Iowa Democrats are anxiously watching their party’s muddled, multi-candidate primary to see who can find the most momentum to win the seat Republican Sen. Joni Ernst announced she’s vacating.
Some of them are hoping Josh Turek, a state representative with no national name recognition, can take the mantle.
A second-term state lawmaker and Paralympic athlete, Turek has had a hot start to his campaign since becoming a candidate in August, earning high-profile praise, raising significant early money and garnering notice from national Democrats. Despite holding elected office for less than three years, he’s also received a string of prominent endorsements from top Iowa Democrats.
It’s the kind of campaign rollout his supporters hope can make him a favorite in the primary, and give Democrats their best chance of winning the Senate seat in a deep red state next year.
“Give this a month or two and I think it’ll be clear, if it’s not already, that Turek is going to be the campaign that people get behind,” said J.D. Scholten, who in August dropped out of the primary and endorsed Turek’s campaign.
In interviews with NOTUS, several Iowa Democratic insiders said they believed that Turek has the tacit backing of Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. That perception has led to attacks on his candidacy from some of his opponents, though Turek said he hadn’t given any thought to whether he has Schumer’s backing, and the DSCC has not formally endorsed in the race.
Scholten’s assessment is disputed by other candidates in the race — including Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls, political newcomer and veteran Nathan Sage, and chair of the Des Moines School Board Jackie Norris — and some impartial Democrats in the state. Even if Turek had a successful campaign launch, they say any of those four candidates can win the primary.
“He might end up being the front-runner, but I think if anyone is telling you that right now with a straight face, they’re lying,” said Matt Sinovic, an Iowa-based Democratic strategist. “He’s awesome, but I have never seen a primary like this before, at least on the Democratic side.”
Interest in the Iowa Senate race among Democrats has spiked since Ernst said in September that she would not seek reelection next year, giving the state its first open-seat Senate contest since 2014. National Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have rallied behind Rep. Ashley Hinson as Ernst’s replacement, and she is expected to start the general election as a clear-cut favorite.
But national Democrats have been encouraged by a string of recruitment successes in battleground states and are hopeful that a strong political environment can bolster their longshot hopes of winning a Senate majority in the midterm elections. Democrats need to gain four Senate seats to claim a majority in 2027.
In Iowa, Sage has harnessed his background as a blue-collar outsider to help raise more money in the second fundraising quarter than any other candidate in the field. Norris, who was once chief of staff to former first lady Michelle Obama, is the only woman in the field and has talked up her own education background.
And Wahls is the best-known statewide of all the Democratic candidates, having once held a leadership position in the state Senate and received national attention in 2011 after delivering a speech defending his moms’ rights to be married.
Turek’s biography is uncommon in politics, having won two gold medals in basketball as a paralympian after being confined to a wheelchair as a child. He touted that history in a video announcing his candidacy, which his campaign said was seen millions of times, calling himself an underdog who lifted himself up with the help of a social safety net that Republicans are now trying to cut.
The visibility of that video helped him raise a half-million dollars in the opening weeks of his candidacy, his campaign said, and led to endorsements from a slew of prominent Iowa Democrats like former state Attorney General Tom Miller.
In an interview, Turek said he had wanted his campaign rollout to strike a more optimistic tone than other campaigns.
“People were tired of the cynicism and the negativity and the fear-mongering and the divisiveness, and the overall negativity and national malaise that has happened because of the Trump administration,” Turek told NOTUS in an interview. “So I had said I wanted this to sound hopeful and optimistic and positive, because I thought there was a real yearning for that in politics right now.”
Turek represents a red-tinted district on the state’s western edge, proof, he says, that he’s capable of appealing to the kind of conservative-leaning voters necessary to win statewide in Iowa, where Democrats haven’t won a Senate race since 2008.
That electoral history, coupled with his personal background, have excited national Democrats, some of whom think winning Iowa’s seat could mean the difference between claiming a Senate majority after the midterm elections and falling short of their goal.
Some of Turek’s opponents, however, are making Schumer’s perceived support an issue, trying to capitalize on mourning frustration among liberal activists that the Senate leader hasn’t done enough to push back against the Trump administration.
“I’ll speak for almost every Iowan right now that D.C. is not going to dictate this race,” Sage told NOTUS in an interview. “It’s going to be Iowans, it’s going to be conversations with Iowans. We all know that Chuck Schumer has lost elections over the past 10 years, and … we’ve seen a lot of anger about that at the town halls that I’ve gone to, where people are tired of D.C. leadership sitting on their hands and not doing anything or writing strongly worded memos but nothing really being done.”
Sage, a veteran of the Iraq War, says Iowa Democrats want a nominee who would do more to fight the GOP agenda. And he said it was fair to criticize Turek for Schumer’s perceived support.
“The difference with me is I’m not going to be, I’m here to work for Iowans, people who are fighting every day to survive in the state, and I’m not going to answer to corporations, billionaires or even Chuck Schumer’s leadership,” Sage said.
Turek rebutted that Sage is only attacking his campaign because he’s off to such a strong start.
“We’ve only been in this a month and we’re already taking shots from the other side,” he said.
Turek said he was the only candidate in the race who faced a serious Republican opponent in a general election, and warned that the state will be seen as politically unwinnable for Democrats as Mississippi if they fail to win next year’s race. If elected, he said he’d work with Trump on issues they both agree on.
Democrats, Turek said, didn’t want “this party-over-country mentality. They want someone who is going to go out there to find legislative solutions to their problems.”
Democratic strategists say that the third-quarter fundraising, due in mid-October, will help assess the relative strength of all four candidates.
Strategists said they expect the race to ultimately come down to whichever Democrat rank-and-file voters think is most electable in a general election.
“They want somebody who can win in November,” said Jeff Link, a party strategist in Iowa. “I think that’s the first, second and third priority.”