It was the final quarter of a US men’s national wheelchair basketball game at the Tokyo Paralympics against Turkey in 2021. Josh Turek was benched for most of the game. Fouled soon after coming in, Turek sank both his free throws to widen the US’ two-point lead in a game it went on to win. Turek, who played in all eight US men’s games at that year’s Paralympics—the team went on to win gold—had no complaints about sitting out most of the game. Ryan Neiswender, Turek’s teammate on that squad, called him a consummate team player.
Playing wheelchair basketball on a national team requires people to be self-sufficient, prepping on their own for most of the year. If an athlete doesn’t put in that work, it shows. “Nobody wins a medal by themselves,” Neiswender told me. “You have to have someone that you can rely on, that you can trust, that you can take at their word…Josh never showed up unprepared.”
Now a second-term representative in Iowa’s state legislature, representing Pottawattamie County—which has voted red in every Presidential election since 1968—Turek is vying for the seat that Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst will vacate at the end of her term. Ernst herself flipped what was then a blue seat from former Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin, who represented Iowa in the Senate from 1985 to 2015; she announced in September that she wouldn’t run for re-election after immense backlash to her comments on President Trump’s then-proposed Medicaid cuts at a May 2025 town hall: Ernst notoriously responded to an audience member’s remark that “people will die” with “We all are going to die.” Her popularity among moderates never recovered.
Turek was born with spina bifida, linked to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during his service in Vietnam, a condition that compelled him to have 21 surgeries by the age of 12. His family grew up poor; the Tureks shared clothes from Goodwill, and Josh qualified for free lunch programs, attending college thanks to the financial support of his state’s vocational rehabilitation program.
“Look, I certainly didn’t win the genetic lottery. Didn’t win it economically,” Turek told me, “but I worked incredibly hard to get a bachelor’s degree [in history], to get a master’s degree [in business], to be able to represent my country on the field of play, to win gold medals.”
From 2002 to 2016, Turek played professional basketball abroad in Italy, France and Spain before transitioning into disability-focused work, including as an account manager for mobility equipment supplier Numotion. His entry into politics was a narrow win in 2022 against another newcomer, Sarah Abdouch, for an open seat in the Iowa House, which he won by less than 1 percent.
In August, early in his second term, Turek drew national attention for the first time with an advertisement announcing his run for Ernst’s seat in which he pushed his manual wheelchair through the streets of Iowa, declaring his status as an underdog and calling out Ernst’s town hall comments devaluing the lives of Medicaid recipients.
At the time, Turek faced a crowded field. The candidates vying to replace Ernst included JD Scholten, a state legislator with several years’ more political experience, who drew national recognition in 2019 for nearly unseating GOP Rep. Steve King—after King said, in a New York Times interview, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?”—and Nathan Sage, a veteran and former head of a municipal chamber of commerce. Sage, supported by Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, dropped out and endorsed Turek in February.
Scholten, like Turek, represents a traditionally conservative area; a fellow athlete and good friend of Turek’s, he dropped out after Turek entered the race. The consolidation of the field has fueled speculation that Turek is national Democrats’ candidate of choice—Turek’s final remaining opponent, former Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls, has claimed that Turek has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s behind-the-scenes endorsement.
In a purple state like Iowa, where up-front association with Schumer and national Democrats might be seen as a poison pill, both the candidate and the party have been cagey. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee didn’t respond to questions on whether it had a role in Turek’s opponents dropping out. Scholten has simply said that “getting out, getting behind [Turek], helping him, was the right thing to do…There’s not a better Democrat in Iowa or probably in the country who can talk about the impact of Medicaid on their life than Josh.”
Wahls, popular among his peers, was himself elected the Iowa state Senate’s minority leader in 2020: he speaks proudly about his two moms, has Turek beat on endorsements from organized labor, and has accused Turek of being poised to follow the Democratic status quo—Wahls has said he would oppose Schumer as Democrats’ leader in the Senate during the first debate and challenged Turek, who declined to make any commitment on that front, to do the same. It was a contentious episode in a debate where the candidates otherwise seemed to be mostly on the same page.
Whoever wins the primary will likely run against House Rep. Ashley Hinson, who has represented Iowa in Congress since 2021 and voted for Trump’s brutal cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. Trump endorsed Hinson, a former news anchor, in August, making her victory against former GOP state Sen. Jim Carlin all but guaranteed. In the first quarter of 2026, Hinson raised $2.36 million, around the same amount as Turek and Wahls combined (Turek also recently received millions of dollars in support from VoteVets, a Democratic Party–aligned political action group pushing for the needs of veterans). Recent polls have placed Turek significantly above Wahls, and both are neck-and-neck with Hinson in prospective general election matchups.
The Iowa Democratic Party is not an especially well-oiled machine. Iowa has become more consistently Republican over the past decade, both in national elections and races for statewide office. Iowa Democrats have been largely ineffective at stemming the tide. But lessons from recent elections in the state could offer a path forward.
