Who wasn’t there was almost as important as who was at the Iowa PBS forum of Republican candidates for governor on Tuesday night.
Frontrunner Randy Feenstra skipped it, as he has skipped other forums where his fellow Republicans running for the nomination appear, but he still loomed over the three Republicans who did show up at the Iowa PBS studio in Johnston. The only person mentioned more often than Feenstra during the live, hour-long event was Rob Sand.
Interestingly, Donald Trump, who Republican candidates typically go out of their way to praise, was only mentioned once in passing, and it was for something he failed to do.
Feenstra has an overwhelming advantage in fundraising and has much greater statewide name recognition than the four other Republicans who will appear on the June 2 primary ballot. He owes both those advantages to his three terms in Congress, representing western Iowa. Feenstra has made ignoring competing candidates in the June 2 primary a central feature of his campaign.
The other Republican who skipped the forum was Zach Lahn, who owns an investment company and used to be the Montana state director of Americans for Prosperity. Lahn was recently endorsed by former congressman Steve King.
The three candidates standing next to each on stage on Tuesday night were Eddie Andrews, Brad Sherman and Adam Steen.
The televised forum was billed as an Iowa Press debate, but there was no engagement between candidates. It’s become common over the last few decades to call joint media appearances by candidates who stand or sit near each other while answering questions from reporters “debates,” even if no debating occurs.
Questions were asked by a panel made up of O. Kay Henderson, Radio Iowa’s news director and moderator of Iowa Press, Des Moines Register chief politics reporter Brianne Pfannenstiel and Erin Murphy, Des Moines bureau chief for the Gazette.
Questions ranged from electability to school vouchers to water quality and cancer. The answers didn’t provide much detail, but viewers did get to learn which candidate thinks Feenstra’s gone woke and which one believes God told him to run.
Below are summaries of the candidates answers on some of the most important topics.
Electability
Brianne Pfannenstiel began the questioning by asking each candidate why primary voters should consider him a stronger general election candidate than Randy Feenstra.
Adam Steen, who served as director of the Iowa Department of Administrative Services for five years under Gov. Reynolds, and whose action in the role have left the department with two ongoing lawsuits (he ordered the closure of the State Historical Society facility in Iowa City last year, and also refused to let the Satanic Temple of Iowa have equal access to the State Capitol grounds), answered first.
“I jumped in this race for one reason and that was to beat Rob Sand,” Steen said. “Rob Sand right now has a tremendous headstart in this election process.”
Steen claimed that Sand is not what he appears to be, and “I know who he actually is,” before turning his attention to Feenstra.
“From an electability standpoint, it’s unfortunate that Congressman Feenstra is not showing up for this debate. It’s unfortunate that he’s hiding in D.C. right now, it’s unfortunate that he continues to run away,” Steen said.
“If you look at the polling right now, Congressman Feenstra is down 12 points to Rob Sand.”
Steen described himself as “a candidate who has a business background, has a faith background, who has a government background” and was therefore the best general election candidate.
Eddie Andrews, a minister and businessman, began his reply by pointing out he’s been elected to the Iowa House from a district in the Des Moines suburbs.
“President Trump did not win this district in either of those six years,” Andrews said, making the only mention of Trump on Tuesday night. It wasn’t clear what “either of those six years meant.”
“Neither one of our U.S. senators, who are both Republicans, who won the state, did not win in this district [sic],” he continued, obviously meaning that neither Grassley nor Ernst carried his district, despite the double negative. “Our congressman did not win in this district.”
Andrews said he was someone “like Ronald Reagan, who can hold the banner high and still attract others to them.”
Brad Sherman started his answer by talking about launching his campaign in February 2025, two months before Gov. Reynolds announced she would not seek reelection.
“Well, when we got into this race, we were the first ones to get into the race,” Sherman said, before eventually dropping the “we” in favor of “I.” “And since we’ve got in we’ve been to 358 meetings all around the state. We accomplished all 99 counties in January before the caucuses, actually. And so, we’ve been hearing from a lot of different people around the state, and I think that’s one of the most important things when it comes to the grassroots when you get into Iowa.”
Sherman said that by traveling around the state, he’s learned “people are frustrated,” and that’s why some want to vote for Rob Sand.
“Whenever I look at those people who are frustrated with what’s happening, you know, regardless of whether I agree with why they’re frustrated or not, the fact is they are frustrated,” he said. “And so we need to give them a candidate who is willing to challenge the status quo.”
