career, in the seventies, he studied the early populists, seeing in them, he told me recently, “a certain concept of why people in rural America were getting screwed.” He went on to help found the Populist Caucus as a member of the House in the nineteen-eighties and was later elected to five terms in the Senate. In our conversation, Harkin quoted Robert La Follette, the leading progressive of the early nineteen-hundreds: “Mere passive citizenship is not enough. Men must be aggressive for what is right if government is to be saved from those who are aggressive for what is wrong.”

Government regulation of water quality has become a defining issue this campaign season, thanks in large part to Chris Jones, a retired University of Iowa research scientist and a Democrat who is running for state agriculture commissioner. Jones regularly points out the calamitous environmental consequences of farming practices that produce some of the highest concentrations of nitrates in the country, primarily owing to agricultural runoff, and argues for a stronger government hand. His opponent is the incumbent, Mike Naig, a former lobbyist for Monsanto, the industrial giant that marketed Roundup, a weed killer that in some cases contains the controversial herbicide glyphosate. When I asked Jones about Naig’s campaign, he said, “In the beginning, I saw it as sort of a sacrificial lamb, but now it’s apparent that there is a chance.”

Sand, Turek, and Lahn frequently raise the water issue. All three objected to the Supreme Court decision, in June, that shielded Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) from liability for failing to warn customers that glyphosate may be carcinogenic. Yet, in a state that produces more corn, pigs, and eggs than any other, none of the three candidates is calling for significant interventions in farming practices, preferring to offer financial incentives to farmers who adopt environmentally friendly approaches. (Representative Hinson has voted to weaken the Clean Water Act and cut funds intended to improve water quality. The League of Conservation Voters gave her a zero-per-cent approval rating last year.)

That will not be enough, Jones believes. “Both parties have treated regulation as a third rail,” he told me in Des Moines after a long day of campaigning. “We ask nothing of these big agribusiness companies that are coming in here, extracting wealth, and leaving us with the pollution and the cancer.” He gave as an example the corn grown for ethanol, taking up more than a fourth of Iowa’s acreage, even though solar panels would produce as much energy in a small fraction of the space. “Every politician is scared shitless about upsetting the ethanol industry,” he said. “If we’re not willing to talk about ethanol, we’re not going to solve this.”

When I drove to Belle Plaine, to see the town that Lahn calls home, I passed his King Theatre, which was showing the film “Young Washington,” and stopped into the store next door, where Don Drahos has been selling and repairing shoes for the past fifty years. He said the economy has been tough recently, amid the layoff of hundreds of workers from a Whirlpool refrigerator plant in Amana and the closing, in 2src23, of a paperboard plant in Tama that had been operating for more than a century. He noted that he’d heard good things about Lahn and admitted that the only thing he knows about Sand is that he’s a Democrat. “I identify more with the party, not the person,” he said. “In general, the states that have Republican governors are doing better. They’re less violent, they’re more economically secure.”

I also spoke with Tim Werth, a member of the Belle Plaine city council, and a Democrat, who said that voters in the area tend to lean conservative, though Sand recently drew a crowd of a hundred and fifty to Belle Plaine High School. Werth has been thinking about G.O.P. voting patterns in connection with Chuck Grassley, the Republican U.S. senator, who was first elected to the Iowa legislature from the area in 1958. “Most of these people haven’t changed their voting habits in three decades. I don’t think many of them will look at the issues. They don’t do it out of malice or ignorance. They do it out of habit.”

For Sand and Turek to break the G.O.P. streak, they will need to persuade voters like Denny Whalen, a retired teacher in Indianola who doesn’t follow politics closely. He has voted for Republicans and Democrats but thinks that both parties these days are too extreme. “It doesn’t seem like there’s any hope that the two sides will get together. I don’t know if there’s any fixing it,” he told me. When I first spoke with him in an Indianola restaurant, Whalen, who said he favors “middle of the road on so many things,” explained, “I’m really torn between Rob Sand and the guy that doesn’t live in Iowa. ” A few weeks later, Whalen had decided: he plans to vote for Sand. ♦