Douglas Burns is a fourth-generation Iowa journalist. He is the co-founder of the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation and a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, where this article first appeared on The Iowa Mercury newsletter. His family operated the Carroll Times Herald for 93 years in Carroll, Iowa where Burns resides.

Many politicians can persuade you to believe in them. That’s a commonly reached feat. But the defining leaders, elected officials like Tom Harkin, Robert Ray, Henry Wallace, and Harold Hughes, are able to summon the inspiration to get Iowans believing in themselves, their own worth and futures.

More than any other contemporary active Democrat, State Representative Josh Turek has the potential to earn the mantle in the ongoing—and now desperately needed—legacy those Iowans with surpassing public-mindedness built.

We are in an era in the United States that can be described as The Great Deconstruction. We are broken. The anger in the streets at “Hands Off!” protests and in other arenas, in real life and online, is fierce and urgent. Soon, and at a more accelerated political pace than is traditional, Democrats will begin vetting candidates for the U.S. Senate race in 2026, a contest with the politically formidable Joni Ernst. The two-term Republican senator has a rare cultural connectivity; her journey as a farm girl and combat veteran carries enormous appeal across the state.

The Democrats’ best candidate for the 2026 U.S. Senate race: Josh Turek. The two-term legislator from Council Bluffs was a gold medalist (twice) in the Paralympics for the United States in wheelchair basketball. Born with Spina Bifida, he overcame 21 surgeries by age 12, and built a life of service. Turek is a pioneering permanently and visibly disabled legislator in the Iowa statehouse. He uses a wheelchair.

Turek is in the early mix for federal office in 2026, and acknowledges he’s exploring a run for the U.S. Senate.

Here’s what’s encouraging: The times and the man are meeting. Iowans will soon see this.

“There was this old saying about Franklin Roosevelt,” former U.S. Senator Tom Harkin said at a recent Council Bluffs speech for a Turek statehouse race event. “I’m going to use the old vernacular. ‘It took a crippled man to lead a crippled nation.’ Well, we don’t use those words anymore, so we say, ‘It took a disabled man to lead a disabled nation.’ Need I tell you that we are somewhat disabled in our country right now. We have entered an era I never thought in my lifetime I would see, where all public trust is being eroded.”

Harkin said Americans are using words about political opponents as if they are subhuman, as institutions are demolished.

“You asked me earlier, ‘Why is there such a buzz about this guy?'” Harkin said of Josh Turek. “Well, when you meet him, and you talk to Josh, you know he’s interested in you and what you are thinking, and you get the sense from talking and meeting with him that he wants to make your life better, that he wants to do the things that make all of our lives better, that we have progress for all, not just a few.”

Turek talks with then 6-year-old Hayes Hofmeister in Des Moines during a recent summit on advocacy for people with disabilities. (Photo By Douglas Burns)

We will be in another period of reconstruction in the United States, beginning in 2027 and carrying through the 2028 election and ensuing years. Iowans, battered and betrayed, by President Trump’s lab-ratting of the American population in his economic experiments, and more particularly, Iowans devastated by Governor Kim Reynolds’ sledgehammering of the foundation of life in the state, public schools, will look to a candidate they trust on the recovery—a leader who has stared down seemingly insurmountable obstacles of his own, and come out stronger on the other side.

That’s Josh Turek. His resilience is at once inspiring and awe-inspiring.

Then there is the raw politics.

In the 2022 race Turek climbed and “crawled” while he dragged his wheelchair behind him—the latter his own description—to 14,000 doors in Iowa House district 20. He won the seat by just six votes — 3,403 to 3,397.

In the 2024 election cycle, Turek was the most over-performing Democratic state legislator in Iowa, according to analysis from Bleeding Heartland’s Laura Belin, who knows Iowa politics by the numbers as well as anyone. He bettered the top of the ticket, presidential candidate Kamala Harris, by more than 13 points in his Council Bluffs-Carter Lake district.

I’ve seen Turek not just in Council Bluffs, but in Red Oak and Carroll and Des Moines and Ankeny and Cedar Rapids and Iowa City and other reaches of the state. He’s one of the strongest potential statewide candidates for Iowa Democrats. Turek can hold central and eastern Iowa Democratic strongholds and outperform in his native southwest Iowa, and he’s the kind of Democrat who can, to the extent its possible, cut through the party tribalism and serve as a safe harbor for Republican and independents to park discontented votes.

Turek’s ability to develop a coalition with more rural and western Iowans, even at modestly higher numbers, will boost his party’s gubernatorial candidate and assist Congressional Democratic candidates. He is positioned to be the most important Iowa Democrat in a generation.

At the Paralympics

Turek’s biography allows him to go life narrative v. narrative in an authentic, appealing Iowa way, with Ernst. No other Iowa Democrat comes close to being able to do that.

“I think without question Josh Turek has the ability to win statewide, whether that’s taking back Tom Harkin’s Senate seat, whether that’s running for governor, whether that’s running for a statewide office,” Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said in a late 2023 interview with The Iowa Mercury. “He has appeal across the state, and he has the work ethic to get it done. He has a good mix of confidence and humility, which is always hard to find in politicians.”

There is, of course, only one Tom Harkin, a senator who constructed a legislative and political record matched by few Democrats in Iowa—and indeed the nation. Since Harkin left office in 2015 and Ernst, a Red Oak Republican, took the oath as his successor, Iowa Democrats have looked for the next Harkin. The party is on something of a wilderness trek for a king’s ransom of reasons—many the Democrats’ own fault, most not.

Harkin himself points to Turek.

“He has all the qualities we need in a great leader,” Harkin said.

Turek with Senator Tom Harkin and Ruth Harkin

For his part, Turek maintains an intense legislative and political schedule, all fortified by a vigorous exercise regimen. Friends and constituents often shout words of encouragement—or questions and comments on politics—as Turek nearly daily in the off-session season wheels or “pushes” from his home on Parkwild Drive in the Council Bluffs hills with sweeping views of downtown Omaha to the west to the YMCA a mile and half away.

“I think probably 85 percent or 90 percent of the people who are in my sort of condition, or with similar disabilities, this situation breaks them and they don’t go on to live meaningful, successful lives,” Turek said in an interview during a drive with The Iowa Mercury on Interstate 80 from Council Bluffs to Des Moines.

“But the ones who do come through are stronger and those make the most interesting, hard-core people. Some of those that get broken become harder in the broken places. It’s totally true. The struggle builds the character. If you can get through that and it doesn’t completely break you, it makes you stronger, a much more interesting individual.”