With the Winter Olympics wrapped up, the Paralympic Games are about to kick off and Josh Turek is familiar with the stress the athletes with disabilities are about to experience, given he has competed in basketball four times and won two gold medals.
“And I’m really excited to see some of the Paralympic sports of the Winter Paralympics are really, really exciting, like sled hockey is amazing,” he told The Independent. “And I love to see the downhill skiing on the monoskis.”
But nowadays, Turek has probably an even tougher task ahead of him than winning the gold. The native of Council Bluffs, Iowa and state legislator is now running for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat.
Democrats currently have 47 Senate seats and if they want to recapture the majority, Iowa will be a key. They not only flip seats in Maine, which voted for Kamala Harris, or North Carolina, which narrowly lost but has a Democratic governor, but also red states such as Texas, Iowa or Alaska, which voted for Trump.
Iowa will be a tough task. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Iowa since 2008, when Tom Harkin won his final Senate race. That same year, Barack Obama won Iowa by nine points.
Iowa control would go south for Iowa Democrats from there. In 2010, Republicans won the governorship and a supermajority. Trump won Iowa three times in a row in 2016, 2020 and 2024, despite the fact Democrats hoped they could flip it in 2024. After Democrats briefly flipped two congressional seats in 2018, Republicans now control all four congressional seats.
But Turek says Democrats have a shot at winning the state. Democrats have a unique opportunity, given that the state’s Republican Governor Kim Reynolds is retiring and the Senate seat is open after Republican Joni Ernst declined to run.
“This is the first time since 1968 we’ve got an open Senate seat with an open governor’s race, and then we’ve got two open congressional seats, and so there’s no power of incumbency,” he said.
Particularly because of how Iowa is falling behind economically thanks to Trump’s tariffs, which the Supreme Court struck down, before Trump summarily levied 15 percent tariffs for 150 days.
The tariffs have particularly hit Iowa hard as soybean farmers have struggled to sell their product to China and even after negotiations, China has not purchased as much as it did in the past.
“It’s additionally, what you were looking at on tariffs, input prices were going dramatically higher because of this chaotic nature of the of the tariffs,” he said. “When you go out and in rural Iowa and I mean the nation in farm foreclosures, and you got farm suicides that are dramatically higher. And then these these communities, they’ll tell you, they’re they’re really hurting.”
Specifically, Turek hit Rep. Ashley Hinson, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Senate, for not voting to repeal the tariffs when they came up for a vote in Congress.
Turek is currently in a competitive primary against Zach Wahls, a state senator. So far, the field has been culled, with two of the former candidates, fellow state legislator JD Scholten and Nathan Sage, both endorsing Turek after they dropped out.
“I think we’ve got enough cookie-cutter Democrats and people that you know have come from privilege and in Ivy League educations,” Turek said. “What I’ve realized, especially in places like Iowa, what people want, is they want real. They want authentic.”
Turek has spina bifida, which means he often has to crawl up stairs in his wheelchair to knock on people’s doors. But he says people appreciate the effort on the campaign trail.
“They would, they would say, you’re an old school Democrat, you’re an FDR Democrat, you’re a JFK Democrat, a blue dog Democrat, however you want to define me, the definitions are irrelevant,” he said. “I think it’s that we need to be running candidates that are focusing on the middle class and on and on our workers.”
Turek said he wants to focus mostly on raising the minimum wage – including eliminating subminimum wage labor for people with disabilities – give collective bargaining for all workers and prevent Wall Street firms from buying single-family homes.
He also called for repealing the cuts to Medicaid in the One Big, Beautiful Bill. Those cuts caused a firestorm in Iowa as it put funding for the state’s rural hospitals at risk. During the deliberation around the bill, Ernst faced criticism when people said they would die because of Medicaid cuts and she said “We all are going to die.”
Ernst would announce her retirement a few months after the bill’s passage.
But Iowa still is an uphill battle for Democrats. Trump won it by 13.3 points in 2024, meaning it has swung more than 20 points since Obama won the state in 2008.
Still Turek is optimistic, specifically pointing to how he represents one of the reddest state legislative districts in the state.
“We aren’t a red state, we’re a common sense state that has masqueraded more red than what we are,” Turek said.
