Field of Dems

Republicans have the corner on fear and anger here as much as anywhere. They’ve convinced white rural Iowa that immigrants are why they don’t have a job, government is why health care costs are so high and unions are out to get them. This Alice-in-Wonderland version of reality is frequently broadcast through Iowa’s GOP Chair and chief signaler Jeff Kaufmann, who never misses a chance to play that tune when the media calls.

But Iowa Democrats are finally back in the news, this time for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Republican Joni “We’re all going to die” Ernst. Democratic candidates here, as everywhere, are struggling with what messages, policies, values and personal stories will move people to register and vote for them. Going Republican Lite has never been a winning strategy (even if gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand, who is Auditor of State and the only Democratic elected to statewide office, hasn’t gotten that memo). Trying to replicate the heady days of the Obama years hasn’t worked either.

Recent special election seats that flipped for Iowa Democratic state legislators (the most recent, in August, denied the GOP their supermajority in the state senate) provide only anecdotal evidence of what works in today’s climate, yet they do offer hope to a dispirited Democratic base.

That is why all eyes are on the Democrats’ crowded U.S. Senate primary race in Iowa. There’s the tatted, angry Marine. The guy in the wheelchair. The Des Moines school board lady. The Johnson County fellow with two moms. The old guy. The baseball player (who has now dropped out of the race).

This is how Iowans—at least the ones paying attention—are attempting to differentiate the candidates. (True to form, GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann calls the lineup a “clown car.”)

Ernst’s recently announced retirement has shifted the ground even more. Democrat Bob Krause, (“the old guy”) who was running in Congressional District 1 against Republican-incumbent Marianette Miller-Meeks, has pivoted to running for the senate seat, leaving behind a battle with repeat primary challenger Christina Bohannan among others. Meanwhile, Republican District 2 Congresswoman Ashley Hinson, endorsed by Trump, has thrown her hat in the ring for Ernst’s seat, ticking off Republican challengers Jim Carlin and Joshua Smith, who had already announced their primary run against Ernst.

Having trouble keeping up? Yeah, so are we. Here’s what the U.S. Senate race looks like at the moment.

Democratic candidates take the field

Using a video laced with expletives and adrenaline-fueled music that could have fit in with any MAGA-like campaign, Nathan Sage, a 40-year old Marine Corps veteran, was the first to announce back in April. His early national media exposure raised good money, but his ground campaign has faltered. Some see this as proof of allegations that Sage was recruited to fill an AI-generated “perfect Democratic candidate” role. Under a new campaign manager, he’s slowly hitting his stride with an ambitious 99-county in 99-days campaign.

Sage’s lack of experience in public office works both for and against him. He’s making hay over growing up in a trailer park in Mason City, Iowa, doing three tours in Iraq and being an outsider in a party that has forgotten working people. 

Zach Wahls is a 34-year-old state senator representing Iowa’s 43rd Senate District. He is perhaps the darling of the Iowa Democratic establishment, (except for a little faux pas that cost him his senate minority leader job). Born and raised in liberal Iowa City, Wahls bafflingly opens his stump speech to rural Iowans with the story of his two moms—one of whom grew up on a farm. He’s pulling big money from the national LGBTQ+ community—in what one competing campaign staffer referred to as a benefit of being “gay adjacent.” He’s making hay over unnamed polls putting him 2 points ahead of his now former competition, Ernst. Wahls offers youth with legislative experience, but he’s got major hurdles being from “the People’s Republic of Johnson County.”

At 55 years-old, Jackie Norris’s credentials include teacher, military mom (with kids still in the academy) and chair of the Des Moines School Board. She’s also the wife of John Norris, a political operative since Jesse Jackson’s runs for president in the 1980’s. John went on to become Tom Vilsack’s chief of staff, both in the Iowa Governor’s office and the first Obama Department of Agriculture.

Jackie served a stint as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, which might help her raise early money outside of Iowa. Des Moines’ population density and wealth may give her an in-state fundraising advantage, but she announced late compared to others. As the only woman in the race for the Dems, she may pull votes from the men, but she will have to rely heavily on teachers to gain traction.

