Photographs by KC McGinnis

Somewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.

This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.

Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”

Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence. 

Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the lesser of two evils” and made a face when I asked whether he enjoyed being in it. “I can’t imagine saying I like being in any political party,” he told me. “I love being a dad.” Before addressing a crowd in Des Moines County last year, Sand’s staff asked for party insignia to be removed from the walls to make the space more inclusive. 

The auditor obviously wants to steer clear of the national party’s noxious fumes. But whereas his progressive contemporaries distance themselves by railing against the establishment, Sand’s campaign approach has been different: Quietly, and with an easygoing optimism that Fred Rogers would envy, Sand questions the concept of partisanship itself. “Our political system is broken, and it’s broken mostly because it’s run by two private clubs” that make voters “feel trapped” into making a binary choice, he told a crowd last month in Newton. “The good news is that Iowa is a place where we have typically said we are going to make politics work for ordinary people.”

National Democrats like what they see—even if they find it tough to describe. Sand “is doing the opposite of what almost every other politician is doing,” the strategist and former Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith told me. He isn’t a loud progressive, but he also doesn’t sound like a corporate moderate, Adam Carlson, a pollster, agreed. “Sand is doing a third thing.” 

In November, Sand will be up against a potentially strong GOP candidate. But his most daunting adversary will be the math: Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 200,000 in Iowa. Which means that Sand plans to spend the next 11 weeks telling Iowans that he can be trusted, in spite of the D behind his name. Will enough of them believe it?

Sand had been annoyed the last time I wrote about him. I’d included all of the relevant background details in my story: that he grew up in Decorah, a town near the Minnesota border, which explains his long vowels (Sand pronounces it “Dee-corah”); that he went to Brown University and worked a few modeling jobs in Europe before attending law school and working for seven years as a prosecutor. I’d explained that, like any good red-state Democrat, Sand loves to hunt and spends Sunday morning in church—and that his wife’s brothers called him “Baby Jesus” for his tendency toward self-righteousness.

But Sand was concerned about something else: that I had not fully captured his frustration with America’s two-party political system. “I was hoping you’d get more into election reform,” he texted me—a sentence that, I am confident, no one has ever said before or since. At the time, I did not imagine that many readers were pining to hear a state auditor’s thoughts on the decline of bipartisanship. But here we are, three summers later, and Sand is still talking about the same ideas: moving to an open-primary system and implementing “approval voting,” which would allow Iowans to support more than one candidate. More remarkable, voters are listening.

Sand is a Democrat because “Jesus is for the little guy, and the Democratic Party, at its best, is for the little guy.” But his more inclusive vision wouldn’t require party affiliation. The scramble to replace Graham Platner in Maine, for example, wouldn’t have happened under Sand’s system, he said. Or, “if a really old candidate, hypothetically, had a bad debate experience, and everyone was like, Um, maybe this person is too old to do this, it wouldn’t be a crisis.” The reforms would reward civility, Sand added, and prevent one-party domination of a state.

Republicans have had total control over Iowa for a decade. In that time, they’ve dramatically cut income taxes, redirected hundreds of millions of public dollars toward private schools, and restricted abortion after six weeks. Right now, the state is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and the second-highest cancer rate in the country. 

But Sand does not harp on Republicans. Actually, a Sand political event doesn’t really feel like one: Each town hall begins with a round of applause for the Republicans, independents, and Democrats (for good measure) who showed up, then transitions into a group rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Sand speaks for a while about his policy priorities (corruption, public education, affordability) before opening the floor to questions, some friendly and others confrontational. The event I attended in Newton concluded with a resounding cheer for—you guessed it!—a return to divided government in Iowa.

An observer might fairly describe all of this as just a tad cringe. But one person’s cringe is another’s stirring call for unity. “There’s a movement afoot for change, and he comes along at a good time,” Steve Mullen, a retired teacher, told me in Newton. 

It helps that Sand does not behave like most Democrats. He is not, for example, easily drawn into culture-war debates or bandwagon slogans. Early in his campaign when a radio host asked him whether biological males should be allowed to play in women’s sports, Sand answered succinctly, “No.” In January, after federal officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Sand did not join in the calls to abolish ICE. “He’s taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left think tank Searchlight, told me. 

