Iowa Senate 2026: Hinson vs. Turek for an Open Seat

Race status as of July 26, 2026. Polling and campaign finance figures in this race change frequently.

Why this race is on our list

Iowa voted for Barack Obama twice and then for Donald Trump three times, most recently by 13 points. It has not elected a Democratic senator since 2008. On paper this open seat should not be competitive. Two polls conducted the same week in June disagreed about who is leading it. The race is a test of whether a state’s presidential lean still predicts anything when the farm economy turns, and of what happens when both parties nominate a candidate who claims the word populist.

Iowa: the state behind the race

Iowa’s economy is unusually exposed to trade policy. It is the second-largest soybean state after Illinois, and soybean exports to China collapsed after the tariff escalation. Farm bankruptcies are up statewide, rural hospitals and clinics are closing or at risk, and state tax revenue is falling. Corn was trading around $4.50 a bushel and soybeans just under $12 in early July. Marc Short, a former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, has publicly warned that administration policy is hurting farmers, so the criticism is not confined to one party.

The state also has a public health problem that has become a political issue. Iowa has the second-highest cancer incidence rate in the country for the third consecutive year, and is one of only three states where rates are rising while they fall nationally. The Iowa Cancer Registry projected 21,700 new diagnoses and 6,400 deaths in 2026. Eighty-seven of Iowa’s 99 counties run above the national trend. Cause is unsettled, which matters for how the campaigns talk about it.

Geographically the race splits along familiar lines. Democratic strength concentrates in Polk County around Des Moines, Johnson County around Iowa City, and Linn County around Cedar Rapids. The rest of the state, including the rural west where Turek lives and the northeast Iowa district Hinson represents, is heavily Republican. Joni Ernst, who is retiring rather than seeking a third term, won by 6.5 points in 2020, the year Trump carried Iowa by 8.

One mechanical note. Under Iowa law, a ballot vacancy occurring after the primary can be filled by convention until August 19, a provision worth knowing given how Maine’s Senate race unfolded this month.

The candidates

Ashley Hinson (R). Age 42, from West Des Moines, now representing Iowa’s 2nd District, which includes Cedar Rapids. A former KCRG-TV reporter and anchor, then a state representative, elected to the US House in 2020 by flipping a Democratic-held seat. She sits on House Appropriations, including the agriculture subcommittee. She won re-election in 2024 by roughly 15 points. Trump endorsed her the day Ernst announced her retirement, as did Senate Majority Leader John Thune and NRSC chair Tim Scott. She voted for the 2025 tax and spending law and against extending Affordable Care Act subsidies. She also voted for the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022, which her primary opponent attacked her for. She is running a 99-county tour modeled on Chuck Grassley’s, and has never run statewide. She reported $2.36 million raised in the first quarter of 2026 and ended it with more than $6.5 million on hand.

Josh Turek (D). Age 47, from Council Bluffs, a working-class city on the Missouri River across from Omaha. A two-time Paralympic gold medalist and four-time medalist in wheelchair basketball. Born with spina bifida, which he attributes to his father’s Agent Orange exposure during Navy service in Vietnam, he had 21 surgeries by age 12 and relied on Medicaid as a child. He is the first Iowa legislator with a permanent, visible disability. Elected to the Iowa House in 2022 by six votes, 3,403 to 3,397, and re-elected in 2024. He calls himself a commonsense prairie populist and is endorsed by former Senator Tom Harkin. He backs a public option, reversing the Medicaid and ACA cuts, ending the tariffs, a federal right-to-repair law for farm equipment, and higher minimum wages.

Thomas Laehn (Libertarian). On the November ballot but below our threshold for full treatment, so described here rather than given a section of his own. Greene County Attorney and the first Libertarian elected to partisan office in Iowa, now in his second term. He grew up in Allison, taught constitutional law and political philosophy at McNeese State, and holds a law degree from the University of Iowa. His platform centers on curbing executive power, ending eminent domain abuse with the Summit Carbon pipeline as his example, eliminating the Department of Education, and narrowing the federal role in criminal law and social welfare. He says he is running against the two-party system rather than against either opponent. No public poll has tested him.

