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Our verdict

Hinson, on the record she actually has

Election Day is November 3. In-person early voting in Iowa runs October 14 through November 2. This is the whole race — the platforms, the records, the worst claims against each candidate, and what the sources actually show. This race's ugliest fight is over who bothered to show up for work, and for once the fact-checkers have a clean answer. LiberalMind endorses Ashley Hinson — with one claim in her own advertising named below as false. Read the research.

How Iowa got here

This seat is open because Sen. Joni Ernst chose to leave it. First elected in 2014 and re-elected in 2020, Ernst — the first female combat veteran elected to the U.S. Senate — announced on September 2, 2025, that she would not seek a third term. "Having been raised in a family who has given me so much love and support, now, as our family ages and grows, it's my time for me to give back to them," she said. "After a tremendous amount of prayer and reflection, I will not be seeking reelection in 2026."

The primaries, held June 2, were not close. U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson, who had announced her candidacy the day Ernst withdrew and collected endorsements from both Ernst and President Trump, won the Republican nomination with 74% of the vote. State Rep. Josh Turek won the Democratic nomination with 62.6% over state Sen. Zach Wahls. A third candidate, Libertarian Thomas Laehn, the Greene County Attorney, is also on the ballot.

The ratings tell a story of a state changing under everyone's feet. Cook Political Report moved the race from Lean Republican to Toss Up on August 20. Sabato's Crystal Ball followed to Toss-up on September 22. Inside Elections, the holdout, rates it Tilt Republican. Trump carried Iowa by 13 points in 2024, and Ernst won this seat by only about 7 in 2020. Democrats have not won an Iowa Senate race since Tom Harkin in 2008 — but they have not had an open seat, a Paralympian challenger, and a farm economy under tariff pressure all at once, either.

Why this seat is in play

Iowa's economy is the subtext of every ad in this race. Corn and soybean markets, fertilizer and diesel costs, and tariff policy run through the polling: Cook cited "concerns about economic pressures on Iowa's farm economy" in moving the race to a toss-up. Layered over it is a war in Iran that both candidates have been forced to price in Iowan terms — gas prices, input costs, and tens of billions sent overseas. Hinson has broken publicly with her own president twice in six weeks on exactly those grounds. Turek's entire campaign is built on the proposition that she hasn't broken nearly enough.

Ashley Hinson (Republican)

Her platform: Hinson, a former television reporter first elected to the U.S. House in 2020, runs on her record and on alignment with the president: "She is working alongside President Trump to secure our borders, cut wasteful spending, and put our country back on the path to prosperity." She is pro-life — she co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which would establish a right to life from fertilization, and she says flatly: "I am pro-life and pro-family… Taxpayer dollars should not fund abortion providers or abortions." In Iowa terms she champions year-round E15 biofuel sales, restoration of the biodiesel tax credit, a temporary gas-tax suspension, and permitting reform for domestic energy production. She voted for the SAVE Act, requiring proof of citizenship to register for federal elections.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: Her vote for the 2025 tax law will leave 110,000 Iowans without health insurance. This is Turek's central attack, and it is built from real numbers assembled misleadingly. Iowa fact-checkers working from KFF's state-level modeling found that the 2025 law itself accounts for roughly 80,000 additional uninsured Iowans by 2034. The larger 110,000 figure folds in a separate event — the expiration of the enhanced Affordable Care Act premium subsidies, which lapsed under their own sunset, not by Hinson's vote. Both numbers are projections a decade out, not counts of people who have lost coverage. Hinson's own counter is a specific one: the same law, her campaign says, "delivered more than $209 million for rural healthcare in Iowa" — a reference to the law's rural health fund. A voter weighing this fight should hold both ends: the law traded coverage reductions in Medicaid for targeted rural-health money, and reasonable people can price that trade differently. What they cannot honestly do is what both ads do — quote only their half.

Claim: She is a rubber stamp for Trump. Turek said it to her face at their October 22 encounter alongside the president himself. The record complicates it. On September 22, Hinson posted that the Iran war "needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end," and proposed a gas-tax suspension, a diesel-export pause, and E15 expansion as fuel prices bit into farm budgets. On October 22, with Trump in Iowa campaigning for her, she repeated her break with him over his Russia sanctions waiver: "I don't think we need to be making any more deals with Russia." That is not a profile in courage on the scale of a career — she voted for the tax law, the border funding, and the party's program — but on the two questions where Iowa's interests and the president's diverged this fall, she said so out loud, once of them in his presence. In the Texas piece we measured John Cornyn against a simple standard: represent your state to Washington, not Washington to your state. On fuel and Russia, Hinson has done the former.

Claim, from her own campaign: "the largest tax cuts in history." Hinson's advertising says she "passed President Trump's working families tax cuts and delivered the largest tax cuts in history." The numbers in the ad — up to $6,100 more in wages, up to $9,900 more in take-home pay for a family of four, 600,000 seniors benefiting from "no tax on Social Security" — are campaign figures, and the superlative is wrong. PolitiFact examined the identical claim about the 2025 law and rated it Mostly False: measured as a share of the economy, the Tax Foundation ranks the law third since 1980 when the extension of the 2017 cuts is counted, and about sixth or seventh counting new cuts alone. Reagan's 1981 cut remains the largest. And the law does not impose "no tax on Social Security" — it added a temporary extra deduction for taxpayers 65 and older. The tax law is a genuinely conservative achievement. It does not need, and does not survive, the exaggeration.