Sherman is the founder and pastor of the Solid Rock Christian Church in Coralville. He’s also a co-founder of Informed Choice of Iowa, which operates crisis pregnancy centers in Iowa City and Burlington. Sherman served one two-year term in the Iowa House, where he was one of most anti-abortion members, and promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and vaccines.
School vouchers
Erin Murphy asked Andrews to respond to a recent Randy Feensta statement. Feenstra said he believes private schools that take public funds through the governor’s education savings account (ESA) school voucher program need to be open to all students.
“I just will say this, that every school has to make sure they take every child, right?” Feenstra said at an Urbandale campaign event in February. “If we have to compete on a level playing field, the playing field has to be level all the way. That’s so important.”
Under current law, private schools that take ESA money can discriminate against students in ways that are illegal for public schools, and refuse to accept students on the basis of disability, religious belief or even because a parent is LGBTQ.
Andrews, an ESA supporter, began by saying, “it sounds great on the surface, right? But think about when you say ‘all.’”
“Do you mean that a person with a non-Christian background, who won’t accept the — won’t sign the statements of faith or the statements of requirements for a Christian school should be required to attend that school?” [sic]
Andrews opposes that.
“I think what you’re trying to get to, if I understand your question right, is should people with maybe mental disorders or health challenges” be able to attend the ESA-accepting school of their choice, he continued. Andrews claimed, “most private schools want to accept those, and are now looking to expand, to change their infrastructure, invest in their infrastructure, and certainly some of the larger ones are already doing that.”
He did not offer any examples.
Murphy asked Sherman if there should be an income limit for parents who want to access ESAs.
“No. I think that whether a person has a different level of income or not is really not the issue,” Sherman replied. “The issue is the content of the education that the children are getting. That’s why so many people are looking at ESAs.”
Sherman said, “This issue of whether you should receive all the other children or not is another issue I’ve heard Rob Sand talk about as well,” but because private schools don’t get all the federal funds public schools do, “to suggest that you should take every student and provide all the same services, and what have you, which has been suggested, you know, is a little bit ridiculous.”
Murphy’s version of the question for Steen was whether Steen agreed with Gov. Reynolds that private schools should get extra funding to take a student with an Individualized Educational Program (IEP), a legally binding document detailing the special education services a school must provide to a student with a disability.
“I agree with the additional funding for children with special needs,” Steen said, adding that both his sons go to public school and one of them has an IEP.
“But let me back up to Randy Feenstra’s comments,” he continued. “Randy Feenstra making those comments, saying that every school should be required to accept any student that walks through those doors shows how ridiculously out of touch he is. For him to make those comments, there’s one person who agrees with him, one person, and that’s Rob Sand.”
“There’s no difference between Rob Sand and Randy Feenstra in this issue, and I think that’s a horrible thing for Iowans. Because if he is the supposed frontrunner, they need to know that Randy Feenstra is not only out of touch, but he’s got a liberal woke perspective and he’s going to be forcing Christian schools to take government intervention, which flies in the face of the whole purpose of the process and the program.”
Steen referenced his own household, saying, “because we have a situation right now in our family, we’re not going to force a school to accept kids that they’re not prepared for.”
Abortion
Henderson began her questioning by confirming that all three candidates onstage have said they believe life begins as soon as sperm fertilizes an ovum, although the vaguer term “conception” was used at the forum. She asked Sherman whether a woman or a doctor should therefore be criminally charged in the case of an abortion.
“Now whether people should be prosecuted for participating in an abortion or having an abortion, I mean, that’s going to depend on every single situation,” he said. “I don’t think you can make a one-size-fits-all on that.”
Henderson reminded Steen that he’s said abortion “needs to be eliminated entirely,” and asked how he’d accomplish that as governor.
Steen said he would eliminate the six-week window in which abortions are currently permitted in Iowa, before denouncing medication abortions.
“I tell you what’s a crime, are [sic] when these abortion pills are being shipped into the state right now, and we don’t know how many abortions are taking place, we don’t know how many abortions are happening around the ‘heartbeat bill’ right now,” he said. “So, the first thing we need to do to protect life here in this state is shut down those abortion pills and keep those from entering the state.”
Steen said as governor, he would focus on creating a “culture of life.”
Cancer
Pfannenstiel asked Andrews what “concrete steps” he would take during his first year as governor to address the state’s cancer crisis.
