In Iowa, the Future of American Politics Is Happening Right Now

Politics The millennial-on-millennial governor’s race is close—and prescient. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Scott Olson/Getty Images, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images, and Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. There will be a time soon when Donald Trump is a historic figure and the 20th century is an increasingly hazy memory. If you want to know what that next era of politics will look like, you don’t have to wait. You can go to Iowa, where the gubernatorial election is a window into the future of politics for decades to come. The millennial-on-millennial contest between Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn is one of the country’s most competitive, despite taking place in what was once a prototypical swing state but has shifted hard toward the GOP in the past decade. Public polls have consistently shown Sand leading—even Lahn acknowledged to reporters that “I think we’re probably down because of the midterm headwinds”—but no one in Iowa politics from either party expects either candidate to win handily. After all, there’s concern about the accuracy of polling in the state where Ann Selzer, its top pollster, showed Kamala Harris winning on the eve of the 2024 election. Trump won by 13 percent, and Selzer, who previously had a stellar track record in polling, promptly retired. But regardless of who wins, this race is a preview of what the 2030s and 2040s will look like. Sand has tapped into the Democratic resentment toward all politics as usual, Lahn is working toward a synthesis of the populist impulses of Trumpism and the conservative ideology that came before it. It’s a sneak peek of a time when millennials will dominate our politics and the political divides that have dominated since the baby boomers came of age will become increasingly obsolete. Politics has long been oriented along the battle lines of a prosperous, optimistic United States that was successfully fighting communism abroad and consistently producing economic prosperity at home. That’s not the world of today. Both Sand and Lahn entered the job market at the time of the Great Recession and are now trying to appeal to an Iowa electorate that has long since been ravaged by deindustrialization—and is currently trying to cope with potential dislocations from A.I. It is a world in which print newspapers are increasingly an anachronism and voters get their information from social media. It is a world that has already seen the rise of unconventional politicians ranging from Donald Trump to Zohran Mamdani and is likely to even further depart from the norms of the late 20th century moving forward. After spending a week traveling across Iowa, talking to voters and following both gubernatorial candidates, I think it’s clear how quickly that era is approaching. Rob Sand was long considered the star of the Iowa Democratic Party’s bench, but by the time this election cycle started, he wasn’t just the star of the bench; he was the only one there. Races in Iowa hadn’t been that close recently. It wasn’t just that Trump won handily in 2024 but that incumbent Gov. Kim Reynolds won by nearly 20 points in 2022 as the last Democrat in Iowa’s congressional delegation lost, along with the Democratic state attorney general and state treasurer, who each had spent 40 years in office. The only statewide Democrat left was Sand, who won reelection as state auditor by just under 3,000 votes, in part because of a strenuous work ethic that included an annual tour of all 99 counties in the Hawkeye State. Sand has long cultivated a moderate image and played up pursuits like his love of hunting and predilection for gas station breakfast pizza. A lanky 44-year-old who painted himself as an earnest advocate for taxpayer efficiency, Sand has tried to conjure up a public perception as half Atticus Finch, half youth pastor. At a visit to a food bank, he earnestly, and without prompting, shares with the volunteers his thoughts on how they can best make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (peanut butter on both sides of the bread, jelly in between). On the stump, Sand espouses what even he acknowledges is anti-politics, a deep disdain for the two-party system and American political institutions in general. It’s an nonideological message that harks back to Jimmy Carter as much as any modern politician. Just as Carter was a reaction to a country reeling from Watergate, Sand has an approach that appeals not just to Republicans jaded by Trump and a decade of GOP dominance in Iowa but to Democrats scornful of a political establishment that has allowed Trump and a decade of GOP dominance to happen. His events are studded with signs featuring his campaign slogan: Not redder or bluer, but better and truer.” Speaking to a crowd at Grinnell College, the elite liberal arts institution located in a small pocket of white-collar prosperity in central Iowa, Sand gave a withering critique of modern American politics. “Does anybody here think that politics is just peachy these days? No. “Does anybody here think that either the Democratic or the Republican Party, the leadership of either, there are a bunch of heroes that are just doing a bang-up job of solving all of our problems? “The idea itself is kind of laughable, isn’t it?” For Sand, both parties consisted of a failed duopoly. “We have two private clubs who are more interested in beating up on each other than they are in actually solving ordinary people’s problems or making ordinary people’s lives better.” He added, “In fact, a lot of times they are perfectly willing to