Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Rob Sand Is Worrying Iowa Republicans

At a recent stop at a brewery in Des Moines, Rob Sand, a Democrat running for governor, didn’t hold back about what the matter with Iowa is.

The state has among the worst economies of all 50 states in the country, he said. College-educated Iowans are leaving the state in droves. The state is in the grip of a health crisis, he said, with a rapidly growing rate of cancer.

Iowa also has sky-high rates of alcohol consumption, Mr. Sand added, prompting a few nervous chuckles from the bar.

“We should talk about the fact that consumption of alcohol is linked to cancer,” he said, facing a crowd holding pints of lagers and I.P.A.s. “So finish your beer, but think twice about having another one.”

Mr. Sand, the state auditor, is campaigning for governor by asking Iowans to take a hard look at their own state and how it has fared in recent years, when Republican legislators and governors have been in charge.

It is a counterintuitive pitch in a place that was once a swing state, electing both Democrats and Republicans in the statehouse and helping send Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in recent election cycles, Iowa has turned solid red, with Republicans occupying the governor’s mansion for the last 15 years, dominating both chambers of the State Legislature and filling all six of the state’s seats in Congress, and with President Trump winning re-election there in 2024 by more than 13 percentage points.

To win in Iowa, Mr. Sand, 43, would have to persuade a significant number of Republicans or independents to vote for a Democrat. (More voters in Iowa are registered with no party affiliation than with the Democratic Party, election data shows, and still more are registered as Republicans than either as Democrats or independents.) Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who became governor in 2017, announced last year that she would not seek a third term.

Yet the governor’s race in November is shaping up to be an unusually competitive one. So far, Mr. Sand has accumulated a formidable war chest: In 2025, his campaign amassed $9.5 million, out-raising all of his Republican opponents combined.

And in a midterm election year when polls suggest that President Trump is sinking in popularity, national Democrats see Mr. Sand as a candidate with a real chance to win. They also see his practical-sounding pitch that spurns strict partisanship as a test of how to broaden the party’s appeal.

Mr. Sand portrays himself as someone who eschews party identity in favor of common sense: Since first declaring his candidacy last year, Mr. Sand has advertised himself as a “governor for all” and repeated the slogan “Not redder or bluer, but better and truer.”

More than 1,500 registered Republicans have donated to his campaign, said Emma O’Brien, a spokeswoman for his campaign, along with more than 4,000 registered voters in Iowa who do not have a party affiliation.

Mr. Sand’s campaign signs don’t look particularly Democratic, designed in shades of forest green and blaze orange, a reminder of his oft-mentioned fondness for hunting, a tradition that is still strong in rural Iowa.

Though Mr. Sand is popular with nationally known Democratic leaders, he is not publicly leaning on them for help. Asked in an interview at the State Capitol which national Democrat he would like to campaign with him in Iowa, he paused and said, “Great question.” Then, he changed the subject.

Mr. Sand would rather talk about how Iowans have been mistreated by what he calls a series of poor decisions by state leaders and a broken “two-choice political system.”

“The bottom line is, I think we’re in a place here where a lot of the stuff that the folks running the state have done, they know in their hearts is actually a bad thing to do,” he said, citing the ballooning budget deficit and a school voucher program that he says gives preferential treatment to private schools.

At town halls across the state, Mr. Sand makes a point of asking audience members which party they belong to, applauding each political party and then asking the crowd to sing “America the Beautiful” together. Then he talks about the woes of the state and how his experience as state auditor and as an assistant attorney general who worked on white-collar-crime cases can help solve them.

“He’s certainly trying to make the race a referendum on how the state is going at the moment,” said Megan Goldberg, a political science professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

Mr. Sand still has an uphill battle ahead of him. The challenge, Ms. Goldberg said, is to lay out the problems the state is facing without coming across as overly critical of elected officials that Republican voters support.

“He’s not even talking about Republicans,” she said. “But if he starts saying, ‘Hey, this is Gov. Reynolds’ fault — this is President Trump’s fault,’ and you identify as a Republican, you feel attacked.”

Mr. Sand strikes as an unusual political figure in Iowa. Born in a small town in the northeast part of the state, he is the son of a doctor and a physical therapist for children with disabilities, and has been an avid hunter and fisherman since he was young. He attended Brown University to study political science, and then returned home to Iowa for law school, rejecting an offer from Harvard.

In his office in the State Capitol, he has hung rows of taxidermied deer heads and a dark bison hide, and he drives in a large Ford pickup around the state, where he has held town halls with voters for years.

To political observers in Iowa, it can feel as if Mr. Sand has been running for governor for a long time. He was the only non-incumbent Democrat to win statewide in Iowa in 2018, and won re-election by less than a percentage point in 2022.

Mr. Sand’s opponents have begun to warn that if elected, he would move Iowa further to the left, as some Democratic governors have done in other states. “We cannot have this state look like Minnesota or Illinois or California,” Representative Randy Feenstra, a Republican from northwest Iowa, told a group of voters in February. “That scares me.”

Polls suggest a tight race in the Republican primary on June 2, when five candidates, including Mr. Feenstra, will compete for their party’s nomination. Mr. Sand is running unopposed on the Democratic side.

That has led even some Republicans to see Mr. Sand as a real threat to their hold on the governor’s office. In the Legislature, lawmakers have moved to limit the governor’s emergency powers in a bill that is seen as an acknowledgment that Mr. Sand could be Governor Reynolds’s successor. In March, Mr. Sand was sitting on the steps of the State Capitol for an interview when a woman in a suit, a Republican lobbyist, half-jokingly greeted him as “Governor” as she hurried past.

Mr. Sand would be the first Democrat to win the governor’s office in two decades, after Chet Culver, who served one term from 2007 to 2011 before losing to a Republican, Terry Branstad.

In April, the Cook Political Report moved the Iowa governor’s race from “leans conservative” to “tossup.”