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.