Same day shift puts Iowa governor’s race at lean Democrat
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report downgraded Iowa’s U.S. Senate race from “lean Republican” to “tossup” on Thursday, a shift that puts the seat held by retiring Republican Sen. Joni Ernst in play for Democrats. The same day, Cook moved Iowa’s gubernatorial race from “tossup” to “lean Democrat”; two of the state’s four U.S. House contests were already rated as tossups.
Cook’s Senate and gubernatorial moves reflect rural Iowa’s economic anxiety over fuel, fertilizer and other costs at a time of stagnant grain prices following Trump’s embrace of tariffs. Trump carried Iowa by 13 percentage points in 2024.
Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win Senate control in November and have identified Iowa alongside Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and Alaska as possible pickups.
The Senate matchup sets Hinson, a former local television reporter and anchor, against Turek, who won two Paralympic gold medals in basketball and has cast himself as a “common sense prairie populist.” Hinson, who was first elected to Congress in 2020, won a Republican primary after Ernst announced last year she would not seek a third term. Turek represents a working-class district east of Omaha that leans Republican. Turek led in one poll this summer; Hinson was narrowly ahead in the rest, with the leads mostly within the margin of error.
Three weeks before Cook’s rating shift, Obama endorsed Turek. The endorsement followed a meeting in Chicago between Turek and David Axelrod, a longtime Obama adviser. Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012.
In an interview, Turek pointed to his father’s voting twice for Obama and three times for Trump and said Iowa is a “state masquerading more red than what we are.” “You can make the argument that the state is hurting more than any other,” he said, citing tariffs, commodity prices, farm input costs and rising cancer rates.
At the Iowa State Fair, Hinson, speaking on the Des Moines Register’s political soapbox stage, stressed her competitive streak. “I always run every race like I am 10 points behind,” she said while sipping a cold beer on a hot day. “I’ve never lost a race. I don’t plan on starting that now.” Just one minute into her speech, Hinson began criticizing Turek’s missed votes in the state legislature and questioning his working-class credentials. “It’s a pity, but you know where Josh Turek is tonight? He is actually fundraising in Nantucket with the billionaires and the millionaires,” she said.
Turek pushed back against the suggestion that fundraising among the coastal elite was out of step with his pitch. “It doesn’t change one bit about who I am and where I’ve come from and who I’m fighting for,” he said.
Turek, who was born with spina bifida and attributes the condition to his father’s Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, said he underwent 21 surgeries before turning 12. “I had the wrong color lunch tickets,” he said, a reference to his family’s use of government assistance.
Hinson’s media background has shaped both her campaign and her work in Congress, she said. “You need a good storyteller in Washington, D.C., because you may only have 30 seconds of one of your colleagues’ time to convince them that a policy is really important for our state or for my district,” she said. In April 2006, when she was 22, Hinson drove a live truck through lingering thunderstorms to cover tornado damage in Iowa City, roughly 30 miles south of the local TV station where she was a rookie reporter. She won an award for the coverage and was later promoted to anchor.
Hinson has navigated visible tensions within the Republican Party. She supported Trump’s tax-cutting legislation known as the “one big, beautiful bill,” but voted to certify the 2020 election against Trump’s wishes and was slow to back his 2024 White House bid, endorsing him only after he won the Iowa caucuses. Trump has since endorsed her for the Senate seat.
Hinson said Turek is “masquerading as a moderate” and suggested his legislative and campaign record sounds “a lot like a socialist.” Turek’s campaign released an ad Wednesday claiming he voted with Republicans 700 times in the state legislature and signaling he would work with Trump, whose image appears in the spot.
Former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, a Democrat, compared 2026 to 1998, when he became the state’s first Democratic governor in more than 30 years, and noted that Iowa sent a Democrat and a Republican to the Senate for three decades before the Trump era. “Iowans at the end of the day aren’t comfortable with extremes,” Vilsack said.
As of Aug. 1, Iowa had 712,087 registered Republicans, 528,758 Democrats and 559,741 independents, with two independents caucusing with the Democrats. Independent voters are expected to be critical to the outcome.
Will Rogers, a former Republican chairman in the state’s largest county, said Hinson’s communication skills would help her in the candidates’ first formal debate, scheduled after Labor Day. “I would rather be Ashley than Josh Turek,” he said.