Elizabeth Warren to campaign in Iowa for progressive Senate candidate
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., plans to campaign this month for Iowa Senate candidate Zach Wahls, adding firepower to a raging battle between progressive outsider candidates and the Democratic Party establishment.
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Wahls, a state senator, will face state Rep. Josh Turek, who many perceive as the front-runner among Democratic leaders in Washington, in the June 2 primary. The winner will face Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson in what promises to be a closely watched race in the fight for control of the Senate.
“Zach Wahls is showing up to shake things up,” Warren said in a statement announcing his May 10 visit to a Wahls rally in Des Moines. “He takes on a corrupt system that is rigged against working families; a system in which giant corporations, their lobbyists, and their super PACs funnel millions to candidates like Ashley Hinson, so these politicians let them raise the prices of groceries, prescription drugs, and basic necessities that Iowans need to survive.”
Warren, who had previously endorsed Wahls, announced her trip to the state Friday morning, a day after an establishment favorite, Gov. Janet Mills, dropped out of a heated Maine Democratic Senate primary. Mills’ decision to suspend his campaign all but guarantees that Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and veteran supported by Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and other progressives, will win the right to take on five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
The two races are among several House and Senate contests across the country that have become proxies in the war for control of the future of the Democratic Party. With the party out of power in the White House and Congress, the influence of former Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton diminished and a free-for-all expected in the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries, the stakes in each race – and all of them collectively – are sky-high, both for established establishment figures and the outsiders seeking to take power from them.
Polling in Iowa has been thin. A poll by Vote Vets Action Fund, a group that supports Turek, found him ahead by 20 points in April. A Teamsters local released an earlier poll finding that the union-backed Wahls party led by 18 points.
In a statement, Wahls welcomed the news that Warren, who campaigned for president in Iowa in 2020 and finished fourth in the Democratic caucuses, is returning to lend her voice to his campaign.
“She has spent her career standing up to the corporate special interests that have rigged our economy, and that is exactly the fight Iowans want their next senator to take on,” he said.
The seat is open because Republican Sen. Joni Ernst has decided not to seek a third term. No Democrat has won a Senate seat in Iowa since Tom Harkin won a fifth term in 2008.
