Josh Turek pushed past the Ring-a-Duck and the Tilt-a-Whirl before rolling up to the Iowa State Fair staple called Hot Shot.
“Big Game,” a sign said. “Big Prizes.”
“You just gotta make two?” he asked.
Sitting in his wheelchair with spoked wheels and an aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber frame, Mr. Turek spun a basketball in his hands. A two-time Paralympic gold medalist, he dribbled hard twice, then twice more.
On the busy, noisy midway, reporters, photographers and passers-by stopped and watched.
Mr. Turek, 47, had attracted a crowd not simply on account of athletic renown. He is the rare Democrat seen as having a plausible path to winning a U.S. Senate seat in Iowa, where he faces Ashley Hinson, a three-term Republican congresswoman and former local news anchor, in a high-stakes race with the potential to help his party win back control of the upper chamber.
At first glance, he is an unlikely key to his party’s hopes. The first time he cast a ballot for president, he was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. In a moment marked by the rise of democratic socialists, he identifies as a “common-sense prairie populist.” And in this era of extreme polarization, he touts the times he’s voted with Republicans. He says he will work with anybody — including President Trump.
He sticks out, too, on the short list of Democrats’ top Senate hopefuls. Compared to Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Sherrod Brown of Ohio or Mary Peltola of Alaska, he had no record of statewide electoral success until he won his primary in June. Relative to charismatic candidates like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, James Talarico of Texas or Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Mr. Turek lacks a certain stage presence and oratorical buzz.
But in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in 18 years and that Mr. Trump won in 2024 by more than 13 points, polls and independent analysts suggest Mr. Turek has a chance.
And he recently earned his party’s ultimate imprimatur: Former President Barack Obama backed him in a video in which he called Mr. Turek “somebody who knows how to win.”
Ms. Hinson is trying to paint Mr. Turek as more liberal than he lets on and as a lawmaker who’s missed too many votes. “My opponent is an absentee legislator,” she said in an interview. But her allies acknowledge that targeting Mr. Turek is uncommonly complicated.
Voters and politicians alike assign to Mr. Turek traits like resilience and persistence — a sense, judging from conversations around the state, that’s based less on what he says and more on what they see.
“Determination,” said Tom Harkin, Iowa’s last Democratic senator. “An ethic of not letting anything hold you back.”
“Toughness,” Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said. “What he’s had to overcome.”
“There is a stigma associated with individuals with disabilities that maybe we’re not quite as capable as the average individual,” Mr. Turek said in an interview. “I think I’m always battling that stigma.”
But, he added, “there is a benefit. That put some serious ambition in me — like, look, I’m going to prove to you what I can do and what I can accomplish.”
At Hot Shot, Mr. Turek looked up and took aim. His first ball missed, off the front of the rim and too far to the left. So did his second, off the front, too far to the right. He missed another, and then another.
“I’m doing it again,” he said.
‘But they kept going’
Mr. Turek was born in Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s western edge, to parents coping with grief. Their first child, Tasha, had drowned as a toddler in a pool.
Joshua Mark Turek was their third.
He came out breech, and his father saw in the eyes of the doctor that something was wrong. At the bottom of the baby’s back was a fluid-filled bulge of balled-up nerves — spina bifida, the family later learned, presumably caused by his father’s exposure during his service in Vietnam to the jungle-killing poison known as Agent Orange. The next day, Josh had the first of more than 20 surgeries.
His parents had three more children, and the family lived on not much money. His father was a recruiter for a local technical school, and his mother was a county case worker for the mentally disabled. They shopped at Goodwill. The kids shared clothes and ate free lunch at school and tuna noodle casserole and gravy on toast at home. They went to family nights at the Royal Fork Buffet when anybody under 12 ate for 10 cents times their age. They never talked about their father’s necklace — a locket with a picture of their older sister who had died.