After Harkin, a popular Democratic senator and one of the original sponsors of the Americans with Disabilities Act, retired, his successor, Rep. Bruce Bailey, didn’t even face a primary. Drake University political scientist Rachel Paine Caufield believes that contributed to his defeat by Ernst in 2014 by almost eight percent: Ernst ran “as somebody who would really challenge orthodoxies in Washington,” a promise Caufield says Ernst hasn’t lived up to.
Caufield believes that a competitive Democratic primary this year may work in Democrats’ favor, especially if Hinson’s status as a sitting national politician—a DC insider—doesn’t help in a populist swing state like Iowa. A vote for a Democrat from an independent or Republican voter in the general election, after all, would most likely be a rebuke of Trump.
When Turek first announced he was running this past August, he positioned himself as a common-sense moderate and a populist who could appeal to voters in his state. He may be right: research suggests that a bigger dose of economic populism could help Democrats in the Rust Belt. A 2025 report found that candidates portraying themselves more as populists than as Democrats were more likely to win over voters in the surveyed states of Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Courting those swing voters, Turek hasn’t offered the kind of rhetoric around Trump that many Democrats are now demanding. Turek’s own father, the candidate acknowledges, voted for Trump three times. Trump “accurately diagnosed that the status quo was not working and is not working for working families and for the middle class,” Turek said to me last fall. “We need to once again be the party of the American worker…fighting for health care, fighting for social and economic justice, fighting for the most vulnerable.”
Turek has criticized Trump for federal trade policies that hurt local farmers, as has Wahls: Trump’s tariffs, they point out, palpably hurt farmers and other Iowans, as do the GOP’s Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy. And Turek says that he strongly opposes ICE’s current escalation of occupations and deportations—though, as Wahls pointed out in a debate, Turek was one of three Iowa Democrats to vote for a 2024 anti-immigration bill that aimed to make undocumented immigration a crime, rather than a civil infraction. On other issues, especially health care, Turek and Wahls don’t vary as greatly; in some respects, both face a question familiar to female candidates and politicians of color: are they likeable enough to win?
Turek told me that he’d like to expand Medicaid funding, even after repealing the Medicaid cuts associated with the One Big Beautiful Bill. Thousands of “disabled Iowans are on [the] Medicaid waitlist right now,” he said, pointing out that those waits could run up to seven years. “That’s fundamentally wrong.”
Disability issues, a focus of Turek’s, have historically been fairly bipartisan, and Turek has a record of collaboration with disabled people across the state to work on various bills.
“He can talk to people and relate to them because he’s been there,” said Alex Watters, a former city councilor in Sioux City, Iowa, and a friend of Turek’s. “He’s [gone] through a lot of these hardships himself,” said Watters, who has a spinal cord injury.
Jenn Wolff, a disabled city councilor in Waverly, Iowa, worked with Turek on a 2023 bill to get chemicals out of catheters in 2023. “It didn’t pass,” Wolff said, “but made it through that first committee—not many Democrats get that far.” She called Turek “one of those legislators who is truly trying to create change by working across lines, which we’ve kind of lost.”
But since the beginning of his first term, in January 2023, none of the more than 80 bills Turek introduced have become law. (Wahls has a similar record, with just one bill he sponsored passing.) Only a handful, not counting nonbinding resolutions, even made it to approval votes in the relevant committees or subcommittees. Republicans control both chambers of Iowa’s state legislature, and the fact that Turek’s bills related to disability, in particular, were not even voted on in committee speaks to Republicans’ lack of enthusiasm for those issues. But it also raises the specter of Turek winning only to be similarly locked out of another GOP-dominated legislature—just on a larger scale. Will Turek be able to push legislation through the Senate if it remains red despite a Democratic win in Iowa? It’s the kind of bipartisan thinking national Democrats love, but the evidence doesn’t seem to support it.
Still, Turek has won the backing of longtime members of Congress with high hopes for him—like former Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a Senate heavyweight known for advancing disability legislation during his 18 years in office, who called Turek the best candidate to fight Medicaid rollbacks.
Former Rep. Tony Coelho, a longtime House representative from California and the primary author of the ADA, has also endorsed Turek.
“I have a lot of people all over the country who are asking for support, and I’ve eliminated most of them,” Coelho told me. “But I’m particularly interested in Josh.” Coelho called Turek a candidate who could bring “a disability voice” to the Senate —an heir to Casey in pushing disability legislation, and a fellow Democrat from an agricultural area who could bolster the party’s standing among farmers. Earlier in May, Turek received the endorsement of Harkin himself—perhaps a difficult commitment for the former senator, who officiated the wedding of Turek’s rival, Wahls, in 2021.
A May 21 poll from Public Policy Polling gives Turek a “commanding lead” of more than 20 points in the primary—but doesn’t say anything about his, or a generic Democrat’s, odds in the general.
“This race is not going to be an easy race by any means,” Scholten told me, “and it’s going to take a special candidate, and a special campaign, to pull it off for a Democrat to win here.”
