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The big question in Iowa’s Senate race
Is Iowa still a swing state? That’s what Democrats are testing in the increasingly red state’s races for governor, U.S. Senate, and four House seats this fall. Josh Turek, the Democratic nominee for a vital U.S. Senate seat, is hoping to prove that a Democrat can still win in Iowa. But he faces an uphill battle.
Turek, a Paralympic gold medalist basketball player who has served in the state legislature since 2023, is facing Ashley Hinson, a former TV journalist and current member of the House of Representatives, a role she’s held since 2021. The two are vying to replace retiring GOP Senator Joni Ernst.
Both Turek and Hinson list affordability and agricultural policy high up on their policy platforms. Turek wants to raise the minimum wage, set term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, and address cancer-causing water pollution—a serious problem in Iowa that has been linked to agricultural runoff. Hinson’s platform includes limiting regulations for family farms, moving federal agencies out of D.C. and into the states, and cutting government waste. Both candidates want to see Congress pass a farm bill, and Turek says he wants it to include anti-monopoly provisions and a “right to repair.”
In the last decade, Iowa’s status as a swing state has become increasingly debatable. The state has elected Republican governors since 2010, and both Senate seats have been held by Republicans since 2015, when Ernst was elected to serve alongside long-serving Senator Chuck Grassley.
President Donald Trump won the state in 2016 by over 9 percent, a massive 15-point rightward swing from the 2012 election. He then won Iowa by 8 percent in 2020, and by over 13 points in 2024.
Turek hopes his “prairie populist” vibe, which has won him elections before, will help him flip the Senate seat. In the state legislature, he represents the 20th district, which includes his hometown of Council Bluffs. He won the seat by just six votes in 2022 and 561 votes in 2024—even though Trump won the broader Pottawattamie County, which includes the 20th district, by 17 percent in 2020 and 20 percent in 2024.
“When I went door to door, crawling up stairs and dragging my wheelchair behind me, the first question people always asked was ‘how in the world did you get up here?’ I would tell them ‘I crawled up here, because that’s how important your vote is to me. I think more than anything, people want their representatives to be willing to listen and fight for them, not for the billionaires and the large corporations,” Turek said in a written statement to The New Republic.
Turek will need independent voters this November. According to a new Emerson College Polling/Nexstar Media survey, independent voters break for Turek by an 11-point margin. But he still trails Hinson in the poll, with support from 45 percent of respondents to her 48 percent. Six percent of respondents remained undecided.
Some political analysts think Turek’s ability to appeal to independents and conservatives still won’t be enough. “If a Republican is disaffected this year, they’re a heck of a lot more likely to not show up or to skip over various offices on the ballot than they are to vote for a Democrat,” said Charlie Cook, founder of the Cook Political Report, in a speech at Des Moines’s Drake University in late July. “We’ll have to wait and see whether the Iowa Senate flips, but I’d give it probably a one in four chance.”
The Cook Political Report rates the Senate race as “leans Republican,” and Cook himself said that he believes Iowa hasn’t been a swing state “for a long time.”—Emma Janssen
Outside Washington
The Ohio Capital Journal has published a trio of pieces reviewing candidates’ data center positions in three key races: gubernatorial (Democrat Amy Acton versus Republican Vivek Ramaswamy), Senate (Sherrod Brown versus Jon Husted), and the 9th congressional district (Marcy Kaptur versus Derek Merrin). Ohio passed tax breaks for data centers in 2017, and now ranks sixth in the nation for current and planned data centers. All three races are believed to be a dead heat, although there’s very little public polling on the 9th. While data center backlash transcends partisan divides, the pieces show that, across the board, Democratic candidates in Ohio seem to be adopting a more aggressive regulatory position.
One of the water utilities recently targeted in suspected Iranian cyberattacks on the U.S. water supply, The Washington Post notes, was in western Arkansas—one of three states that sued the Environmental Protection Agency under Joe Biden to prevent it from instituting a requirement to harden water systems against cyberattacks. “Had the EPA rule been in place, some experts say, the Arkansas utility or others like it might have been spared,” write Ellen Nakashima and Amy B. Wang—Heather Souvaine Horn
The Open Markets Institute’s Center for Media and Digital Governance director, Courtney Radsch, condemns last week’s Federal Communications Commission vote to scrap a rule that limited TV media consolidation. “This decision effectively places FCC Chair Brendan Carr in open defiance of Congress, and it gives us yet again another reason to call for removing him from his post,” said Radsch in a statement.
Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert calls last week’s Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general a “stain on the record of Senators who voted to confirm him.”
After yet another company announced a settlement agreement with Trump’s Interior Department last week to abandon its offshore wind leases, the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that this brings the tally of such settlements up to “nearly $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds.” In a statement published on the organization’s website, NRDC policy analyst Pasha Feinberg said that “American consumers are paying twice, once with their tax dollars and the second time with higher utility bills.”—Heather Souvaine Horn
In Closing
Four Questions For: Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center
Interview by Monica Potts
Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?
A: I am the president of the Food Research & Action Center, where I’ve spent 27 years working to end poverty-related hunger in America. Before stepping into this role, I spent many years leading our child nutrition work. Right now, we are focused on restoring, protecting, and strengthening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program after Congress made unprecedented cuts to the program in July 2025. Since then, five million people have lost access to SNAP.
Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?
A: Helping policymakers feel the urgency of ending hunger can be one of the hardest parts of this work. Children only get one childhood, and there are no do-overs. Growing up in a food-insecure household, as one in five children do, can have a lasting impact on how they grow, learn, and thrive. Hunger is solvable. It just requires political will.
Q: What was your biggest success in the last year or two?
A: We have made significant progress on Healthy School Meals for All. More schools are offering school breakfast and lunch to all their students at no cost, regardless of household income. That’s a win for kids who have the nutrition they need to thrive in school, families who can count on school meals to help ease pressure on their household budgets, and schools who have students who are well nourished and ready to learn.
Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?
A: What motivates me is knowing that hunger isn’t inevitable; it’s a policy choice. We know what works. We have the tools to solve it. And that is what we focus on every day at FRAC. I also draw strength from the commitment and passion of my colleagues, who bring that same sense of purpose to the work.
Political Trivia Question of the Day
A Democratic Wisconsin senator from the 1960s and ’70s was the creator of Earth Day. Who was he? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)
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