Republican Iowa gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn pulled off a shocking upset by campaigning heavily on an issue few candidates talk about, and he hopes to catch that lightning in a bottle a second time in November.
Propelled by endorsements from Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action and the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, Lahn stunned Trump-backed Republican Iowa Rep. Randy Feenstra in the June 2 primary and will now face Democratic nominee Rob Sand in a race the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates as a “toss up.” The farmer says his razor-thin win over Feenstra shows that the MAHA movement which Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. built is not going anywhere.
“You have to understand that this was a movement before it had a name,” Lahn told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview. “And I think that what happened was Bobby Kennedy was able to coalesce a lot of this base around these issues of medical freedom, of health issues, healthy food, all of this. And he [Kennedy] was able to bring that into one group.” (RELATED: 10 Processed Foods That Taste Awesome But Will Probably Kill You — Or At Least Make You Super Fat)
“I think it’s important to understand that in any group like this, unity does not mean uniformity,” the Republican candidate said, adding that the idea behind the health-centered movement is not to be a “monolith” where “everybody’s agreeing on every issue.” He also noted that in his primary race, his team “saw a tremendous amount of support from people who support the MAHA issues and agenda.”
Lahn called MAHA a “bipartisan effort” that “is really bringing people together from both sides.”
“I think our win, what it really showed was this [MAHA] has legs, it has steam, it has momentum and it really connects in with a lot of voters that maybe felt like they didn’t have a voice with either major party,” he told the DCNF. “Many people told me that I couldn’t win a Republican primary talking about these issues.”
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Lahn says that Kennedy’s movement to him represents a “reprioritization of initiatives towards commonsense ideas that will help people live healthier lives, live longer lives.”
It also seeks to “address the deep systemic issues” plaguing Iowa including its cancer epidemic, the candidate told the DCNF.
The Iowa Cancer Registry’s 2026 Cancer in Iowa report estimated that 21,700 “new, invasive cancers will be diagnosed” in the state that year. It also projected that 6,400 Iowans — 2 out of every 1,000 of the state’s residents — will die from the disease in 2026 alone.
Lahn added that MAHA also entails “addressing things that people should all count on, like water quality.”
“When I think about it for our campaign, I think it really is kind of a banner that’s flying that says, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let these issues go by the wayside anymore.’ Like, we are going to address these head on,” he said.
The farmer expressed his admiration for Kennedy, telling the DCNF the secretary is “a warrior” committed to MAHA ideals who is “fighting a fight that is going to take a very long time.”
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. enters the room prior to announcing actions for combating fraud in Minnesota at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota on May 21, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by David Berding/Getty Images)
“He’s really working hard in the face of a very corrupt bureaucracy. Anybody that comes into that department, you can either go one of two ways. You can go with them or you can go against them,” Lahn said. “And I think Bobby Kennedy is showing us an example of how you go against them … but also how hard it is to fight the machine that is within each of these agencies. Because these agencies have become recalcitrant over decades and decades.”
Lahn cautioned that “it’s not just going to be one year or two years that is going to allow us to have the long-term effects that” the MAHA movement wants to have.
The secretary and his allies have experienced various setbacks in recent months. The Supreme Court in June ruled in favor of Bayer, the Big Pharma company that produces weedkiller Roundup, sparking outrage from many in the MAHA movement who viewed the Court’s decision as giving a green light to a chemical that may have caused cancer. Lahn told the DNCF that he agrees the 7-2 ruling was a “bad decision.”
Furthermore, a Politico survey from March found that a slight plurality of 41% of President Donald Trump’s 2024 voters believe that his administration has not done enough to make the U.S. healthier. The following month, multiple analysts told the DCNF that they do not think MAHA issues would make much of a difference in the outcome of the upcoming midterms.
The DCNF in May obtained a secret 2025 poll conducted by a Trump ally that found vast majorities of Americans agreed with multiple core tenets of the MAHA policy agenda. However, the poll was never released and Fabrizio Ward, the firm that conducted it, did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. Fabrizio Ward published two similar polls that year that had starkly different findings, specifically on the issue of vaccination.
In addition to Lahn, MAHA Action has endorsed other Republican candidates running in the midterms, including Iowa House candidate Joe Mitchell, who won his primary on the same night as Lahn. The Kennedy-aligned advocacy group has also backed Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow — who won her Senate primary defeating an incumbent who provoked MAHA’s ire — as well as Michigan Rep. Tom Barrett, Wisconsin House candidate Michael Alfonso and Texas House GOP nominee Brandon Herrera. Of these endorsees, only Alfonso still has to get past a competitive primary. (RELATED: Meet The MAHA Candidates Heading Into The Midterms)
Lahn also shared his experience of gaining the primary endorsement of Turning Point Action, whose founder, Kirk, was a notably early supporter of policies now synonymous with the MAHA movement. Kennedy called the late activist the “primary architect” of incorporating the movement into the coalition that sent Trump back to the White House in 2024.
Founder and executive director of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk speaks at the opening of the Turning Point Action conference on July 15, 2023 in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
The Iowa Republican nominee said he had first met Kirk back in 2011.
“We were both speaking at an event, and I remember seeing him speak … I think he was 17 years old at the time. And I thought, ‘Wow, who is this guy? He’s got a ton of energy, a ton of ideas,’” Lahn told the DCNF. “He was really a man on a mission.”
The candidate said he and Kirk maintained contact throughout the next 14 years with their last correspondence being in August 2025, the month before the activist’s life was tragically cut short by an assassin’s bullet.
“I think the reason they endorsed me is because they had people on the ground that saw the energy growing,” the Republican added. “They were tightly connected to the grassroots in Iowa. There were at so many events I did prior to the endorsement. They saw the momentum, the young people saw our message and they really, really believed in it.”
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