Turek's Iowa win exposes the trap Trump set for Republicans | Opinion

Democrat Josh Turek has won Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat, beating Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson by 4.5 percentage points, according to The Associated Press. The flip handed Democrats control of the Senate.

Hinson launched her campaign promising to be President Donald Trump's "top ally" in the Senate. By the end, she was putting distance between herself and the president wherever she could.

Her race shows just how tight a bind Republican candidates were in. They faced an impossible choice: Pander to Trump's base and alienate moderates, or break with the president and anger his base. Neither was a good option, and Hinson couldn't walk the line between them.

Hinson tried to distance herself from an unpopular Trump presidency

Trump endorsed Hinson right after she launched her campaign, and she spent the final months trying to soften what that endorsement had come to mean. High diesel prices and Trump's tariff regime have hit Iowa farmers hard, and the state's economy along with them.

In a CNN poll, most likely Iowa voters said tariffs had been largely bad for their state. That turned a reliably red state into a midterm toss-up.

In the lead-up to Election Day, Hinson promised Iowans she would be "a thorn in his side if he's wrong for our state." She broke with Trump on a handful of issues and made sure to remind voters of it.

She called his decision to let more foreign beef in without higher tariffs "a bad idea." She said she didn't support immediately closing the Department of Education. And as the Iran war dragged on and fuel prices climbed, she said Iowans "shouldn't have to foot the bill" for it, though she had voted four times against House resolutions to end the war.

Those breaks made Hinson look more independent than most Trump-endorsed candidates, but in the end they weren't enough to overcome Iowans' dissatisfaction with the administration. Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points in 2024. An October CNN poll found just 41% of likely Iowa voters approve of the job he's doing. On Tuesday, they made their dissatisfaction known. 

Turek also had help from the top of the ticket. Democrat Rob Sand ran a radically centrist campaign for governor, going after people in both parties and courting Republicans under the slogan "Not redder or bluer but better or truer." Iowans loved it.

Sand cruised to victory over Republican Zach Lahn, and his coattails may well have carried Turek to the Senate.

Hinson shows the impossible challenge Trump poses

Hinson's campaign is a case study in the bind Trump has put Republicans in. His endorsement can make or break most Republican primary campaigns, and that gives him outsize power over candidates. But with his approval rating near historic lows, that same endorsement is poison outside his committed base.

To her credit, Hinson tried hard to make her case to Iowa voters. Breaking with the president on beef imports and the cost of the Iran war took some political courage for a Republican who had run as his "top ally." But some of those breaks came late in the campaign, after a September poll showed her downn 8 points, and they stopped well short of a full split. In the end, they couldn't overcome just how unpopular Trump is in Iowa.

We've seen this before. In 2022, Trump-endorsed Senate candidates Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and Herschel Walker in Georgia all lost winnable races, in large part because of Trump.

Four years later, Republicans are still shooting themselves in the foot by shackling their candidates to Trump's record.

Voting results were a resounding rejection of Trump's second term. Hopefully, Republicans finally see that he is no longer worth losing elections over. Candidates shouldn't have to choose between appealing to their party's president and appealing to their own voters. As the GOP heads into the post-Trump era, it's a pattern Republicans would do well to remember.

Dace Potas, a law student, is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY. Follow him on X: @DacePotas