The Tureks’ oldest boy had surgery after surgery on his clubfoot, his faulty hips and his stunted spine. He didn’t crawl until he was 3. He didn’t walk until he was 5. He lugged his legs with a herky-jerky gait until he started using a wheelchair at 10. He was bullied so badly that he moved to Missouri for middle school, living with his great aunt and attending the Christian school where she taught. Back in Council Bluffs for high school, he joined the student council, the student newspaper and the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. He had a graduation party at his house, and not one classmate came.
This past spring, at the YMCA in Des Moines, Mr. Turek slid out of his chair and onto a mat on the floor.
“The very first thing that my father sees is the mass of nerves on the base of my back,” he said. “I always thought that for someone like him, he would have stopped and said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve lost my firstborn, now we’ve had a child with disabilities, I’m not going to continue on.’”
Dressed in a white United States Paralympic Team T-shirt and navy Nike pants and shoes, Mr. Turek stretched and winced.
“But they kept going,” he said.
Gold in Rio and Tokyo
Mr. Turek’s younger brother and youngest sister were tall and good at basketball — good enough eventually to play in college and professionally in Europe. As kids, his siblings honed their shots on the hoop at their house. From his chair or trying to stand, he did, too.
He attended a wheelchair sports camp when he was 12 and played for the Nebraska Red Dawgs wheelchair basketball team in Omaha as a teen. He kept getting better. He wanted, he told the local newspaper, The Daily Nonpareil, to be the “wheelchair champion of the world.”
At Southwest Minnesota State University, he was a three-time team captain and a four-time National Wheelchair Basketball Association All-American. He scored more than 4,000 points.
After college, he played for a professional team in Italy. He played in the Paralympics in Athens in 2004, when the U.S. finished seventh.
In 2005, he moved to Spain to play for a team near Madrid. But when he tried out for Team USA, he got cut.
He got cut in 2006.
He got cut in 2007 and 2008.
He got cut in 2009 and 2010.
He was always a top-shelf scorer, according to teammates, but had to become a better defender. In Council Bluffs between seasons in Spain, he lifted weights at the Y and pressed through laps around Lake Manawa.
He played in the Paralympics in London in 2012, scoring 15 points to help the U.S. beat Britain to win the bronze medal. He played in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, scoring four points against Turkey in the semifinals to help the U.S. win the gold. And he played in Tokyo in 2021, when the U.S. won the gold again.
“I was sad with how I played, particularly in the last two games,” he told The Nonpareil. “Maybe there’s something poetic about the great scorer in his last game scoring zero points,” he said, “totally satisfied because the ultimate goal was to win a gold medal for your country.”
Even as he was creating a life as an athlete, he was steadily thinking about what might come next, imagining a career in politics. In 2008, he was spotted by a reporter from the conservative National Review changing his voter registration so he could pick Mr. Obama in the caucuses. His time overseas, Mr. Turek told him, had upped his interest in government at home.
“After living in Europe,” he said, “I think it’s embarrassing that 40 million Americans don’t have health coverage.”
And after Tokyo, he was ready. He told The Nonpareil: “I don’t want basketball to be the be-all, end-all of my story.”
‘How in the world did you get up here?’
He tugged his wheelchair up porches and stoops.
Married to a woman from the Dominican Republic he had met in Spain, working at a wheelchair company in Omaha and driving his hand-controlled Dodge Charger around his hilly hometown, Mr. Turek decided to run for a State House seat in 2022. He went from house to house to champion more equitable health care, higher wages for workers and more funding for public schools.
“He’s had to drag himself up some stairs,” said Lisa Lima, the chair of the Democratic Party of Pottawattamie County. “They can’t just say, ‘Oh, come back another day.’”
“Always, the first question is, ‘How in the world did you get up here?’” Mr. Turek said. “And I say, ‘I dragged my wheelchair up here. That’s how important your vote is.’”
His first race, he won by six votes.
Two years later, he was re-elected by nearly 600.
