Josh Turek flips Iowa Senate seat, giving Democrats a boost in the fight for the majority

Democrat Josh Turek defeated Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson to take Iowa’s open Senate seat, NBC News projects, a critical flip for his party in the fight for the majority.

Turek, a state representative who won a contested primary this year with the tacit backing of Democratic leaders in Washington, effectively tied Hinson to President Donald Trump and a Republican agenda in Washington that proved unpopular with voters in Iowa.

Turek hammered Hinson on her repeated votes backing Trump’s trade war, which has hurt Iowa producers and consumers, and the war with Iran, which has contributed to rising prices for gas, diesel fuel and products that are transported into and around the state.

The victory could not have come at a more opportune moment for Democrats. To wrest control of the Senate from Republicans, they needed a net gain of at least four seats. Democrats had not won a Senate seat in Iowa in nearly two decades.

Hinson leaned heavily on her record over three terms in the House and Iowa’s Republican tilt, but she could not overcome Trump’s sagging approval ratings and voter frustrations about the cost of living.

As was the case across the country, Trump and his agenda played an outsize role in the Iowa race. Hinson was forced to perform a high-wire act in which she simultaneously courted Trump’s MAGA base and tried to find ways to distance herself from him.

In September, after the last of her seven votes against efforts to end the war, Hinson announced that she believed the conflict should come to an end. That positioned her closer to the sentiments of Iowans but gave Turek the opening he needed to call her a flip-flopper.

On Oct. 21, the day Trump held a rally in Sioux City to bolster Hinson and other Republican candidates in Iowa, Hinson told “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Llamas that she was not disappointed in Trump. But despite a voting record in lockstep with his priorities, she argued that she has no trouble working with — or standing up to — presidents of both parties.

“I work alongside the president. When he’s right for Iowa, I’m going to tell him. When he’s wrong for Iowa, I’m going to tell him,” she said. “But that’s not a change for me in how I’ve operated. I’ve always worked with both sides to get things done for Iowa.”

Hours before Trump’s arrival, she separated from her party’s leaders by condemning Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s controversial ad featuring the mother of Democratic rival Amy Acton. In the ad, which Trump and Vice President JD Vance expressed support for, Acton’s mother accuses her of being a liar. Acton and her brother say they were removed from the family home after allegations that her mother’s husband sexually abused Acton.

“It’s terrible. I think about it as a mom, and you think about your kids surviving childhood sexual abuse and having to relive that trauma on TV again,” she told ABC News. “I think it’s absolutely terrible, and I think they should take the ad down.”

Democrats’ bet on Turek’s narrative, and his ability to prosecute the case against Trump and Hinson, paid off. Born with spina bifida, which he attributes to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, Turek won gold medals in wheelchair basketball at the Summer Paralympics in 2016 and 2020. He then won election to the Iowa state House in 2022, becoming the first permanently disabled member of the Legislature.

He faced a divisive primary against state Sen. Zach Wahls in June but ended up cruising to victory, 63% to 37%. Hinson had an easier path to her party’s nomination because Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Tim Scott of South Carolina endorsed her in the fall of 2025, helping her clear the field of serious opponents. She won her primary with 75% of the vote in June.

Turek appeared to be the preferred candidate of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — though neither officially endorsed him — and Wahls used the signs of their support to paint Turek as beholden to them.

Hinson picked up on that argument and also accused Turek of standing with the far left of his party. She hammered him for missing votes in the Legislature in the early part of the year as he campaigned for his party’s nomination.

In debates and on the campaign trail, she noted that President Joe Biden signed two of her bills into law — one on preventing stillbirths and one to create a federal study of rural veterans’ mental health. Rather than pick fights with Trump, Hinson found niche ways to distance herself from the national party.

As one of the marquee matchups on the map, Iowa’s race attracted about $200 million between the two candidates’ committees and outside groups — more than the $167 million annual appropriation for state agriculture and natural resources programs Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law this summer.

The money kept flowing in large part because the race looked so close. For months, surveys showed a contest within the margin of error, with some finding Hinson in the lead and others finding Turek ahead.

In the end, Hinson was unable to free herself from the Trump anchor that Turek tied her to.