Andrews said he would support research and said he had two concrete steps in mind. The first was “making radon kits available,” and he said he was also “proposing early, if not free, but certainly reduced [cost] cancer screening for all Iowans.”
Asked how he would move quickly from research to action, Steen replied, “That’s a great question. Let me back up and just mention, and I’ve publicly said all across the state, that my family was hit hard with cancer.”
Steen said his father died of cancer and his mother was a breast cancer survivor.
As for action, he said there’s a need for “one thing that will lead to three things.” The one thing is to “stop the political talking points around this problem.”
The three things?
“First we need independent research … [T]he second thing, I will create an enterprise within the Department of Administrative Services that is purely focused on solving the cancer issue … And lastly, the third thing is we’re going to fund it. We’re going to fund it appropriately.”
Pfannenstiel asked Sherman if he thought Iowa’s poor water quality played a role in the state’s extremely high levels of cancer.
“That’s a big topic everyone talks about,” he replied. “Now, I’ve been saying also from the beginning that we have to have studies by people who, as the old phrase goes, don’t have a dog in the hunt. Because there’s a big level of mistrust out there in the public right now, even with our medical institutions and what have you.”
Sherman added, “I know chemists who can really look into this.”
Water quality
Murphy prefaced his question to Sherman by saying that improving water quality in the state would improve recreational opportunities, which may persuade people to move to Iowa and people who live in Iowa not to leave.
“Is Iowa hurting itself by not putting more into water quality?” he asked.
“I think that’s certainly part of it,” Sherman said. “Recreation is, you know, everybody enjoys recreation, water sports and we’ve had trouble with some lakes and streams that are so polluted that they have to put signs up to say ‘don’t go swimming.’ But it is not unique just to Iowa.”
Sherman then told a rambling story about a trip to the Smoky Mountain and seeing a sign warning people not to eat fish from a river there.
Murphy asked Andrews what action needs to be taken about nitrates in the drinking water sources for the Des Moines area.
“Water quality, and what we call quality of life, and recreational water is important,” Andrews said. He claimed the Iowa Legislature is effectively addressing the problem of water pollution.
“We are taking action as a state,” he said. “I would even accelerate that as governor.”
Murphy asked Steen if as governor he would sign legislation increasing legal protections for pesticide companies.
“Before we sign anything into law, what we need to understand are the facts and to back up to water quality,” he said.
According to Steen, he attended a forum held by the Iowa Cancer Consortium, and “I didn’t hear them talk about nitrates at all.”
Steen never addressed pesticides.
Other issues and Reynolds’ legacy
The candidates were also asked about property taxes (Steen: “I will attack spend [sic]” to lower property taxes; Sherman wants to eliminate them altogether through “common-sense budgeting,” but that’s a long-term plan; Andrews claims to have a plan that will eliminate property taxes in just seven years), Iowa’s ongoing billion-dollar-plus budget deficit (all three think things will work out if the state just keeps lowering taxes); and the use of eminent domain for a private company’s pipeline (Sherman and Andrews are against it, Steen want to find the “middle ground” between opponents and proponents).
The final question was about Gov. Reynolds’ legacy.
Eddie Andrews said Reynolds has “done a phenomenal job in many respects.” He praised her for the ESA program (although he suggested he really deserves the credit), the series of laws targeting transgender Iowans Reynolds has signed into law (he called it “protecting girls and women”) and for the school book ban (he called it “making sure that our education does not have porn”).
Steen praised Reynolds for her “bold conservative values.”
“She championed life, protecting life,” he said. “She championed protecting girls’ sports and protecting school choice. So, absolutely, I will continue to push those forward. But I have a different background, I’ve got a business background.”
Steen warned viewers that Rob Sand “won’t champion conservative values.”
“If Rob Sand is our governor, we will be the next Minnesota; Illinois; Dearborn, Michigan; California; Virginia. The list goes on and on.”
Steen didn’t explain how Iowa could end up like Michigan’s eighth largest city, but rightwing political commentators often claim Dearborn is somehow unAmerican because of its Muslim population.
Sherman, who was running when people believed Reynolds would seek another term, was asked why he thought a change was needed. He answered by recalling the phone call he made to Reynolds to tell her he was about to launch his campaign.
According to Sherman, he told the governor, “I feel I’ve prayed about it, and God’s made it so absolutely clear that I feel like I’m going to run for governor.”
He added, “That’s why I ran.”