Josh Turek’s family relied on Medicaid while he was growing up with spina bifida—a birth defect he blames on his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. This makes Turek the “Medicaid candidate.” He’s 46-years-old and currently a state representative from far-western Iowa’s Council Bluffs. A 2-time Paralympic champion, his announcement video shows him pulling himself up steps to knock on doors, a striking sight meant to communicate perseverance. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand’s Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC) threw $500,000 into his campaign in its first weeks. Word is they think (or wish) Medicaid will be the issue in 2026. This is despite the facts that Medicaid recipients vote at a lower rate than other Americans, that 49% of them voted for Trump and that the worst impacts of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” on Medicaid won’t take effect until after the 2026 election.

Media coverage for Bob Krause’s campaign is sparse. Outreach is limited. The candidate has no campaign website. With multiple unsuccessful runs for office since serving 3 terms in the state legislature in the 1970’s, Krause has spent most of his life advocating on behalf of service veterans like himself. He makes hay over having experience running for U.S. Senate and his statewide network of service veterans. At 75, he will resonate with the older voters so prevalent in rural Iowa, but will struggle connecting with younger voters. His lack of visibility isn’t doing him any good.

None of these candidates has any direct experience with or in rural Iowa, unlike former candidate J.D. Scholten, a State Rep. from Sioux City and a 45-year-old pitcher with the minor league Sioux City Explorers. Scholten dropped out as his western Iowa colleague Turek announced, and has worked to transfer donors and volunteers to Turek. In 2018, Scholten’s campaign against right-wing Rep. Steve King (R), who represented a massive, ag-dense northwest Iowa district, resulted in Scholten losing by a mere 3.4 points. Scholten’s near miss is credited with the entrenched King losing his next primary to Republican Randy Feenstra. Scholten claims that Turek will adopt the progressive ag policy he developed over years of listening to rural Iowans. There’s no evidence yet that Turek has done that, however. Instead, there’s talk that Scholten’s campaign and his populist, anti-corporate ag policy was torpedoed by leaders of the DSCC. (Barn Raiser published Scholten’s policy proposal, “A Fair Game Plan for Farmer’s and Us,” last week.)

Sage, who is campaigning on accepting no PAC money, has taken a leaf from Scholten’s anti-monopoly ag policy, calling for a breakup of the “Big 4” meatpackers, the passage of a right to repair law with teeth and stringent anti-trust legislation. Wahls—who has accepted PAC and Farm Bureau money in the past but says he won’t for this election—also includes a line on his website about breaking up ag monopolies and another about enforcing anti-trust law.

Republican candidates in the batters box

Ashley Hinson, 42, is the only candidate with federal experience. She is currently the U.S. congresswoman from Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District but has thrown her hat into the senate race. “I know Ashley well,” said Trump, when endorsing her. “SHE IS A WINNER!” Hinson’s campaign website heralds her as “a conservative mom on a mission to make Washington run more like the great state of Iowa.”

Like Ernst, a toe-the-line Trump Republican, she could suffer the same midterm blowback Republicans are expecting elsewhere—if it comes to fruition. Her congressional website states:

As part of my commitment to Iowa’s farmers, I will push for thoughtful rural development to support our farming communities every day. This means advocating for improving rural infrastructure, expanding broadband access, increasing rural access to health care, and listening to the needs of rural Iowans.

Hinson will have to answer rural Iowans—if they can find her—about anticipated closures to rural health clinics, nursing homes and grocery stores because of her support for Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Jim Carlin, a 62-year-old attorney, service veteran and former state senator, speaks to the far-right wing of the Republican Party. In the Iowa Senate, he proposed a bill to protect doctors who recommended ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, both scientifically unfounded treatments for Covid. He also supported university witch hunts, proposing that the Iowa Board of Regents be required to track faculty political affiliations. Carlin voted to shorten early voting, tighten voter registration and reduce ballot drop boxes, making it even harder for rural Iowans and the elderly to vote. Election finance reports indicate that Carlin’s campaign is almost entirely self-funded. He came out swinging when Hinson announced, calling her “hand-picked” by what he calls the D.C. establishment “uniparty.”

While Joshua Smith is listed as a candidate, there is little to show that Smith is actively campaigning.

Trump’s fan boy and the GOP’s bat boy

If you can’t tell one Democrat from the other except by tats and wheelchairs, you won’t get any help from GOP Chair Jeff Kaufmann. For him, every Democrat supports “radical,” “left-wing” or “failed” policies of “bloated” government. For good measure, he regularly invokes the “men playing women’s-sports” bogeyman. Kaufmann, who served as a state legislator from 2004-2013, is the longest-running GOP chair in Iowa history, having assumed his role in 2014, and is a multi-term county supervisor in Cedar County. He once called J.D. Scholten, a man two-thirds his age who’s held office for less than 2 years, a “do-nothing career politician.”

