Josh Turek is running a radically centrist campaign
Semafor ·
The Iowa Senate nominee, if he wins, could start reconstituting a red-state Democratic bloc that’s lost ground.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa — Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek is running ads calling for border security. He’s touting his votes with Republicans in the statehouse.
Turek is criticizing his party for obstructing farm and data center legislation and says he has “no interest” in talking about impeachment. He even embraces a term that Democrats rarely use these days.
“Politically, the term moderate can be pejorative. And I say that I’m proudly a moderate,” Turek told Semafor on the banks of the Missouri River. “Socially, culturally, you could define me as moderate.”
In one of the country’s closest Senate races, state Rep. Turek and GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson are competing for a small slice of independent-minded Iowans who will decide their race — and with it, potentially, the Senate majority. They’re both blue-chip recruits: Hinson is a former Iowa TV reporter who ousted a Democratic incumbent in 2020; Turek is a gold medal-winning Paralympian who won his first statehouse race by six votes.
And the appeals from each candidate are similar: I’m the real pragmatist, and my opponent is just pretending to be one. Notably, Hinson launched her campaign with a vow to be Trump’s “top ally” before putting distance between them.
What’s more, if Turek and candidates like fellow Great Plains Democrat Adam Hamilton win, it would tilt the center of gravity in the party’s Senate caucus toward a center that’s lost ground in recent years. So Republicans are running ads that affirm Turek’s distance from the left, while casting him as unable to hold it back: “I know Josh Turek isn’t a socialist, but can we trust him to say no to his party?” asks an Americans for Prosperity ad .
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Semafor that “even if he is a different kind of Democrat” — emphasizing the “if” — Turek’s association with his party leadership is still damaging.
“When he gets to Washington, DC, which isn’t going to happen, he’s going to get a lot of pressure to vote for a lot of these really wild schemes,” Grassley said.
Hinson describes her opponent’s campaign as a “tale of two Tureks. In the primary, he was trashing the president, and now he’s saying that he wants to work with him. I know Iowans are going to see right through that.”
The charge clearly irks Turek who said Hinson’s “masquerading. I mean that’s a problem for me. I’m genuinely a bipartisan person,” he added. “She has been partisan. … Just be who you are.”
And on the day of Trump’s latest Iowa visit, Sioux City newspaper readers were greeted with an ad bragging that Turek “voted with Republicans 700+ times.”
Turek called it “fearmongering” to portray his candidacy as empowering the left, vowing to “100%” be a check on his party’s liberal impulses.
“‘What do you think about impeachment?’ No interest in that. I believe we should look forward, not backwards,” Turek said.
Turek’s been a lonely Democrat before: He and state Rep. J.D. Scholten, D-Iowa, were the only Democrats representing Western Iowa in the Iowa House for years. Scholten told Semafor that experience positions Turek to convert frustrated Republicans.
“We don’t have the luxury of talking just to Democrats out here in Western Iowa,” Scholten said. “You have to talk to everybody, and I think that has benefited him in a huge way.”
“He’s our best candidate since [former Sen. Tom] Harkin,” Scholten added.
Polls show the race as essentially tied, with little real movement for months. Amid the deadlock, Hinson is making her own play for the center.
“That’s a tradition in Iowa,” Grassley explained. “They expect us to represent Iowa interests and not just the interests of whoever’s president of the United States.”
She is a sitting House Republican, with her own voting record in support of the president’s agenda, including the tax cut law. She’s also campaigning with Trump down the stretch, even as she criticized a polarizing ad by Ohio’s GOP gubernatorial nominee that Trump defended.
After supporting it in several House votes, Hinson now opposes Trump’s Iran war and is breaking with his Russia dealmaking. Asked if she should have voted against the Iran conflict when she had a chance, she said: “I look forward. That’s how I always operate. And when you look at where we are right now, I’ve asked the president to end the war.”
Asked about Turek’s charge that she’s making a late tack to the center for political expedience, Hinson whacked Turek for missing votes in the statehouse and said “it’s exactly the opposite.”
“He’s going to be voting with Chuck Schumer 100% of the time,” she predicted. Turek said he’d meet with any leadership candidates before making a decision on who should run the party.
Turek criticized Trump’s tariffs, the war, expired health care subsidies, and Medicaid cuts as inordinately harming Iowa. He also ticked off the areas on which “I agree” with the president.
“Let’s drive private equity out of housing. Let’s drive it out of healthcare. Let’s drive it out of nursing homes. … We should have no tax on tips, overtime, and Social Security. There’s a lot that we can agree on,” Turek said.
He said he would have supported the Laken Riley Act, a law tightening restrictions on non-citizens accused of crimes that still painfully splits Democrats. He also objected to the Democratic filibuster of a GOP data center bill and said his party erred in blockading a farm bill.
“The farm bill isn’t exactly as written as exactly what I would want. But I don’t think we should let perfection stand in the way of progress,” Turek said. “If I’m up there, I will vote for it.”
Iowa is reeling from high gas prices and a moribund agriculture market, causing dissatisfaction with the long-ruling GOP. Three Republican-held House seats are up for grabs, and Democrat Rob Sand is favored to win the governor’s race.
But no matter how much Turek appeals across the aisle, Republicans feel that the party will come home for Hinson as it has in every Senate race since 2010.
“I believe we’ve closed this gap,” said Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., after an event with Hinson. “We’ll prevail in a number of these states, Iowa being at the top of that list.”
Look beyond the attacks from both sides in Iowa, and you’ll see a good old-fashioned race for the middle here. It’s a reminder of what pre-Trump politics used to be like — and, perhaps, what they might be in the future.
The bevy of red-state centrist Democratic senators whom I first started covering in 2013 helped steer the party’s agenda to the middle and temper progressive priorities. Democrats might be starting to rebuild that wing of their party this year in Iowa, Kansas, and North Carolina.