Zach Lahn, a 40-year-old businessman and farmer who grew up in northwest Iowa, won the Republican nomination for governor on June 2, defeating Republican Rep. Randy Feenstra. Trump endorsed Feenstra days before the primary. The president said on June 11 that he regretted that endorsement and that “the man running against him was all Trump.”
Lahn has cast himself as a political outsider running on an “Iowa First” message, promising to confront the biggest companies in a state where agriculture is an economic mainstay. Iowa produces more corn, hogs, eggs and ethanol than any other state and is the second-largest soybean producer. About one in five Iowa jobs is in agriculture.
“I will take on the Big Ag cartels,” Lahn said in his primary victory speech. “I will break up their monopolies.”
He has pledged that as governor he would join a lawsuit filed in May by an Iowa-based company alleging Bayer used anticompetitive practices to monopolize the market for biotech corn seeds. A Bayer spokesman said the lawsuit lacks merit and that corn seed markets are competitive, fair and diverse. Lahn has also said that bills aimed at shielding chemical companies from liability would be “dead on arrival” if they reached his desk.
Mark Mueller, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, said that going after big agriculture probably helped Lahn in the primary, but added, “I’m not hearing vast support from the farming community for Lahn.”
Lahn is married to the former daughter-in-law of billionaire and conservative mega-donor Charles Koch. The couple and their seven children — six from previous marriages — have a home near Wichita, Kansas, and Lahn frequently flies between Iowa and Kansas, sometimes piloting the plane himself. He has said he is living in Iowa full time and that his children would split their time between parents if he is elected.
Records show Lahn voted in Kansas in 2018, 2020 and 2022 and in Iowa in 2024. He said he also voted in Iowa in 2014 and 2016. He bought his great-grandmother’s family farm in Belle Plaine, Iowa, in 2014 and grows corn, oats, soybeans and alfalfa on roughly 700 acres there.
Lahn lent his campaign $2.5 million. He said he “bootstrapped and built” his wealth from entrepreneurship, but declined to directly answer whether he was a millionaire before marrying his current wife. “If the question is could I have funded the campaign in the way I did solely from money I have made, the answer is yes,” he said.
Before his business career, Lahn worked in politics for part of a decade, including for the Koch-affiliated group Americans for Prosperity. Democrats have said those ties make Lahn a “Kansas carpetbagger closely aligned with billionaire-fueled conservative interests.”
During the Republican primary, Feenstra ran ads highlighting Lahn’s $1 million investment in a Montana-based men’s sexual health company called FirmTech, which sells wearable devices described as “erection rings.” A Feenstra ad called it “a sex toy company” and suggested Lahn lacks “Iowa values” for the job.
Lahn said he invested in FirmTech in the early 2020s, resigned from its board in 2023 over concerns about its marketing before “more risqué” products were released, and has not been able to recover his investment.
Lahn will face state Auditor Rob Sand, a Democrat first elected in 2018 who remains the only Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa. Sand, 43, has focused on the same issues Lahn has — rising cancer rates and water quality problems — and regularly visits all 99 counties as part of his job. Two years ago, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, chose not to seek re-election, leaving the seat open and setting up what both parties describe as one of the most competitive gubernatorial races in the country this year.