Kaufmann’s son Bobby is now in year 14 in the Iowa House, after serving on the Trump campaign’s Iowa staff last year. He was elected by his peers to serve as majority leader. He’s known for his government-supported metal recycling facility that started out as a flailing scrap hauling business until Bobby figured out how to make money by having people bring the scraps to him. Last session, Bobby declared twice at a listening post with more than 40 residents, “Everyone knows glyphosate causes cancer.” Within the week he was back on the GOP message, writing in a Des Moines Register op-ed that the allegation of Round Up causing cancer is just lawyers making a buck. Oops.

Jeff is the one currently carrying the president’s water in Iowa. His Trump-like audacity hit a new low when he called 23-year Army veteran, nurse administrator and former Republican Kathryn Dolter a “far-left political activist.” Dolter is running as a Democrat in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, which until this week was held by Hinson. The audacity meter flared again with Clint Twedt-Ball, a pastor who built a successful nonprofit called Matthew 25 to house and feed the poor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s second largest city. In July, when Twedt-Ball announced his bid in the Democratic primary for the 2nd Congressional District. Kaufmann, who hasn’t seen dirt under his nails in a very long time, called this man who ministers to the poor every day an “out-of-touch, radical liberal.”

Meanwhile, Iowans are revving up over the murky conditions of their rivers after a Des Moines lawn watering ban (and a new report blaming 80% of it on ag runoff), rising cancer rates, growing unemployment, a state economy that ranks last in the nation for GDP growth, struggling public schools and a health care crisis looming on the horizon. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly food stamps, makes up 10% of grocery store sales in rural areas, a margin most stores can’t afford to lose but that is at risk because of SNAP cuts in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Cuts in Medicaid mean that rural nursing homes will struggle to keep their lights on, since about two out of every three residents rely on Medicaid as their primary coverage provider.

When the money runs out from the one-time American Rescue Plan and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act—money local Republicans have been more than willing to dole out—taxes will have to go up unless the GOP successfully privatizes the entire government by then. While cancer rates stay high and wages low, and when tourists leave Iowa for the cleaner waters of Wisconsin and Minnesota, voters will decide who the “out-of-touch radicals” really are—but only if Democrats can successfully reach through the muck and noise.

Matt Russell is a 5th generation Iowa farmer with 25 years of ag policy under his belt. He served as Iowa’s Farm Service Agency director under the Biden administration.

“We lost the last election because the national leadership blew it,” he tells Barn Raiser. “Coming out of the primary, the strongest candidates will be those that lean into authenticity and wrap that authenticity around values that build a platform for policies going forward. But it won’t be about policy this cycle.

“Part of all of that is going to be the candidate who has the ability to do that—especially when the national leadership and national donor class are asking them to do something else.”

In 2020, the Coyote Run Farm near Lacona, Iowa, which Russell co-owns with his husband Patrick Standley, became a required stop on every Democratic presidential candidate’s swing through Iowa. They garnered national attention for their diversified farm and its potential for rebuilding local and regional food systems in a commodity-driven state. When Biden took office, millions poured into Iowa to do just that.

Russell knows what breaking the 10-year Republican stranglehold on Iowa looks like.

“It looks like beating the shit out of Republicans for policies that are an affront to the values we share,” he says. “The formula is authenticity—be yourself, who are you—and then what are those shared Democrats/Progressives core values, and then how to build solutions on top of those values.”

He says it’s important to promote values before policy, a discussion that should be relegated to the next election cycle. This wisdom is backed by research showing that voters make decisions with their hearts more than their heads.

Russell is not blind the challenges ahead. Iowa is home to one of the wealthiest Farm Bureaus in America, an organization that is not only financially invested in all products related to corporate-controlled commodities, but that serves as the all-powerful, all-pervasive political voice for those interests in Iowa.

To Russell, that is the front Democrats, progressives, independent farmers and anyone else in Iowa who wants clean water and a healthy economy are fighting on.

“How the hell do we punch back Republicans?” he asks. “When we do that, then we can punch back the Farm Bureau.”

Suzan EremMore by this author →

Suzan Erem is a fruit and nut farmer, working writer and community organizer in rural Cedar County, Iowa. Her Substack is Postcards from the Heartland. Her farm can be found at DracoHill.org.