Rob Sand Said He Wasn’t Trying to Turn Iowa Blue. Well, He Did.

Rob Sand at the Iowa State Fair in August, 2026. Scott Olson/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. On Tuesday, Rob Sand became the first Democrat since 2006 to win the governor’s race in Iowa, defeating ultra-MAHA conservative Zach Lahn and powering a Democratic resurgence in a state that had been drifting away from the party for years. As I wrote in a profile for the magazine, the 44-year-old state auditor ran as a sort of anti-partisan, good-governance crusader who urged Iowans to restore neighborliness and accountability to the political process. He held public events in all 99 counties, opened them with a complaint about the two-party system and a group rendition of “America the Beautiful,” and used his experience as a white-collar prosecutor and taxpayer watchdog to make the case for “rotating the crops” in a state where Republicans have held a governing trifecta for a decade. It worked uncommonly well—Sand never trailed in the polling average and has been widely seen as a rising star within the national Democratic Party. The New York Times included Sand on a list of possible Democratic presidential candidates in 2028, alongside such luminaries as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stephen A. Smith. When an NPR reporter asked him about that list in June, in the kitchen of a small event space in Chariton, Iowa, Sand pivoted dramatically and began walking toward the door, floorboards creaking beneath his boots. “You can’t cut without you hearing me laugh!” he said when he came back. I was reminded of what he told a reporter who asked him, years ago, about speculation that he’d run for governor: “Can you quote an eye-roll?” In Iowa, the national environment, and the actual environment, weighed heavily on voters. Outgoing Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds is deeply unpopular. Her voucher program has pissed off teachers and rural voters. Tariffs and diesel costs are hammering farmers. And cancer rates are rising even as they fall in most of the rest of the country. To national Democrats, Sand may seem like something of a unicorn—a bow-hunting, churchgoing small-town Democrat who’s never lost an election in a state Donald Trump has carried three times. But there are lessons for other candidates here too. Sand won by relentlessly courting everyone, eschewing partisan labels, and emphasizing the need to work together in what was expected to be a divided government in Des Moines. He focused on things he said were doable—ending Medicaid privatization with the stroke of a pen, tightening the rules for the Republican-passed voucher program, and pursuing a clean-water strategy that was heavy on carrots and light on sticks. But really, you should just read the profile I wrote. It’s all in there, plus a whole lot more.