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

The progressive left, as you might imagine, is not wild about Sand. Some were disgusted, for example, that the Democrat did not release a statement denouncing ICE after Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Others see Sand’s comments on trans athletes as a betrayal of the LGBTQ community. Still, most seem to find the state auditor tolerable. “He’s a happy warrior for nonpartisan technocratic efficiency and anti-corruption,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Sand might slap that on a billboard. 

Iowa’s state auditor can seem a little naive. Even if he becomes governor, Sand would almost certainly be working with a Republican state legislature that won’t be eager to hand him any wins. But Sand says he isn’t worried. “There’s still a lot of people of good faith in that caucus,” Sand told me at a deli in Manchester after we’d finished our bike ride. State GOP lawmakers know that they’ll need to have something to show for their public service when they “reach the pearly gates.” Had Sand met a politician recently? I thought. When I voiced my doubts out loud, Sand looked stricken. “I am really hopeful,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are busy trying to convince Iowa voters that the auditor is more extreme than his kumbaya suggests. “It’s like The Truman Show,” Zach Lahn, Sand’s GOP opponent, says in one campaign video. “He’s not a moderate.” In another, Lahn pledges to take back Iowa’s public-school curriculum “from the Marxists who hijacked it.” 

Lahn, a former Republican operative, seemed to come out of nowhere in June when he defeated incumbent Representative Randy Feenstra for the GOP nomination. More specifically, Lahn came from Kansas. Although he was born and raised in Iowa, he has lived in Wichita, where he founded a private school, for much of the past decade. The Des Moines Register reported that Lahn splits his time between Iowa and his second home in Kansas, where some of his children live, although Lahn reassured Iowans that if he is elected governor, he will be in the state “as much as humanly possible.” (Lahn did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But Lahn’s outsider status might help him. He has no elected-office experience and is not yet a known quantity in Iowa, which means that he does not wear the albatross of incumbency. So far, he’s campaigned on protecting small farms from corporate agriculture, an unusual Republican position in the state. For this, as well as his pledge to ban mRNA vaccines and improve the state’s water quality, Lahn has also received the MAHA stamp of approval. Several conservative Iowans along the bike route told me that they wouldn’t have voted for Feenstra, but they were considering Lahn’s “new ideas.”

Lately, Republicans have accused Sand of doing too much stumping and not enough of his day job; they’ve also drawn attention to the significant campaign donations from his wife and her wealthy family. But Lahn’s main project ahead of November will be to remind Iowans that Sand, regardless of his rhetoric, is running as a Democrat. At Sand’s Newton town hall, a Lahn supporter named Carrie Atkinson asked the auditor to declare the number of weeks at which he would support a ban on abortion. Sand answered that he thought Roe v. Wade was a reasonable decision. “He didn’t answer my question!” Atkinson told me later. At another event, a local Republican activist named Gary Loeffler asked Sand to justify his support for abortion as a Christian. There are “many verses in the Bible that say life begins at breath,” Sand said, an answer that enraged some religious conservatives.

Republicans believe, or say they believe, that Sand, a wealthy guy with an Ivy League education, is far more liberal than he lets on. Loeffler offered a disturbing visual: Like an infested cob of sweet corn, Sand might look normal on the outside, but inside, he’s “full of worms.”

Luckily, I was able to test Loeffler’s hypothesis—by traveling to Sand’s hometown and peering into the proverbial husk. In Decorah, along the Upper Iowa River, I attended Nordic Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian heritage that included Viking battle reenactments, Nordic dancers, and a parade featuring Sand in the back of a convertible. It felt a little like visiting Bedford Falls with George Bailey. “This is Rob Sand; he’s a good friend of my eldest son!” the announcer said as the auditor drove by. Sand’s aunt, who ran the lefse stand, trotted into the street to give him a package of fresh Norwegian flatbread. Sand’s father asked me in Norwegian if I spoke the language of my ancestors. (I do not.)

After the parade, Sand offered a wry tour of his hometown. Walking down the main drag, he pointed out the old teen center. “Can you guess how many times we went?” Near a statue of a long-snouted woodland creature, he explained: “Trolls are out in the world and can be dangerous.” Quickly, we were overwhelmed by friends and well-wishers. Among them was Andy Rasmussen, Sand’s best friend from high school. Sand was always smart and ambitious, Rasmussen, who does autobody work in Decorah, told me later. He liked to skateboard and bowhunt. He didn’t drink, but he’d give friends rides to parties. “The running joke was that someday Rob’s gonna be president,” Rasmussen said. But what were Sand’s politics back then? I wanted to know. Is he a Trojan horse of socialist corn worms? Rasmussen basically shrugged. “He will generally talk to and listen to anybody that’s out there.”