use ordinary people in order to maintain power by making some group of ordinary people scared of some other, usually smaller group of ordinary people, right? And if they can exploit that fear enough, then they and their friends can pick the pockets of ordinary people while maintaining power. Does anybody think that that’s an unfair description of politics today?” There was no dissent. This resentment of the “political establishment” has increasingly become de rigueur in a Democratic Party where candidates often compete in their disdain for traditional party institutions. Among the party’s most popular figures are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who first rose to fame by successfully primarying a member of House Democratic leadership, and Bernie Sanders, who is not even a Democrat. Yet while both Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are on the left of the party, this disdain is nonideological, as Democrats across the ideological spectrum increasingly disapprove of party leadership. The anti-leadership frustration is perhaps to be expected, given that the status quo has led to two terms of Donald Trump. It’s also resonating on the stump. Sand was standing on a campus that had long been a die-hard stronghold for progressive Democrats. But as he held forth about the failures of both parties, students in the room nodded their heads in unison. Speaking to Slate, Sand insisted he disdained the party system despite the fact that he not only was a two-time statewide elected official as a Democrat but had worked on Democratic campaigns in his youth. “I registered as an independent when I first registered to vote because I don’t really like either political party. That doesn’t mean that you’re not active in it,” he said. “Even though I’ve been a participant in the two-party system, I’m still someone that has always looked at it and said, like, why? Why do we do it this way? Doesn’t make any sense. And so, I just think that people appreciate that. And if it’s the right attitude for the moment, great. But I would be talking about it even if it wasn’t.” Some of Sand’s approach is tailored to his red-state run. Indeed, even as he runs for governor as a Democrat, he’s playing up what he expects would be checks on his own power. He has long buffeted his appeal to independents and Republicans by noting that Iowa’s huge Republican legislative majorities mean it is beyond unlikely that Democrats will gain control of one, let alone both legislative chambers in Des Moines. He didn’t even seem to want a scenario in which Democrats would win a majority when asked by Slate. “I genuinely believe that most of the good stuff is in divided control,” he said. “What an ideal would be is if you had both chambers with razor-thin majorities, where you actually could have people go one way or the other.” Sand may go further than most Democrats in his seeming indifference as to whether his own party wins legislative majorities in the Hawkeye State, but this is an indication of an aversion to traditional politics that is becoming stronger within the Democratic Party. It’s not just that the party is perceived to be a failure by many of its voters; it’s that it is actively loathed by a good portion of its membership. The belief that the party has become an empty vessel is one of the rare articles of faith shared across ideological factions. The institutions that were the base of the Democratic Party, like trade unions and Black churches, are shrinking and leaving nothing to replace them except the corrosive nature of social media. Instead, Sand offers his own simple solutions, a world where we put away our phones—he describes social media as “the scourge of our times: It’s shortening our attention spans, it’s filling our heads with lies, and it’s making us hate people we love”—and just sit down, have coffee with each other, and find common-sense answers to our problems. On policy, Sand sticks carefully to the center. He opposes transgender athletes competing in women’s sports and focuses his opposition on a controversial school voucher program recently introduced in the state, noting the wasteful spending it entails, as well as what he considers the unneeded subsidies it provides for well-off Iowans. He even dodges on whether he backs a constitutional amendment on the ballot, backed by Republicans, that would require legislative supermajorities to ever raise personal or corporate income taxes in the future. “Now, making it harder to raise taxes on ordinary people, to me, sounds like a good idea, but I don’t know why they’re including making it harder to raise taxes on corporations at the same time,” he told a crowd in a coffee shop in Davenport, Iowa. Instead, he focuses on issues like water quality, a topic that has become central in a state where the cancer rate is skyrocketing and many people have become reluctant to drink the tap water, and pushes for systematic reforms to electoral politics, like nonpartisan primaries and term and age limits for elected officials. This attitude even appealed to attendees at a debate watch party that the Sand campaign held in Davenport for the first gubernatorial debate in early October. It was a crowd of Democratic faithful where local candidates pressed the flesh and attendees sitting down next to each other compared notes on what they did at the John Deere factory in the blue-collar river town. Alan Lavine, of Bettendorf, told Slate that he liked Sand’s “distrust of the two-party system. I like that he talks about that. It’s one of the main things that I like.” Lavine was a partisan Democrat but was hesitant to say whether he’d show up for a debate party for