The flaw, plainly: Hinson's flaw is salesmanship, not substance. Her record — pro-life, tax cuts, border enforcement, biofuels, a 98.9% voting attendance rate across her House career — is the record she claims it is, with one advertising superlative that fact-checkers have rejected and that she should retire. Voters who want the Cornyn standard applied should also note where she has already met it: on the two occasions this fall when her state's fuel prices and her president's Russia policy collided, she chose Iowa in public.

Josh Turek (Democratic)

His platform: Turek, elected to the Iowa House in 2022, is a former professional wheelchair basketball player and three-time Paralympic medalist who first won his Council Bluffs-area seat by six votes. He calls himself a "common-sense" moderate and a "prairie populist," and the Des Moines Register noted he "casts a more moderate image" meant to appeal to independents and disaffected Republicans. His stated agenda: economic policy for "the middle class and workers rather than Wall Street and billionaire donors," strong public education, opposition to school vouchers, major reform of "Iowa's broken health care system," and environmental protection of "the air, food, and water we all rely on." He was endorsed by former President Barack Obama.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: He skipped 58% of his votes this year and took the money anyway. Unlike most attack lines in this series, this one checks out. PolitiFact Iowa independently counted the Iowa House journal: Turek missed 261 of 445 floor votes between January 12 and April 2, 2026 — about 58% — and rated Hinson's narrow statement that he "skipped 58% of the votes at the Statehouse this year" True. Gray Media's Iowa bureau, reviewing the same journal, put his absence rate at 58.1% for 2026 floor votes — the second-highest among the chamber's 100 members. Among the missed votes was the Iowa Farm Bill on May 2; Turek was on an approved leave of absence and filed a statement that he would have supported it. Hinson's campaign adds that he collected his full taxpayer-funded per diem of more than $20,000 while absent; that figure is her campaign's, offered alongside the verified absence rate. Turek's defense is that he was campaigning — "I'm out meeting Iowans all over all 99 counties" — and his counterattack, that Hinson "missed 193 votes," compares unlike things: his number counts her floor and committee absences across her entire service since 2021. On floor votes alone, she has missed about 1.1% — five of 314 this year. A candidate who asks for a promotion to the U.S. Senate while missing most of his current job's votes, whatever the reason, hands voters a fact no framing can move.

Claim: Hinson took $50,000 in taxpayer money for a luxury D.C. apartment while a multimillionaire. Turek raised this in debate. The money is real: Hinson claimed about $50,000 over three years under the standard congressional lodging-expense reimbursement program available to House members. The "luxury" framing is not supported — fact-checkers found the apartment priced close to the average cost of housing in Washington, upscale but not extravagant. It is also a program Turek's own side of the Capitol uses in state form: Hinson notes he took Iowa's per diem while absent. Both are legal reimbursements; only one of them was paired with missing most of the session.

What he actually believes: Strip the heartland presentation and the policy core is his party's standard program. He supports a public health insurance option, restoring the enhanced ACA subsidies, and reversing the 2025 law's Medicaid provisions. On abortion he would not merely defend Iowa's law — he wrote and sponsored legislation to repeal Iowa's six-week abortion ban, and he pledges to restore Roe v. Wade as federal law nationwide: "Women should make decisions about their reproductive health care, not politicians." One political analyst summed up the construction: Turek and the Democratic governor nominee "lay heartland aesthetics over their left-leaning politics."

The flaw, plainly: Turek's flaw is twofold, and either half would do. The first is values: a public option and a federal Roe statute are not moderate deviations from the Democratic program — they are the Democratic program, delivered in a Paralympian's voice. The Manchin exception — the rare Democrat whose own record breaks with his party on the things that matter — does not describe a candidate whose signature state legislation was repealing his state's abortion law. The second is the verified record of absence: 58% of floor votes missed, second-worst in the chamber, while drawing full per diem. Iowans are being asked to hire a man to a harder job on the strength of his attendance at the easier one.

Thomas Laehn (Libertarian)

His platform: Laehn, the Greene County Attorney, notes with justifiable pride that he was "the first Libertarian to hold an elective partisan office in Iowa." His pitch is constitutional fidelity: "When I was elected County Attorney, I swore an oath to defend the Constitution, as does every elected official in the United States. However, unlike our members of Congress, I took my oath seriously." He has attacked the use of eminent domain for private carbon-capture pipelines — the Summit Carbon Solutions project — arguing landowners' rights cannot be overridden for a private company, and describes himself as radically pro-life while arguing abortion is a question the Constitution leaves to the states. Polling puts him around 2%.

The flaw, plainly: Laehn's instincts — constitutional limits, property rights against corporate eminent domain, taking the oath seriously — are this publication's instincts. The gap is the familiar one: no caucus, no coalition, and no account of defense or governance beyond refusal. He is a principled protest with a law degree, in a race that will be decided between the other two.

The verdict: Hinson, on the record she actually has

This race offers Iowa a clear values choice dressed up as a personality contest. One candidate's program is tax cuts, border enforcement, biofuels, and the right to life, with two public breaks from her own president where Iowa's interests required it. The other's is a public option, a federal abortion statute, and a verified record of not showing up.

LiberalMind endorses Ashley Hinson. Not because her advertising is accurate — its biggest claim is not, and we have said so — but because her voting record is what she says it is, and her opponent's is too. The attendance gap in this race is not a talking point; it is 261 missed votes against five. Iowa tried the experiment of senators who stop listening to it; it was called the Cornyn lesson in Texas, and it is why this seat is open at all. Hinson has, so far, listened.

Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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