Others who knew Sand during college and law school similarly described a man committed to listening. At Brown in the early 2000s, Sand frequently criticized the Bush administration in his column in the school paper. Still, he recruited Stephen Beale, a conservative columnist at the paper, to start a new class on conservative thought, featuring readings from Edmund Burke, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan. Sand is still “being his authentic self,” Beale, who now works as a freelance writer, told me. “He really does care about hearing the other side.”

I thought about Sand’s cheering section at the Nordic Fest parade. “Light ’em up, Rob!” one man had shouted. But Sand had waved him off. “No, no, no,” he’d said.

The next two months may not be so friendly. So far, Sand has outraised Lahn, but Republicans are pouring millions into the state, partly thanks to a high-profile Senate bid from Democrat Josh Turek and three surprisingly competitive House races. Expect ads from both parties to be vicious—and pervasive. On Thursday, screaming activists for Turning Point Action chased Sand around the Iowa State Fair. 

[Read: Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Right now, Sand looks reasonably well positioned for victory. The Cook Political Report has changed its analysis of the race from “lean Republican” to “toss up,” and new polling shows Sand leading Lahn by five points. If he succeeds, Democrats might finally be able to say out loud what many have believed for years: that Iowa still defies partisan categorization.

Many Iowans are only now starting to pay attention. Before I lost Sand on the bike ride, a middle-aged man named Ethan Vaas had rolled up next to us. “Are you who I think you are?” he asked Sand, sounding more suspicious than excited. The two chatted for a moment, but Vaas soon pedaled away, looking unimpressed. An hour later, though, he was back, this time to talk with Sand about his job and his kids. Vaas wasn’t sure how he’d vote this year, he told me later. He typically “leans right.” But there was something different about Sand.

This story was updated on August 5, 2026, at 7:29 p.m. ET

The Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed made the customary call for unity after a hard-fought primary against a fellow Democrat. “Always magnanimity in victory,” he told a packed crowd of supporters, adding that “however much we might disagree with our Democratic opponent, there is so much more that unites us than divides us.”

But just minutes earlier, one of his most famous endorsers was pushing a much different message. “Everyone being like, Abdul has a fuck-ton of work to do mending bridges, here’s the fucking take-nuke for you, okay? You are all unbelievably Islamophobic pieces of shit,” Hasan Piker, the left-wing Twitch streamer who has said that America deserved 9/11 and who El-Sayed has embraced on the campaign trail, told some of his millions of followers. Piker went on to challenge would-be holdouts in the party to back El-Sayed: “Do you want to fucking win or not?”

Democrats in Michigan do, in fact, want to win in November, but they find themselves in a predicament over how to get everyone on board. El-Sayed, a progressive, eked out a victory over the more moderate Haley Stevens in a historically expensive and high-profile showdown between the party’s insurgent and centrist wings. The closeness of the race—El-Sayed led by about one point when the AP declared him the victor this morning—surprised many people, given that a number of polls showed the 41-year-old doctor with a double-digit lead over the four-term congresswoman.

The narrow margin of victory has, predictably, sparked a blizzard of thoughts about what lessons Democrats should garner from El-Sayed’s victory as the party barrels toward November. The candidate has suggested that he doesn’t plan to moderate his platform; he ended a news conference this morning by giving a version of his campaign slogan, asking Michiganders to join a “movement to get money out of politics, so we can put money back in pockets and finally guarantee the promise of health care through Medicare for all.” At the same time, he insisted that Democratic harmony would be crucial in the face of what he predicted would be an onslaught of negative attacks from his Republican opponents.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, were happy to comply. They endorsed El-Sayed’s candidacy this morning, praising his “energetic campaign.” (Both had originally endorsed Stevens.) Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who ended her bid for the Democratic nomination last month, announced her support for El-Sayed last night before the race had even been called. Stevens also added her endorsement this morning. But much of the common ground ended there. The takes on what El-Sayed should do and the lessons the party should learn from his victory are so abundant in part because the stakes are so high. Democrats will struggle to recapture the Senate if they do not win the race in Michigan.

Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told us that El-Sayed’s win “sends a signal to every other Democratic politician in America that you can cross very powerful interests and still win if the people are on your side.” Green suggested that El-Sayed doesn’t need to  perform some grand pivot to appeal to general-election voters who may be skeptical about his leftist views: “We believe that Abdul El-Sayed and candidates like him are more electable in a general election because we’re living in an outsider moment and people in all political parties and independents want someone who will shake up a broken system, not be a creature of it.”

Asked about Green’s comment, another Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to be frank, was, well, frank. “What the fuck is he talking about? Now you’re pushing an ideological agenda and not trying to win,” the strategist told us, before addressing El-Sayed himself. “You clearly need to pivot,” this person said. “A lot of the people in the party don’t like you!”

The returns highlighted clear vulnerabilities for the new nominee. El-Sayed performed well in highly educated, mostly white and affluent communities, including some of Michigan’s college towns, while trailing Stevens in some working-class areas and Black neighborhoods. Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate leadership aide, posted on X that El-Sayed begins the general election as an underdog. He predicted that the Democrat would underperform his polls “because a lot of normie Dems are voting against him,” and added that El-Sayed should try to win over these folks by being “a little less rigidly left-wing, and a little more heterodox.”

El-Sayed said today that the primary would “pale in comparison to the cynicism” that would come from his Republican opponent, former Representative Mike Rogers, and President Trump during the general election. That prediction seemed to come true just hours later, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee released its first ad of the general election. “Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed—the most radical Senate candidate in America,” the ad’s narrator begins, casting away any sense of subtlety before going on to link the Democrat to the Muslim Brotherhood and describe him as “too dangerous” for Michigan. (The ad uses the full name of the candidate attempting to become the nation’s first Muslim American senator at a time when some Republicans have been fomenting Islamophobia.)

[Read: The Republican who wants to banish his own constituents ]

Michigan continues to swing between Republicans and Democrats—Trump won the state in 2016 and 2024. The president wasted no time weighing in on El-Sayed’s victory this morning, calling him a “Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.” El-Sayed ran as an unabashed critic of Israel and AIPAC, which spent tens of millions of dollars backing Stevens. Trump predicted that, with El-Sayed, the “Dumocrats crazy policies will only get worse” and called his win “great news for the Republican Party.”

Lis Smith, a Democratic operative who advised McMorrow in the primary, told us that El-Sayed should focus on broadening his coalition, adding that she feels that “he has not tried to do that one iota during this primary.” Rogers, who ran unopposed, came just about 20,000 votes shy of winning a Senate seat in 2024. El-Sayed bashed Rogers last night and this morning, aiming to cast him as an avatar of the corporate elite that has raised prices and left everyday Michiganders struggling. He also tied Rogers closely to Trump, who polls show is unpopular in the state.

[Read: America’s most divided state loves its extremes ]

The call for Democratic unity is a new one for El-Sayed. He showed no hesitation about blasting the party as he pursued its nomination, telling a group of young voters last month that “the Democratic Party brand right now is so bullshit.” El-Sayed also used his primary victory to attack politics as usual—clearly implying that Democrats have been engaged in it for far too long.

Although El-Sayed’s victory was the main event this week, several other races across the country complicated the idea that the Democratic Party has been seized by the progressive movement. In Missouri, former Representative Cori Bush lost handily to Representative Wesley Bell, the moderate who originally ousted her from her seat two years ago. In Washington State, centrist incumbent Marie Gluesenkamp Perez beat back a challenge from the left to win a primary for a district that Trump carried in 2024. Moderate Democrats in Virginia prevailed in two key congressional primaries, while left-leaning candidates claimed victories in two congressional primaries in Michigan.

The murkiness of the results shows that the party is stuck in a state of tension. Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist whose organization, MoveOn, endorsed El-Sayed, told us that although the process appears chaotic, it is necessary for a party trying to redefine itself and recover from traumatic losses in 2024. “Democrats tried an era where we swept things under the rug and we tried to sort things out before it got in front of voters,” he said. “That doesn’t work. We’re in a different era.” Instead, he advised, the party needs to openly “have the fights, let it get messy, and then put it back together on the back side.”

Things in Michigan are certainly messy. Now El-Sayed and his fellow Democrats need to put them back together over the next 13 weeks if Democrats hope to win back the Senate in November.