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Hey, guys, Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the Bulwark. There's a primary tomorrow in Iowa and I'm extremely excited about it. And I want to tell you guys the state of the race as we go into this primary. So we're going to talk about the Senate and governor's race today. But before we do that, let's look at the political landscape right now in Iowa. First of all, we've been conducting focus groups in Iowa. And Iowans are really mad at both Donald Trump and their governor, Kim Reynolds. And the Democrats, for the first time in a long time, are running some really strong races. You got Rob sand, who's running for governor. You've got Josh Turek and Zach Walls who are vying for the Senate. And we're going to find out which one of them will be in the general election after the primaries. And they also have a slate of very strong House candidates. So why are people mad at Kim Reynolds and Donald Trump? Well, number one, this is Iowa and the tariffs are hitting them really hard. Before the tariffs, Donald Trump had a 52% approval rating in the state. Still not super great for Iowa, but he is currently at 42%. Farmers are losing money even with the federal subsidies that are trying to offset the impact of the tariffs. You've got soybean. Farmers are losing about $75 an acres. Trump's big beautiful bill kicked nearly a hundred thousand Iowans off their health insurance. And Reynolds is one of the most unpopular governors Iowa's seen in a while. They had the school vouchers issue that came up in a lot of the focus groups where some schools have had to go down to four days a week because of their school vouchers program. There's a lot of people talking about the six week abortion ban they enacted there in Iowa, which people think is too extreme. And then there's this issue of cancer water, which I had not heard about until I started focus grouping in Iowa. But essentially you've got a lot of chemicals going into the water. And a lot of people in Iowa say that they're experiencing these incredibly high cancer rates. So I want to play just a little bit of focus group sound since we have it from some of these Kim Reynolds voters who are currently what I would call sand curious, meaning Rob sand, who's running for governor there. Let's listen to them.
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If you don't want to drink cancer water. And you can get these like test strips and check it. And the limit is like 10. And we tested ours. We literally installed a reverse osmosis system in our house for drinking water today. My husband installed it today.
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So when you talk about the tariffs, you talk about cancer, water. These are the things that are driving down the approval rating of Republicans and have made Iowans very frustrated with Republicans right now. So that takes us to the Iowa governor's race. So Kim Reynolds is not running for reelection, so we've got an open seat there. So in the Republican primary, you have two people really worth talking about. There's Randy Feenstra. He's the Mike Maga establishment candidate. He's currently a member of Congress. You may remember him because he's the guy who replaced very controversial House member there in Iowa, Steve King. And most of the Republican establishment there in the state has endorsed him.