Josh Turek, the party’s Senate nominee, who was running a more traditional campaign in a toss-up race. Republicans disdain Sand as a pious hypocrite who is simply the creation of an overly friendly media and his wife’s family wealth. After all, his wife comes from one of the wealthiest families in the state—it has spent eight figures funding his campaign this year—and Sand has long made himself accessible to national reporters. It’s hard to think of a major outlet where the Iowa auditor has not gone on a hunting trip and scarfed down breakfast pizza with a reporter. If Sand falls short of the governor’s mansion, it’ll be in part because Zach Lahn punctures that aura. But that’s not all the Republican is running on. Iowa Republican politics had long been defined by a conflict between a powerful establishment and a social conservative opposition that predated Trump. The state’s battle lines don’t cleanly fall along the MAGA–vs.–non-MAGA feuds of other states. Lahn represents neither faction and ran in the primary as a comparative outsider (although he eventually became the anti-establishment favorite as he bested the Trump-endorsed candidate, Congressman Randy Feenstra). This was helped by the fact that although he is an Iowa native, he had spent much of his adult life living outside the state before returning in 2023 (a fact that Sand has made a key issue of in his campaign, spending millions of dollars to attack his Republican opponent as a carpetbagger from Kansas). Instead, he represents a deeply Trump-influenced alternative. His politics can be best described as common-good conservatism, a philosophy that represents the explicit use of state power for right-wing ends. The Make America Healthy Again–tinged Lahn sees a real role for the state to achieve conservative goals rather than deferring to the free market. It is the fusionist politics advocated by J.D. Vance when he was in the Senate and still by Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican. It’s a long, long way from the Reagan-Bush era GOP’s view of economic policy—and represents an evolution even from the second Trump administration. On the stump, Lahn says the key issue of his campaign is to “protect and preserve the culture of Iowa.” The Republican candidate noted that places like Illinois and Minnesota, particularly Minneapolis, lost this battle to “defend their culture.” There’s no dog whistling here; Lahn has repeatedly been explicit that when he talks about culture, he means one grounded firmly in Christianity. (Unlike many other Republicans fighting the culture war, Lahn doesn’t even bother with the Judeo- prefix when discussing these religious roots of American culture.) For him, this was under threat by the specter of the left trying to undermine this in the name of “collectivism.” He pointed to the rise of Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who he said was “connected directly with the Muslim Brotherhood,” adding, “This is what it looks like when you let down your guard of defending your culture.” Lahn caveated: “We are a welcoming people. We always have been. Iowa has been a welcoming place, but if you don’t understand what built this country, the ideals that built this country, there’s no way you can defend this country.” But he also tied culture to fighting powerful private interests as well. Speaking in rural Iowa, he described fighting eminent domain as a cultural issue. “So many of your families in this room came to Iowa probably in 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880. Why did they come here? They didn’t come here for religious freedom, because we already had it in Europe. The Reformation had happened. … What did they not have? They did not have their land. They couldn’t pass something down to their kids. A very small group of wealthy, land-owning, and elite controlled everything.” He added: “By the way, does that sound familiar to how things are going across our country right now in agriculture?” This leads to Lahn going places that are explicitly against the traditional free-market-based beliefs of the Republican Party of the late 20th century. He scorns what he describes as “market fundamentalism” and told reporters: “We don’t worship the market. Our faith is the foundation of our state.” In particular, one of the targets of his ire has been “unchecked monopolies in the agricultural industry”; he added that, in his view, “monopoly is a failure in the free market.” Lahn rails against industry consolidation and argues that this was in part what inspired the American Revolution. “The East India Company basically ran England, and [the Founding Fathers] knew what it was like to have an out-of-control monopoly.” Speaking to Slate, Lahn denounced big business and consolidated power. “Big business buys off both sides. You look at some of the biggest companies; they donate to both sides, and what do they do that for? So we will turn a blind eye. Well, they’re not donating to me,” he insisted. One example he pointed to was lab-grown meat. “Why is it legal in Iowa? Many states have banned it, but it’s an assault on the cattle industry. “Who invested $100 million into lab-grown meat? JBS,” Lahn said, taking aim at the Brazilian-based conglomerate that is the largest meatpacking company in the United States. “The people that are processing meat in one of the big three are also in the market of finding other solutions and not working with farmers to undermine farmers.” He added: “And it’s not just them. There’s many of these groups doing it.” At times Lahn almost sounded like Sand, including when he was asked about the tension of running as an insurgent from the incumbent party. “It’s