Josh Turek, a former U.S. Paralympic wheelchair basketball player and a second-term Iowa state lawmaker, is running for the Senate seat Republican Joni Ernst will leave. His campaign is shaped by his disability story, his criticism of Ernst’s remarks about “pe
When Josh Turek came off the bench in the final quarter of a U.S. men’s wheelchair basketball game at the Tokyo Paralympics in 2021 against Turkey, he wasn’t angry. Fouled soon after coming in, Turek sank both his free throws to widen the U.S. two-point lead in a game it went on to win.
Turek played in all eight U.S. men’s games that year, when the team won gold. His teammate Ryan Neiswender later described what Turek’s bench role really meant: self-sufficiency, discipline, and preparation. “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. more than two decades after he began shaping his life around resilience—spina bifida. 21 surgeries by the age of 12. a childhood marked by poverty—Turek is trying to bring that same kind of credibility into politics. He is serving a second term in Iowa’s state legislature. representing Pottawattamie County. a place that has voted red in every Presidential election since 1968. Turek is vying for the seat Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst will vacate at the end of her term.
Ernst’s decision not to seek re-election has been tied to backlash over comments about President Trump’s then-proposed Medicaid cuts. At a May 2025 town hall. Ernst responded to an audience member’s remark that “people will die” with “We all are going to die.” Her popularity among moderates. the article says. never recovered.
Turek’s life story is central to why Democrats and disability advocates are betting his candidacy can feel different from the usual Beltway script. He was born with spina bifida. which the source links to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during his service in Vietnam. His family grew up poor; the Tureks shared clothes from Goodwill, and Josh qualified for free lunch programs. He attended college thanks to the financial support of his state’s vocational rehabilitation program.
In talking about his education and his place on the national stage. Turek told me. “Look. I certainly didn’t win the genetic lottery. Didn’t win it economically. ” before adding that he 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. he 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 came with a narrow win in 2022 against another newcomer. Sarah Abdouch. for an open seat in the Iowa House. He won by less than 1 percent.
In August. early in his second term. Turek drew national attention with an advertisement announcing his run for Ernst’s seat. The ad showed him pushing his manual wheelchair through the streets of Iowa as he declared his status as an underdog and called out Ernst’s town hall comments devaluing the lives of Medicaid recipients. An embedded video of the advertisement is included in the source.
The race he’s entered was never just a two-person contest at the start. The candidates vying to replace Ernst included JD Scholten. a state legislator with several years’ more political experience. and Nathan Sage. a veteran and former head of a municipal chamber of commerce. Scholten had drawn 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 Sage had been supported by Clinton administration Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.
Sage dropped out and endorsed Turek in February. Later, Scholten dropped out as well after Turek entered the race. The article says Scholten represents a traditionally conservative area and that he was a fellow athlete and good friend of Turek’s. The consolidation has fueled speculation that Turek is the national Democrats’ candidate of choice.
But the specifics of who backed whom are where Iowa’s political reality pushes back. Turek’s final remaining opponent in the primary is former Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls. Wahls has claimed that Turek has Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s behind-the-scenes endorsement. In a purple state like Iowa. where the article notes that open association with Schumer and national Democrats might be seen as a poison pill. both the candidate and the party have stayed cagey. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee didn’t respond to questions on whether it had a role in opponents dropping out.
Scholten, for his part, 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 elected Iowa state Senate’s minority leader in 2020 and speaks proudly about his two moms. He has endorsements from organized labor. He also accuses Turek of being poised to follow the Democratic status quo: Wahls 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. The debate itself, the article says, was otherwise contentious but left candidates mostly on the same page.
Whoever wins the primary will likely take on House Rep. Ashley Hinson in the general election. Hinson 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. and the article says her victory against former GOP state Sen. Jim Carlin all but guaranteed her nomination.
Money and momentum are part of the calculations going into the spring. In the first quarter of 2026, Hinson raised $2.36 million, about 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 placed Turek significantly above Wahls, and both are neck-and-neck with Hinson in prospective general election matchups.
