“The Guy Who Doesn’t Live in Iowa”: Report Exposes Carpetbagger and Career Political Operative Zach Lahn
DES MOINES – New reporting from the New Yorker exposes Zach Lahn as a Kansas carpetbagger and career political operative who Iowa voters know as “the guy that doesn’t live in Iowa.”
The report spotlights Lahn’s extreme agenda that is out-of-touch with Iowans, including banning certain cancer treatments, accusing public school teachers of indoctrinating students while using his private school in Kansas to push far-right political ideologies onto kids, and welcoming an endorsement from avowed white supremacist and disgraced former Congressman Steve King.
Read more from the New Yorker here, or key points below:
- Lahn had been a registered voter in Iowa for only nineteen months when he won the June 2nd primary … He had worked for Republican politicians in Colorado and Montana and for [a] conservative dark-money group.
- Lahn has often flown his plane back and forth to Kansas … If elected, he has said, “We’d be in Iowa as much as humanly possible.”
- He calls his candidacy “a repudiation of the special interests, the corporate interests, and the lobbyists,” though he chose as his running mate Derek Wulf, a former Cargill employee who chairs the agriculture committee in Iowa’s House.
- He is also leaning heavily into language familiar to MAGA Republicans—declaring, for example, that Iowa’s school curriculum has been hijacked by Marxists … He welcomed an endorsement from Steve King, the far-right former U.S. House member, who was stripped of his committee assignments in 2019 after questioning why the term “white nationalist” was offensive and was defeated in the next Republican primary.
- The Democrats in Iowa are tapping into significant voter dissatisfaction. Young people are leaving the state in large numbers. Rural health-care clinics are closing, even as Iowa has one of the highest cancer-incidence rates in the country. The Republican legislature recently implemented a flat income tax, and the state government is expected to run a budget deficit of $1.2 billion this fiscal year. Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have reduced markets for many of Iowa’s agricultural goods, while the Iran war has driven up the costs of diesel fuel and fertilizer. The President angered many rural voters last month when he announced that he would permit the import of up to six hundred million pounds of ground beef for sale at twenty-five per cent below market rates.
- For Sand and Turek to break the G.O.P. streak, they will need to persuade voters like Denny Whalen, a retired teacher in Indianola who doesn’t follow politics closely. He has voted for Republicans and Democrats but thinks that both parties these days are too extreme … Whalen, who said he favors “middle of the road on so many things,” explained, “I’m really torn between Rob Sand and the guy that doesn’t live in Iowa.” A few weeks later, Whalen had decided: he plans to vote for Sand.
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