Zach Lahn’s victory in Iowa’s gubernatorial primary on Tuesday is a rare instance of Republican voters rejecting Donald Trump, who has used his endorsement to elevate proteges and oust rivals nationwide ahead of the November midterm elections.
In the race to replace Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, who is not seeking re-election, the president had given Randy Feenstra, a congressman, his “Complete and Total Endorsement”, which would normally be enough to see him to victory. Instead, Lahn, a farmer and businessman, won Tuesday’s Republican primary with 38% of the vote to Feenstra’s 37.2%, according to the Associated Press.
The congressman’s shortcoming is unlikely to be an indication that the power of Trump’s endorsement had waned – a streak of victories has ousted Republican incumbents at the state and federal level. In recent weeks, Trump-endorsed candidates have triumphed over Thomas Massie, a Kentucky congressman; Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana senator; John Cornyn, a Texas senator; and five of the seven Indiana state senators who defied his redistricting demands.
In most of those races, Trump and his allies spent months orchestrating the successful primary challenges. But in Iowa, the president intervened in support of Feenstra only last week, amid polling that showed him struggling against Lahn and raised the possibility that no candidate would clear the 35% of the vote required to win the nomination and avoid a party convention.
“Nobody thought this could be done. We were outspent, opposed by the establishment, told to wait our turn,” Lahn said in a victory speech on Tuesday. “Well, tonight the people of Iowa had something to say about that, that we’re not going to wait anymore.”
The owner of an eastern Iowa farm that had been in his family for 105 years, Lahn campaigned against big agricultural businesses that he accused of ripping off farmers and driving up the state’s cancer rate, which is the second highest in the nation, according to the Iowa Cancer Registry.
“We have to find out what big ag and big pharma knew about the safety of their products, and when they knew it,” he said in his victory speech.
Turning Point Action backed his campaign, as well as Maha Pac, the political arm of the “make America healthy again” movement. Though tension has developed between its supporters and the Trump administration in recent months, Tony Lyons, co-president of the Maha Pac, said in a statement: “Thanks to the courage and leadership of President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, the Maha movement is alive and strong,” while calling Lahn “the likely future Maha governor of Iowa”.
Lahn, in turn, has embraced some Maha policies, including banning Covid vaccines and efforts to reduce the load of nitrates in Iowa’s water supply.
The GOP has dominated Iowa for the past decade, and no Democrat has won election as governor since 2006. But analysts believe Democrats may have their best shot to win the governor’s mansion in decades this year, thanks to a combination of Trump’s unpopularity and the candidacy of Rob Sand, the state auditor, who faced no opposition in the Democratic gubernatorial primary and is viewed as a strong candidate for the job.
In a memo released after the primary, Sand’s campaign attacked Lahn as “too extreme for Iowa” and a “Kansas carpetbagger”, pointing to reports that he has lived extensively in the state.
“As voters learn more about Lahn’s extreme record – from lying about where he lives to supporting policies that are making life worse for working families – they will see why he’s wrong for Iowa and send him packing back to Kansas,” the memo read.