What the campaigns are contesting

Hinson is running on the 2025 tax and spending law, border enforcement, and alignment with the president. Her campaign’s case is that Turek is a national Democrat in Iowa clothing, and she has said he is masquerading as an Iowa moderate. The Iowa GOP chair framed the general election as a fight over Iowa values and tied Turek to Senate Democratic leadership.

Turek is running almost entirely on the farm economy and health care. He calls the situation in agriculture “farmageddon” and says the word he hears most from farmers is betrayal. His health care argument is built on Hinson’s vote for the 2025 law, which he says will close rural hospitals in a state that can least afford it, and he uses his own medical history to make it.

Iowa voters’ own priorities line up with that terrain more than with either party’s national message. In the New York Times/Siena survey, 54 percent rated the state economy only fair or poor against 38 percent good, and both polls found economic issues dominant. The Times also found 47 percent saying the president’s policies have hurt Iowa against 33 percent saying they have helped.

Evidence check

Not a full fact check. Six recurring campaign claims, three per major candidate, with context and sources.

“Hinson voted for the largest Medicaid cut ever.” Turek’s central line. Hinson’s vote for the 2025 tax and spending law is documented, and the law’s Medicaid reductions are the largest enacted in the program’s history by most published estimates, though we did not independently verify the superlative against every prior change. Hinson defends the vote by pointing to the $50 billion rural health fund enacted alongside the cuts, aimed at telehealth and similar services. Independent analysts say that fund offsets a fraction of projected losses. Both parts are worth holding at once.

“Medicaid is rife with waste and abuse.” Hinson’s stated justification for the cuts. The framing conflates two different things. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, roughly three-quarters of improper payments stem from insufficient documentation rather than fraud. Improper payments are a real administrative problem and a legitimate target for reform. They are not the same as money stolen.

“The law prevents an average $1,700 tax hike.” A claim Republican leaders have used to defend the 2025 law, describing what would have happened had the 2017 tax cuts expired. It is a projection rather than a measurement, and the word average conceals a wide spread: an average across all filers tells an individual household very little about its own situation. We did not verify the underlying estimate or its distribution.

“Iowa’s cancer crisis is directly related to its water quality crisis.” Turek has made this link explicitly. The cancer numbers are real and alarming. The causal claim outruns the current evidence. The Iowa Cancer Registry’s own 2026 report found that Iowa farmers had 13 percent fewer cancers than expected compared with the general state population, which its authors attribute to lower smoking and drinking rates and physically active work. The report also notes that research on people living near farms is thin, and state researchers say multiple factors could connect water quality to cancer, with a second study phase still examining environmental causes. Lung cancer accounts for about a quarter of Iowa’s cancer deaths, and a proposed tobacco tax increase died in a state Senate committee this year. The honest position is that Iowa has a serious problem and an unresolved explanation.

“Turek is a grassroots working-class candidate.” True of his biography and his fundraising base, and in tension with how he won the nomination. VoteVets, a national Democratic super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic leadership, spent close to $10 million promoting Turek in the primary, more than both campaigns spent combined, on behalf of a candidate who is not himself a veteran. Federal disclosure rules meant the group did not have to reveal all its donors before Iowans voted. VoteVets justified the spending by citing Turek’s father’s Agent Orange exposure. Chuck Schumer denied directing it. His primary opponent’s objection to that spending was not a fringe complaint, and Republicans have since made it their own.

“Turek won the most conservative district in Iowa to elect a Democrat.” The underlying facts hold up and the superlative is hard to verify. He won House District 20 by six votes in 2022 in a district Trump carried, and expanded his margin in 2024. Whether it is the single most conservative Democrat-held district in the state is a claim we could not confirm. The crossover appeal it is meant to demonstrate is documented.

