Republican Zach Lahn and Democratic state Auditor Rob Sand are competing in the Nov. 3, 2026 election to become Iowa’s next governor. (Candidate photos by Zach Sommers for Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa Capitol photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch)
In the race for Iowa governor, Democrat Rob Sand and Republican Zach Lahn agree addressing high cancer rates and making life more affordable for Iowans are their top priorities if elected Nov. 3, 2026 — but the candidates shared different opinions on how to tackle these problems.
For the first time since 2006, Iowa has an open gubernatorial race as Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced she would not seek reelection. Sand, the state auditor and only Democrat to currently hold statewide elected office in Iowa, quickly emerged as the frontrunner to become the Democratic nominee and exited the primary unopposed. Lahn, a self-described entrepreneur and farmer, faced a more contentious journey to the general election ballot. He emerged as the GOP gubernatorial nominee from a five-man primary, which included U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, who was endorsed by President Donald Trump.
Iowa Capital Dispatch sat down with the two candidates to speak about why they joined the race and what they hope to accomplish if elected.
Why run?
Sand said his road to running for governor began when he served as the state’s “chief public corruption prosecutor” as assistant attorney general, and then ran and won his seat as state auditor in 2018. He said during his time in office, he put together a senior leadership team that included an independent and Republican, and said his office worked together, across party divisions to uncover “a record amount of misspent money across the state of Iowa in my first term.”
“And then the Legislature came back to town and made it harder for us to find misspent tax money,” Sand said. “So, that to me was a clarifying moment. You know, I’ve been working against corruption for years and then it turned out that the Legislature went and passed the biggest pro-corruption bill in Iowa history to try to stop us from doing our jobs.”
Sand has long been critical of Senate File 478, a law signed by Reynolds in June 2023. The measure prevents the auditor from going to court for subpoena enforcement against state agencies, departments, boards, commissions and statewide elected officials. The law instead directs these disputes to a board of arbitration made up of two members appointed by the parties involved, and a third member appointed by the governor. It also limits the state auditor’s ability to access personal information when performing investigations.
When this law passed, Sand said it mean two things for him — the first being that there “wasn’t much point in running for a third term as state auditor, because I can get told that I’m not allowed to do my job.”
“The other piece of it was, it really clarified for me just how bad things had gotten in the Capitol building,” Sand said. “If they are at a moment where we are at the bottom for economic growth, we’re at the top for cancer growth, our education system is now in the bottom half, we have a water quality crisis, we have a cancer crisis — and their definition of a problem they have to address is making sure the state auditor can’t find misspent money, then I think we need a new direction.”
Lahn said he had “no intention” to run for Iowa governor, but decided to enter the race because he believed many of Iowans’ top concerns were not being addressed by those currently in office.
“I saw long-term issues that our state’s been facing for many years that hadn’t been addressed,” Lahn said. “And I often say, that’s both parties that have been in power as some of these long-term trends have gone the wrong way. You know, we’ve we’re losing our kids faster than 46 other states. We’ve lost 10,000 family farms (in) the past 20 years. Our public education system went from number one when I was in elementary to number 27. And we have the fastest rate of new cancer in the country. … They’re long-term issues, so they’re going to take long-term efforts. But I wanted do give those issues of voice, and that’s why I got in.”
Lahn has not previously held elected office, though he has experience in politics working for Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group affiliated with the founders of Koch Industries, and working for a state senator in Colorado. After working for Americans for Prosperity, he moved to Witchita, Kansas, and launched Wonder, a private pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade school, in 2018 on the campus of Wichita State University. The businessman said his experience in the private sector would help inform his approach to the Iowa governorship.
“The way I look at it, from a business standpoint, … I always look at, ‘what are the key metrics I want to be tracking?’” Lahn said. “The lagging indicator to me is, are Iowa’s kids staying or going? … If you look at this, kids aren’t going to want to stay or come back if they have a higher chance of getting cancer, if the public education system’s in the bottom half, if the rural communities are being hollowed out. So, I think it takes a full, different look at how we’re addressing this.”
Top issues
Lahn said keeping Iowa’s youth in the state is a top priority for his campaign — and said addressing concerns like rising cancer rates, improving the state’s education system and incentivizing people living and working in rural communities are ways to keep young families in Iowa. He said his policies focus on an “Iowa First” approach — prioritizing population retention for the state.
He proposed incentive programs for children graduating from Iowa high schools to encourage them to stay in the state, such as eliminating the income tax “for a set amount of years that would go into an account that they could use on a down payment on a home.”
“If you look at the math on this, let’s say, even if it was $50,000 (in lost revenue through income taxes) … every kid (that) we lose, that leaves our state is about $400,000 in lost tax revenue to the state over their lifetime,” Lahn said. “And that’s aside from the cultural piece of tight-knit families, good communities, good rural areas, all of these things. The state’s also losing tax revenue, and I see that as a way that we can, you know, take some of that, pay it forward so to speak, as a down payment.”
He also said he would focus Iowa’s medical research and agricultural institutions on “local problems instead of global problems,” such as addressing high cancer rates and water quality problems in the state. Additionally, he said he would support other measures, like tying public university funding to the percentage of Iowans going to these educational institutions, as ways to prioritize Iowans.
Lahn said he was “looking at the problems we’re facing from that standpoint of ‘Iowa first,’ and how can we direct the economy and the governor of the state to make life better for the people who live in the state.”
“On the other end of this, you have groups that are, you know, kind of categorized as special interests, lobbyists, corporate giants which have gotten far too much for a very long time from the government both from the state and federal level,” Lahn said. “And so those are a bit of the things that I am fighting against as well to say that incentives that we have should go to the people. And if they’re going to business, they need to go to Iowa’s home grown businesses.”
Sand said over the course of his campaign, three major issues have stood out.
“We’ve got high costs, we’ve got high cancer and we’ve got high corruption,” Sand said. “We need to address all three of those.”
Sand said his campaign has released specific plans on how to address these three subjects. His campaign has released policy platforms that include proposals on how to tackle these issues. His affordability plan includes proposals to end the privatization of Medicaid, provide universal free school lunches and his cancer proposal includes a call to invest in radon testing and water quality monitors, and he supports higher penalties for people convicted of stealing taxpayer funds. But Sand said these problems facing Iowans stem from a larger problem with how politicians currently approach the two-party political system.
“We are centered on ending the special legal privileges of the Democratic and Republican parties, because we’re going to have high costs and high corruption and high cancer rates — or other serious problems — as long as politicians don’t have to solve our problems,” Sand said. “And right now they don’t. You don’t have to solve problems in order to get reelected, and that’s bad. It should be that whether or not you succeed is dependent upon whether or not you’ve actually delivered for people. But instead we have a system that really functions to help incumbent politicians get re-elected, and that’s not good for us.”
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