Iowa Deserves a Senator Who Answers to Iowa

Both candidates in this Democratic primary are exceptional. One is free.

I am endorsing Zach Wahls for the United States Senate. And I want to start with something that rarely gets said in endorsement essays: I am endorsing him, in part, because he is my friend.

I don’t mean friend in the way politicians use the word, as a prefix before the knife. I mean friend in the way that matters. When threats were being made against my life during the summer of 2020, Zach was one of the people who checked in. Not once. Regularly. When legislation was moving through the Iowa Senate that would hurt my constituents, he gave me a heads up before it landed. And beyond the politics, he has been there through the kinds of hard, private moments that life throws at all of us, the ones that never make the news but test who actually shows up. Zach showed up.

But let me be equally clear: I am not endorsing Zach Wahls solely because he is my friend. I am endorsing him because he is the best candidate in this race. There is no stronger debater, no more effective fundraiser, and no more clear-eyed leader running for this seat.

The Machine

Senate Democratic leadership has made clear, through surrogates and outside spending groups, that it prefers Josh Turek. VoteVets, a group aligned with Chuck Schumer, has poured more than $8 million into the race on Turek’s behalf. And I understand why a talented candidate like Turek would accept that support. Who wouldn’t? Money and institutional power are the oxygen of modern campaigns. But the history of American politics is also the history of what happens when you owe people, when the favor gets called in, when the bill comes due, when the interests of those donors and those party leaders quietly diverge from the interests of working people in places like Waterloo and Davenport and Council Bluffs.

We have seen this film before. We know how it ends.

But here is what I need Iowa Democrats to sit with, really sit with: you can’t spend years saying that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have failed this party, that Democratic leadership is out of touch, that the establishment keeps losing because it refuses to fight, and then turn around and vote for their handpicked candidate. You can’t say the system is broken and then do exactly what the system tells you to do. And look, I know not every Turek supporter has been cajoled by Washington. Some people genuinely like Josh. And good for them. He is likable. But if they expect a candidate who was handpicked by Chuck Schumer, bankrolled by his aligned super PACs, and surrounded by establishment endorsements to arrive in Washington and suddenly stand up to that same establishment, I have a bridge to sell them.

If you believe, as I do, that national Democratic leadership has presided over a historic collapse of the party’s connection to working people, then sending their anointed candidate to Washington is not resistance. It is surrender. It is handing the keys back to the same people who lost them. A candidate who limps out of June on Schumer’s money and super PAC goodwill doesn’t arrive in November free. He arrives indebted. And Iowa cannot afford a senator who starts the job already owned.

That is not a vision for Iowa. That is a vision for Washington.

A Word About Josh

I want to be honest about something, because intellectual honesty demands it: Josh Turek is not the villain of this story. He is a two-time Paralympic gold medalist, a state legislator, and by every account, a serious and capable public servant.

But campaigns reveal character. And what I have seen from his campaign, especially in recent weeks, has given me real pause.

A former primary rival, Nathan Sage, dropped out of the race and lobbed personal attacks at Zach on his way to endorsing Turek, calling him “artificial” and a “career politician.” Then, most recently, a Turek supporter filed an ethics complaint against Zach, alleging he violated Senate rules through his work with a political organization. The bipartisan Iowa Senate Ethics Committee reviewed it and quickly dismissed it unanimously. There was, in the committee’s words, no “clear and convincing evidence” of any violation. It was not a close call. The complaint’s filer had publicly declared support for Turek on social media.

That is not the politics of conviction. That is the politics of desperation.

And here is what I would say directly to Josh: if you did not know about these attacks being made on your behalf, you should have spoken up the moment they surfaced. Silence is endorsement. And if you did know, and let’s be honest, you almost certainly did, then you need to be bigger than that. Iowa Democrats are watching. They are tired of candidates who talk about integrity and then let their campaigns do the opposite.

Why Zach

Zach Wahls was formed by something different than institutional favor. At 19 years old, he stood before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee to defend his family, two mothers who raised him, before a roomful of powerful lawmakers who had already made up their minds. He didn’t have institutional backing that day. He had conviction. And it changed minds across the country. That moment was not a political calculation. It was a young person who understood that some things are worth fighting for, even when the room is hostile, even when the outcome is uncertain.

That is the same quality I want in a United States Senator.

When Wahls made the decision to run, he said he wanted to be in the fight rather than on the sidelines, and that too many of Iowa’s challenges are coming from Washington to stay quiet. He has since built a campaign grounded in labor, in grassroots organizing, in the kind of accountability politics that Democratic voters keep asking for and too rarely get. His endorsers include Teamsters Local 238, the largest local union in the state, the Ironworkers, Firefighters, UFCW, CWA, and the state building and construction trades council. These are the people who build things, who move things, who make Iowa run. They chose Zach. Not because Washington told them to. Because they trust him.

He has called for lowering costs for working families, taking on corruption regardless of whose feathers get ruffled, and delivering real results. He once told a crowd: “I don’t really think this race is as much about left versus right, so much as those of us who are outsiders taking on insiders. I’ve been willing to challenge my own party when necessary.” That is not a talking point. That is a track record. He was pushed out of Iowa Senate Democratic leadership for daring to challenge a shrinking caucus that had grown too comfortable managing its own decline. He took lashes for it. But he took them standing tall, on conviction. That is exactly the kind of Democratic politician this moment demands. Not ideological purity. Not theatrical rebellion. Just the basic, stubborn willingness to put people first, and mean it.

The Stakes

Iowa is one of the most productive agricultural states in the world. It feeds nations. And yet, according to Feeding America, food insecurity has increased in every single Iowa county, with one in six Iowa children now unsure where their next meal is coming from. Since 2020, the child food insecurity rate has jumped from 11% to nearly 17%. A state that grows enough corn and soybeans to feed the world cannot feed its own kids. That is not a natural disaster. That is the result of Republican policy, and a Democratic Party in Iowa too weakened by timid, status-quo leadership to stop it.

That same kind of institutional machinery that managed that decline into irrelevance, that chose comfort over confrontation for fifteen years while Republicans consolidated power in Des Moines, is now reaching into this primary to anoint its preferred candidate for the United States Senate. Iowa Democrats should ask themselves why.

And for the record, I know what it feels like to sit in the chair. As the first African American elected county supervisor in Iowa’s second largest county, I learned quickly that public life is not always about what you believe. It is about who you owe. Who you answer to shapes everything about how you govern. It shapes which calls you return. Which bills you fight for. Which compromises you accept. Which lines you refuse to cross. The pressure of institutional politics is not abstract. It is daily and relentless, and it has a way of reshaping people who arrived in office with the best of intentions.

I do not doubt that Josh Turek has good intentions. But I know who is paying for his campaign’s oxygen. And I know what that tends to mean.

The Choice

Iowa is not without hope or history. The state that gave Barack Obama his first presidential primary win, is still here, persisting underneath the rubble of GOP calamity. It is a state still populated by farmers who want fair prices, parents who want fully funded schools, workers who want wages that keep up with the cost of living. Those people deserve a senator whose first loyalty is to them.

Iowa Democrats have a clear choice: send Washington’s preferred candidate to Washington, or send Iowa’s.

I know which Iowa I believe in. On June 2nd, send Zach Wahls.