What supporters are saying

Sourced voter comment is thinner on the Republican side in this race, partly because Hinson has held fewer open-press retail events since the primary and declined an interview request from US News in July. We note that rather than filling the gap.

Turek supporters. A voter in Ames told the Iowa Capital Dispatch she backed him for his focus on price gouging, housing costs, and raising the minimum wage. A voter in western Iowa interrupted making dinner to greet him at her front door after seeing his ad, which CNN reported as an illustration of how heavily the super PAC advertising had raised his name recognition. The Heat and Frost Insulators local in Council Bluffs endorsed him on his legislative record with unions, and his endorsements include Tom Harkin, former Attorney General Tom Miller, former Lieutenant Governor Sally Pederson, and J.D. Scholten, who left the primary to back him.

Hinson supporters. At her campaign kickoff in West Des Moines, a voter from Ankeny told the Gazette she backed Hinson completely, citing her work on the 2025 tax and spending law. That comment dates to September 2025, which is worth knowing given how much the state’s economic picture has moved since. Her institutional support is extensive and current: Trump, Thune, Tim Scott, the Senate Leadership Fund, and the Iowa Republican Party. It is also worth recording that her support for the same tax and spending law drew jeers at a town hall in her own district, so Republican opinion in Iowa is not uniform on the vote she is running on.

How this race is being framed

The most useful thing to know about this race is that two respected polls conducted in overlapping weeks reached opposite conclusions. Little Village laid the two side by side: the Times/Siena poll, conducted June 15 to 27 with 600 likely voters and a margin of error of 4.7 points, had Hinson ahead 46 to 44. The Fox News poll, conducted June 23 to 27 with 1,003 registered voters and a margin of error of 3 points, had Turek ahead 50 to 46. Both found Turek’s personal favorability higher than Hinson’s. Both are inside or near their own error margins. Anyone telling you confidently who is winning is choosing a poll.

The two surveys also framed the same question differently, which is instructive. Fox asked only whether voters were concerned that Hinson is too close to the president, and half said they were. The Times asked about both candidates and found 46 percent saying Hinson supports the president too much, and the identical 46 percent saying Turek would oppose him too much. The second version produces a picture of an electorate uneasy with both poles rather than tilted against one.

National coverage treats Iowa as a signal. It is one of a handful of seats that decide the Senate, where Republicans hold 53 to 47 and Democrats need four, and commentary has cast the state as an early warning for the party in power. Iowa coverage is more concrete and less interested in the arithmetic: commodity prices, hospital closures, cancer rates, the Summit Carbon pipeline, and whether a Council Bluffs Democrat can hold rural votes.

One finding from the Times poll is worth sitting with on a site about political conversation. Asked which single source they rely on most for news, Iowans named social media first at 18 percent and a national TV network second at 15 percent. Local print or online news organizations came last, at 1 percent.

Discussion Questions

Iowa voted twice for Barack Obama and three times for Donald Trump. What changed, and is it changing again?
Many Iowa farmers who supported the president say tariffs have hurt them badly. When does economic damage change a vote, and when does it not?
Two well-regarded polls taken the same week disagreed on who leads. How should a voter read polling at all?
A national super PAC spent close to $10 million to pick one Democrat over another before Iowans voted. Does outside spending in a primary affect how you view the eventual nominee?
Hinson defends the Medicaid changes by citing waste, and federal data show most improper payments are paperwork failures rather than fraud. Does that distinction change your view of the policy?
Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country and no settled explanation. What should elected officials do when the public wants action and the science is incomplete?
Both candidates call themselves populists and mean different things by it. What would you want the word to mean?
Thomas Laehn argues the two-party system itself is the problem. What is the strongest version of that argument, and what is the strongest response?
The Times poll found the same share of Iowans think Hinson backs the president too much and that Turek would oppose him too much. What kind of senator would satisfy those voters?
If your preferred candidate loses, what would you want the winner to do first?