Julie Stauch’s longshot campaign to win the Democratic nomination for governor came to an abrupt halt on Friday afternoon.
“This afternoon I had a call from the Iowa Secretary of State’s election office telling me that my petitions did not meet the requirements during their review,” Staunch posted Friday evening on Facebook. “Two counties had several problems which led to numbers below the 100 threshold required.”
“Therefore, my name will not be on the June primary ballot.”
Stauch submitted her paperwork to appear on the primary ballot to the Secretary of State’s Office in the Iowa Capitol on Thursday. She told reporters her candidate petition had 4,575 signatures, more than enough to qualify for the June 2 ballot. Candidates for governor needed to submit petitions with 3,500 valid signatures from Iowans eligible to vote in the 2026 election, including at least 100 signatures from 19 different counties, by 5 p.m. on Friday. Because Stauch did not submit her paperwork until Thursday, there was no time to gather more signatures in the two counties that had problems after she was notified on Friday afternoon.
Julie Stauch is president and CEO of a consulting firm she founded in 2011 and has been active in Iowa Democratic Party politics for decades. She has worked on a number of Democratic campaigns, including Mike Franken’s 2022 Senate run, but had never run for office herself before.
The West Des Moines Democrat was always a longshot. Rob Sand was the prohibitive favorite for the nomination even before he officially declared he was running for governor last year on May 12. That didn’t change when Stauch launched her campaign three weeks later. At the time, Stauch said she knew she could match Sand in terms of fundraising, but that didn’t matter, because she would “beat him on the messaging and on how I’m connecting with the voters.”
Nothing that’s happened in the nine months since Stauch began campaigning suggested she was cutting into the large lead Sand had from the beginning.
Stauch’s failure to qualify for the primary ballot leaves Sand unopposed for the Democratic nomination. Sand filed his paperwork to appear on the ballot on March 9. According to his campaign, Sand’s petition had 24,756 signatures. The campaign reported that approximately 20 percent of people who signed the petitions weren’t registered as Democrats, including 2,080 registered Republicans and 3,360 registered as No Party.
Randy Feenstra, who is generally considered to be frontrunner among the five Republican candidates for governor, filed his paperwork the same day as Sand. Feenstra submitted a petition with approximately 7,500 signatures.
“Every day we’re on the campaign trail, hitting every Pizza Ranch,” Feenstra told reporters when he submitted his paperwork on March 9. “We have meet and greets all over the state, every day — I think we’ve done 80, 85 stops now.”
Despite having the highest name recognition statewide of any of the Republican candidates, thanks to his three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, and a commanding lead in fundraising, also due largely to his years in Congress, two of the other four Republicans who will be on the primary ballot collected more signatures than Feenstra.
A week before Feenstra filed his paperwork, Brad Sherman, a former one-term member of the Iowa House and an evangelical pastor known to promote conspiracy theories about vaccines and the 2020 presidential election, submitted his. According to Sherman, his petition had almost 9,300 signatures.
Two days after Feenstra filed his paperwork, Adam Steen submitted his. Steen served in the Reynolds’ administration as director of the Department of Administrative Services until resigning in August to run for governor. According to Steen, who’s been endorsed by rightwing evangelical political leader Bob Vander Plaats, the petition he submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office had 9,602 signatures.