just that, you know, this has been the most frustrating thing for me running for office, is just that everything is boiled down to this lowest common denominator of: What letter do you have by your name?” However, he quickly disagreed that there was any commonality. “[Sand] is doing that because he’s just trying to message independents, but he’s not actually trying to solve the problem of politicians being bought off.” Lahn’s message draws a range of attendees to his events. In Jefferson, Iowa, Tim Heisterkamp was a loyal Republican who voted for Lahn in the primary but was particularly concerned about keeping the state red. “I just don’t think going backwards with the progress that we’ve made in certain areas is worth it. Fiscally, we are as sound as we’ve ever been, and I think we need to keep it that way.” Heisterkamp was also concerned that Sand would roll back the state’s new school voucher program. In Indianola, Bob Cooper, a bald and bearded attendee, was simply worried about the state of the country. “Muslims are taking over,” he said. “It’s already slipping in now. Like I tell everybody all the time, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, you know. So that’s what’s happened. We’ve accepted this.” Cooper had not always been a Republican. He grew up in a Democratic family and spent the ’70s as a “hippie” and “not doing much voting.” However, he had come to appreciate that “a lot of good people died so that we can have the freedom that we have. And every day I thank God that I was born in a country where we have freedom. Look at France right now, for instance. The only difference between us and them, we have guns. They don’t have guns.” Iowa is not likely to be mistaken for France anytime soon, but Lahn’s version of conservatism is still very European. It represents the next step in the transition on the American right in the Trump era to a more populist and more statist worldview. After all, all of Trump’s many heresies from traditional American conservative thought, ranging from his 2016 opposition to entitlement reform to the recent push for the federal government to take ownership stakes in a number of privately owned companies, are far more in tune with the politics of Marine Le Pen than those of Mitt Romney. There’s no indication that there will be any reversion to the GOP of the past. Instead, in the post-Trump era, Republicans will have to seek to emulate what aspects of Trumpism can actually be copied, as opposed to what are unique to a man who was a celebrity for generations before he was a politician. Lahn’s effort, which encompasses both a strain of nativism and real skepticism of corporate power along with many traditional shibboleths of the American right, feels the logical next step in this, an attempt to redefine the GOP around the political coalition that reelected Trump in 2024 and move beyond the political landscape of the past. Of course, the stakes in the race include not just the governor’s mansion and which millennial will be an ideological flag bearer for their party moving forward but potentially a Senate seat. Iowa’s Republican incumbent Chuck Grassley is 93 years old. Although Grassley is in good health and has even filed to run for reelection in 2028, he has noted the risk of being replaced by a Democratic governor if he dies in office. When asked how they would deal with a Grassley replacement, both Sand and Lahn agreed that they would consider voting for a Republican. Sand said he would look to “trying to pick someone that’s actually going to represent Iowans, not a party. That might be picking someone who’s independent.” The Democratic candidate even noted that he could think of one Republican he would appoint. “I wouldn’t name them because I don’t want them to get kicked out of the party. I could think of at least one that I think would do a good job.” Lahn pointed to someone who understands “the grassroots.” He added: “You’re going out to Washington, D.C., to fight a machine … the Senate is one place you can actually have a real influence. So I would want somebody that would be willing to take these more populist ideas—economic and health—and carry that on outside of Iowa.” The governor of Iowa always takes on an outsize role in American politics due to the state’s first-in-the-country caucuses. If Lahn wins, he will be there as a kingmaker in 2028 when Republicans go first. And Sand has already pledged that if he wins, he will ensure that the Iowa law that mandates that the Hawkeye State go first is followed even though the Democratic National Committee has attempted to end Iowa’s status as an early state. And of course that will just be amplified because of their relative youth and because a win from either would justly be considered impressive. Sand would be the first Democrat elected governor in 20 years in a state that Trump won three times. If Lahn wins, it would be despite being consistently down in polls and outspent. But what would stand out is how much they would represent the future of their parties. Lahn’s views represent the fusion of Trumpism, inchoate as it may be as an ideology, with the Republican Party of the past. And Sand represents the wholesale rejection among Democrats of party institutions of the past. Although he shares little politically with figures like Zohran Mamdani, there is a commonality in their rejection of their party and efforts to build a politics that rejects the institutions of the past. And regardless of who wins this matchup this year, it is likely to be an indication of the battle lines drawn in political races for decades to come. Democrats Donald Trump Elections Republicans Iowa 2026 Midterms