Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek won the Democratic Senate primary Tuesday, June 3, defeating state Sen. Zach Wahls in a race that became a proxy battle between national party leaders and the anti-establishment wing of the Iowa Democratic Party.
Turek, a wheelchair basketball player who competed on two Paralympic gold-medal teams, will now face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in a general election race that both parties see as critical for control of the U.S. Senate. Preprimary polls showed the two in a statistical tie going into the fall.
The primary fight
The race turned ugly fast. Wahls accused Turek of being owned by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — who didn’t formally endorse but whose leadership PAC maxed out to Turek’s campaign — and outside groups including VoteVets, which spent more than $10 million on advertising for Turek. That figure is more than three times what both campaigns spent combined.
Turek’s backing wasn’t just national. Former Sen. Tom Harkin, the last Democrat to hold an Iowa Senate seat, endorsed him — as did a number of prominent state Democrats who saw Turek’s “prairie populism” pitch, focused on working-class economic concerns, as the better general-election argument.
The stakes
Democrats haven’t won an Iowa Senate race since 2008, when Harkin was elected to his final term. Turek would be the first Democrat to flip the seat since then — a long shot that the party now considers reachable, with Iowa’s agriculture sector rattled by the Trump administration’s tariffs and broader economic frustration climbing.
Turek was first elected to the Iowa House of Representatives in 2022. That race wasn’t clean either: he beat his Republican opponent by six votes.
Whether that margin or the $10 million outside-spending advantage translates against Hinson in a statewide race hasn’t been tested yet. No general election date has been set.
Originally reported by Politico. Read the original report.
