Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate Rob Sand Is Worrying Iowa Republicans

At a current cease at a brewery in Des Moines, Rob Sand, a Democrat working for governor, did not maintain again about what the matter with Iowa is.

The state has among the many worst economies of all 50 states within the nation, he mentioned. College-educated Iowans are leaving the state in droves. The state is within the grip of a well being disaster, he mentioned, with a quickly growing charge of most cancers.

Iowa additionally has sky-high charges of alcohol consumption, Mr. Sand added, prompting a number of nervous chuckles from the bar.

“We should talk about the fact that consumption of alcohol is linked to cancer,” he mentioned, going through a crowd holding pints of lagers and IPAs “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 tough take a look at their very own state and the way it has fared lately, when Republican legislators and governors have been in cost.

It is a counterintuitive pitch in a spot that was as soon as a swing state, electing each Democrats and Republicans within the statehouse and serving to ship Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. But in current election cycles, Iowa has turned stable crimson, with Republicans occupying the governor’s mansion for the final 15 years, dominating each 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 greater than 13 share factors.

To win in Iowa, Mr. Sand, 43, must persuade a major variety of Republicans or independents to vote for a Democrat. (More voters in Iowa are registered with no social gathering affiliation than with the Democratic Party, election knowledge exhibits, and much more are registered as Republicans than both as Democrats or independents.) Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who grew to become governor in 2017, introduced final yr that she wouldn’t search a 3rd time period.

Yet the governor’s race in November is shaping as much as be an unusually aggressive one. So far, Mr. Sand has amassed a formidable battle chest: In 2025, his marketing campaign amassed $9.5 million, out-raising all of his Republican opponents mixed.

And in a midterm election yr when polls counsel that President Trump is sinking in reputation, nationwide Democrats see Mr. Sand as a candidate with an actual probability to win. They additionally see his practical-sounding pitch that spurns strict partisanship as a check of how you can broaden the social gathering’s attraction.

Mr. Sand portrays himself as somebody who eschews social gathering identification in favor of widespread sense: Since first declaring his candidacy final yr, Mr. Sand has marketed 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 marketing campaign, mentioned Emma O’Brien, a spokesperson for his marketing campaign, together with greater than 4,000 registered voters in Iowa who wouldn’t have a celebration affiliation.

Mr. Sand’s marketing campaign indicators do not look significantly Democratic, designed in shades of forest inexperienced and blaze orange, a reminder of his oft-mentioned fondness for searching, a convention that’s nonetheless sturdy in rural Iowa.

Although Mr. Sand is fashionable with nationally recognized Democratic leaders, he isn’t publicly leaning on them for assist. Asked in an interview on the State Capitol which nationwide Democrat he wish to marketing campaign with him in Iowa, he paused and mentioned, “Great question.” Then, I modified the topic.

Mr. Sand would moderately discuss how Iowans have been mistreated by what he calls a sequence of poor selections by state leaders and a damaged “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 mentioned, citing the ballooning price range deficit and a college voucher program that he says provides preferential remedy to non-public colleges.

At city halls throughout the state, Mr. Sand makes a degree of asking viewers members which social gathering they belong to, applauding every political social gathering after which asking the gang to sing “America the Beautiful” collectively. Then he talks in regards to the woes of the state and the way his expertise as state auditor and as an assistant legal professional normal who labored on white-collar-crime instances will help clear up them.

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

Mr. Sand nonetheless has an uphill battle forward of him. The problem, Ms. Goldberg mentioned, is to put out the issues the state is going through with out coming throughout as overly vital of elected officers that Republican voters help.

“He’s not even talking about Republicans,” she mentioned. “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 uncommon political determine in Iowa. Born in a small city within the northeast a part of the state, he’s the son of a health care provider and a bodily therapist for youngsters with disabilities, and has been an avid hunter and fisherman since he was younger. He attended Brown University to check political science, after which returned residence to Iowa for legislation college, rejecting a proposal from Harvard.

In his workplace within the State Capitol, he has hung rows of taxidermied deer heads and a darkish bison conceal, and he drives in a big Ford pickup across the state, the place he has held city halls with voters for years.

To political observers in Iowa, it could actually really feel as if Mr. Sand has been working for governor for a very long time. He was the one non-incumbent Democrat to win statewide in Iowa in 2018, and received re-election by lower than a share level in 2022.

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

Polls counsel a good race within the Republican major on June 2, when 5 candidates, together with Mr. Feenstra, will compete for his or her social gathering’s nomination. Mr. Sand is working unopposed on the Democratic aspect.

That has led even some Republicans to see Mr. Sand as an actual menace to their maintain on the governor’s workplace. In the Legislature, lawyers have moved to restrict the governor’s emergency powers in a invoice that’s seen as an acknowledgment that Mr. Sand might be Governor Reynolds’s successor. In March, Mr. Sand was sitting on the steps of the State Capitol for an interview when a lady in a go well with, a Republican lobbyist, half-jokingly greeted him as “Governor” as she hurried previous.

Mr. Sand can be the primary Democrat to win the governor’s workplace in twenty years, after Chet Culver, who served one time period from 2007 to 2011 earlier than shedding to a Republican, Terry Branstad.

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