Republican candidate for governor Zach Lahn announced on Friday morning that he’s chosen state Rep. Derek Wulf as his running mate. Wulf is in his second term in the Iowa House representing parts of Black Hawk, Benton and Tama counties. He was chair of the House Agriculture Committee during the most recent session of the legislature. Wulf is a farmer and rancher, and lives in Hudson with his wife, Dresden, and their two daughters.
“Derek has been an Iowa First fighter for years in the legislature,” Lahn said in a statement. “Whether it was leading on Right to Repair, defending private property rights, or stopping corporate overreach — Derek has been there for Iowans and I am very proud to have him partner with me on this campaign and look forward to serving with him at the Capitol.”
Lahn’s selection of Wulf as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor comes four days after Democrat Rob Sand announced Crawford County Supervisor Dave Muhlbauer, a farmer and rancher, as his running mate.
In a news release from the Lahn campaign, Wulf said he is “honored to stand with Zach Lahn as we fight to save Iowa’s future.”
“Our identity, our values, and our way of life are under assault like never before,” Wulf said. “Zach’s decisive primary victory proved Iowans are done with the status quo and ready for an Iowa First agenda that puts our families and communities first. Together, we’ll deliver the results our kids and grandkids will thank us for.”
Wulf’s description of Lahn’s primary victory as “decisive” is one that might be expected from a running mate trying to promote the ticket, but Lahn won the election by less than 1 percentage point. He received 37.97 percent of the vote in the five-way Republican primary. Second-place finisher Randy Feenstra got 37.19 percent.
Wulf, who comes from a farming family, attended Hudson High School and Iowa State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in animal science. He worked for agribusiness giant Cargill for 15 years.
Wulf launched his political career in 2022, running for the open seat in House District 76. Towards the end of the campaign the question of whether Wulf lived in the district was raised by KCRG, which reported he was registered to vote at a residence in Waterloo, rather than at his farm in Hudson, where his wife was registered to vote.
Wulf did not respond to KCRG’s request for a comment, but later sent a statement to the North Tama Telegraph in which he confirmed, “I am a resident of the district that I’ve worked and raised a family in pretty much my whole life.”
“While I had to move a few miles away to reside in the district that I hope to represent, it was worth it for me to do [so] in order to make sure our area is receiving the right representation at the statehouse,” he wrote.
Wulf won the 2022 election with 60.7 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2024 with 60.5 percent of the vote.
Residency has already been an issue for Zach Lahn in this year’s election. In May, the Des Moines Register reported flight records for a private plane Lahn owns through an LLC showed that between October and May, he had flown to Wichita, Kansas 37 times — an average of one trip every six days over that seven month period. Lahn owns a home in Wichita, and children from his previous marriage and his wife’s previous marriage still live there. Lahn had been registered to vote in Kansas until 2024, when he reregistered in Iowa. According to Iowa law, a person must be registered to vote in the state for at least two years in order to run for governor.
Lahn dismissed the idea that the amount of time he spends in Kansas has any meaning in his run for governor of Iowa, telling the Register, “I’m in Iowa the majority of the time, a tremendous amount of time.” Lahn also said that if elected governor he would cut back on the trips to Kansas, and “it would be a different arrangement, and we’d work it out. Because, you know, we’d be in Iowa as much as humanly possible.”
Lahn’s selection of Wulf as a running mate and Sand’s choice of Muhlbauer means this will be the first gubernatorial election in Iowa since 1978 in which neither major party has a woman on the ballot as a candidate for either governor or lieutenant governor.
