Iowa’s Water Crisis Crashed the Midterms

Iowa voters exemplified a national trend of flipping federal House and Senate seats from red to blue on Tuesday night, while also electing the state’s first Democratic governor in 20 years and ousting a Republican attorney general with deep financial ties to corporate agriculture.

Rob Sand won the governor’s seat against his MAHA opponent Zach Lahn. Josh Turek’s win in Iowa clinched Democratic control of the Senate last night. Nate Willems bested incumbent attorney general Brenna Bird, who has been criticized for alleged “sweetheart deals” for polluting agribusinesses. Christina Bohannon, Sarah Trone Garriott and Lindsay James flipped three of four Iowa House seats from red to blue.

However, an underdog candidate for Secretary of Agriculture in the nation’s pork capital failed to cross the finish line.

Democratic candidate Chris Jones, a retired water scientist, spent his campaign challenging the state’s agricultural status quo. He campaigned on transitioning Iowa away from industrial agriculture and seeking stricter regulations for large farms as the state grapples with a water quality crisis from increased agricultural pollution. He himself has admitted he did not expect to win when he began his campaign (corporate agribusiness donates to many political campaigns in Iowa), but he gained surprising momentum and thousands of donations from individuals across the state.

The state houses nearly 11,000 factory farms which produce an estimated 170 billion pounds of manure each year.

“Iowa is not the same as when we started this campaign in January,” Jones wrote in a statement late Tuesday night. “When we started, few other candidates were even talking about water quality as an issue. Iowa residents were left to wonder if their government would ever take the issue seriously.”

Jones lost his election to incumbent Mike Naig, who has held the position since 2018, with 47% of the vote to Naig’s 53%.

Naig, 48, is a former lobbyist for Monsanto, now Bayer, the nation’s largest agrochemical company. In addition to Bayer, he received financial backing from major Iowa pork producers, ethanol companies and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.

“Tonight, Iowans rejected divisive rhetoric and attacks on our farming community, choosing instead a positive vision for the future of Iowa agriculture,” Naig wrote in an early morning Facebook post on his campaign page.

“We’ll continue to strengthen Iowa agriculture by building markets internationally, domestically, and locally, working together to improve water quality, protecting our food supply, and ensuring our farms remain strong for the next generation.”

Iowa Gets First Democratic Governor in Decades

The Hawkeye state will have its first Democratic governor in over two decades after Tuesday night.

Democrat Sand, the current Iowa state auditor, won his seat over the Republican candidate, businessman and farmer Lahn, who has close ties to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.

Sand campaigned on day-to-day issues for Iowans such as lowering healthcare costs and improving water quality, saying he would invest in more water quality monitoring and make manure records publicly accessible for Iowans. He also said he would create a cabinet-level Cancer Task Force to combat the state’s rising cancer rates.

Sand raised a record $54 million. Some of his largest donations came from his wife and in-laws, the executives of Iowa-based The Lauridsen Group, Inc. This company owns subsidiaries that create and distribute animal feed, pet food, dairy products and other livestock industry byproducts for medical and food companies.

Sand, in his across-the-aisle approach seen throughout the campaign trail, thanked his opponent Lahn on Tuesday night, saying he was glad to see someone win a Republican nomination talking about water quality and cancer.

“Let’s use that bipartisan support from Iowa voters to actually get our water cleaned up and our cancer rates under control,” he said.

Iowa Attorney General-Elect Vows to Address Corporate Pollution

Iowa’s newly elected top lawyer campaigned on holding corporate polluters accountable. Democrat Willems won the Iowa attorney general seat Tuesday night over incumbent Republican Brenna Bird.

Willems, 47, a former state representative, campaigned on bringing more penalties to companies with histories of environmental pollution. He has criticized Bird for allegedly giving sweetheart deals to fertilizer and meatpacking companies, and for not pursuing additional legal action against a Shell Rock, Iowa bioprocessing facility that polluted the air with a probable carcinogen for several years.

Iowa Senate Seat

Democrat Turek, a current Iowa state representative, flipped a contested Senate seat Tuesday night, ousting Republican Ashley Hinson.

Hinson, the 43-year-old former broadcast journalist, was closely aligned with President Donald Trump throughout her race. From her seat in Congress, she introduced the Save Our Bacon Act in 2025. This contested legislation would overturn statewide referendums on agriculture, such as California’s Proposition 12.

On the campaign trail, she painted Turek as aligned with “radical vegan activists” as she made promises to remove regulation for agriculture producers.

Turek, a 47-year-old paraplegic athlete, told the Iowa Capitol Dispatch he does not support the Save Our Bacon Act and wants to create legislation to benefit small farmers over large multinational meatpacking companies. Iowa Farmers Union, a nonprofit that advocates for family farms, endorsed Turek, their first endorsement of a federal candidate in over a decade.

Addressing a crowd in Des Moines on Tuesday night, he said he campaigned on ending the U.S. war in Iran and ending Trump’s “chaotic tariffs,” which he said are “killing farmers and hurting our rural communities.”

“I am going up to the United States Senate to pass a farm bill and a farm bill for small family farmers in rural communities, not just Big Ag,” he said.

Turek said he will also fight to address the root cause of Iowa’s cancer crisis, “which is our water quality crisis.”

“Every Iowan deserves — when they turn on their tap — to ensure that their water is not giving them cancer,” he said.