Turek’s pitch is built for a state where Democrats have struggled to keep pace. The Iowa Democratic Party is described as not especially well-oiled. and Iowa has grown more consistently Republican over the past decade. both in national elections and races for statewide office. After former Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin retired—an original sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act—his successor, Rep. Bruce Bailey. didn’t even face a primary. and the article says that contributed to his defeat by Ernst in 2014 by almost eight percent.
Caufield. a Drake University political scientist cited in the source. says Ernst ran “as somebody who would really challenge orthodoxies in Washington. ” and that promise Ernst hasn’t lived up to. But this year. the prospect of a competitive Democratic primary could help Democrats. Caufield argues—especially if Hinson’s status as a sitting national politician doesn’t translate well into a populist swing state like Iowa.
The logic is blunt: a vote for a Democrat from an independent or Republican voter in the general election would most likely be a rebuke of Trump.
That’s the path Turek is trying to walk. When he first announced his run this past August. he positioned himself as a common-sense moderate and a populist who could appeal to voters in his state. The article also points to research: a 2025 report found that candidates who portrayed themselves more as populists than as Democrats were more likely to win over voters in Michigan. Iowa. Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Turek, though, has not followed the same rhetorical line many Democrats are now demanding. His father, the candidate acknowledges, voted for Trump three times. Turek told me last fall that Trump “accurately diagnosed that the status quo was not working and is not working for working families and for the middle class.” He added. “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.”.
He has criticized Trump for federal trade policies that hurt local farmers. the article says—along with Wahls—citing Trump’s tariffs and GOP Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy. Turek also says he strongly opposes ICE’s current escalation of occupations and deportations. At the same time. Wahls pointed out in a debate that 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, the article says Turek and Wahls don’t vary as greatly. The question then becomes something the source frames in personal terms, particularly in races where voters are deciding who feels trustworthy enough to win: are they likeable enough to win?
Turek says he wants to expand Medicaid funding, even after repealing 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 are a focus of Turek’s, and the article says those issues have historically been fairly bipartisan. It also describes 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. Watters, who has a spinal cord injury, added that Turek has “gone through a lot of these hardships himself.”
Jenn Wolff. a disabled city councilor in Waverly. Iowa. worked with Turek on a 2023 bill to get chemicals out of catheters in 2023. The bill. the article notes. “didn’t pass. ” but “made it through that first committee—not many Democrats get that far.” Wolff called Turek “one of those legislators who is truly trying to create change by working across lines. which we’ve kind of lost.”.
Still, the legislative scoreboard is sobering. Since the beginning of his first term in January 2023. none of the more than 80 bills Turek introduced have become law. the article says. 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 article says the lack of committee votes on disability-related bills points to GOP lack of enthusiasm. It also leaves the practical worry: if Turek wins a Democratic seat in a legislature that remains red. can he still push legislation through a bigger GOP wall?.
That’s the kind of bipartisan thinking national Democrats want, the article says, but the evidence doesn’t seem to support it.
Even so, established figures in Congress are showing up for him. The source says Turek has the backing of longtime members of Congress with high hopes, including former Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey, a Senate heavyweight known for advancing disability legislation during his 18 years in office. Casey called Turek the best candidate to fight Medicaid rollbacks.
Former Rep. Tony Coelho, a longtime House representative from California and primary author of the ADA, endorsed Turek as well. Coelho told me. “I have a lot of people all over the country who are asking for support. and I’ve eliminated most of them. ” but said he was “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—described in the source as perhaps a difficult commitment for a 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, though it doesn’t say anything about his, or a generic Democrat’s, odds in the general.
Scholten summed up the challenge, telling me the race “is not going to be an easy race by any means” and “it’s going to take a special candidate, and a special campaign, to pull it off for a Democrat to win here.”
Turek’s campaign. in other words. is asking voters to accept a simple idea: that preparation. credibility. and a lived disability story can matter as much as party labels in a state that has steadily leaned away from Democrats. For a candidate who once had no complaints about sitting on the bench until his moment came. the question now is whether Iowa’s politics will give him the same kind of opening.
Josh Turek Iowa Senate Joni Ernst Zach Wahls Ashley Hinson Medicaid Paralympics wheelchair basketball Agent Orange spina bifida Chuck Schumer Democrats Republicans VoteVets