In his two terms at the capitol in Des Moines, Mr. Turek was one of the more bipartisan legislators and was lauded for being one of the most effective. He voted against school vouchers and bans on gender affirming care for minors and limits on books in school libraries about L.G.B.T.Q. topics. He was also one of just seven Democrats to vote with Republicans on a bill calling for longer prison sentences for serial serious offenders. And he was one of only three Democrats to vote with Republicans to attempt to make illegal immigration a state crime and to require state law enforcement to make arrests.
In this year’s Senate race, Mr. Turek won the support of several high-profile Democrats during the primary, including Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois; Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary; and Mr. Harkin, the architect of the Americans with Disabilities Act. He was the all but designated preference of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — and the beneficiary of $10 million of outside spending. It helped him trounce his closest primary opponent.
Since then, he has hand-pedaled 59 miles in a cross-Iowa bicycle ride, downed Busch Light while hobnobbing with fans at the Iowa Corn 350 stock car race and marked his final visit in a tour of all of Iowa’s 99 counties with a cheesy quip. “We intentionally had the 99th county be Worth County so we could say that this trip was worth it,” he said at Worth Brewing. The few dozen people by the bar obliged with laughs and applause.
A few hours later, at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding Dinner in Clear Lake, he sat at the base of a ramp built for him.
The short video that had announced Mr. Obama’s support played on big screens. The former president and the potential senator dueled in a state-specific version of the basketball game of H-O-R-S-E — in which two players try to match shots. “Not only did I get whooped,” Mr. Obama said to the camera after losing in I-O-W-A, “but you’ve got here a man of character.”
Some 750 people stood and cheered. Mr. Turek pushed toward the center of the stage.
Hot beef sundae
Back at the state fair, in the Agriculture Building across from the Pork Tent, Mr. Turek waited in the line to see the Butter Cow. He moved past seventh-place tomatoes, fourth-place corn and second-place squash.
A staffer offered him signature snacks. Peanut butter and jelly corn dogs. Deep-fried Oreos. Pickle pizza. He didn’t think twice.
He went with the hot beef sundae.
“This is very similar to what we’d eat as kids,” he said. “My mom would make as much as she could with potatoes and beef or rice or noodles.”
Into the Styrofoam bowl filled with mashed potatoes, roast beef and gravy, shredded cheese and a cherry tomato on top, Mr. Turek plunged his plastic spork.
At the fair’s semifamous “soapbox,” on a dais adorned with bales of hay, Mr. Turek made his pitch: Everything costs too much — gas, groceries and more — and Ms. Hinson isn’t helping, he said. She voted for Mr. Trump’s tariffs, for his war in Iran, for his “One Big Beautiful Bill” that made it harder for some Iowans to have health care, he said. He said he was “very proud” to have “voted with Republicans over 700 times” in the State House. He brings to politics, he said, lessons learned while winning medals. “It’s not about the back of the jersey. It’s about the front,” he said. “USA.”
Chip Albright, a musician from Des Moines, capped the candidate’s speech with a song, “If It’s Turek, That’s Terrific!” — a ditty as corny as it was catchy. “Tough times need good guys who overcome obstacles,” Mr. Albright sang. “Winners never quit.”
Mr. Turek’s bipartisan bent, his hokey jokes, his less than electrifying oratory — it all makes him distinct from other, edgier Democratic candidates of 2026.
“He’s boring,” said Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a progressive group that recruits young candidates and backed one of Mr. Turek’s opponents in the primary.
“The idea of him is better than the reality of him,” she said. And yet that might not be disqualifying, she added. “Actually, the idea of him might be enough.”
For any Democrat, Iowa is an uphill battle. Mr. Turek is trailing Ms. Hinson in fund-raising, and polls, too, suggest he is behind — but not by much. Some elections analysts rate the race as leaning Republican; last month, though, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report reassessed it as a tossup.
Out on the midway, he linked up with Mr. Kelly, the senator from Arizona — here to stump for Mr. Turek, and to seed some ambitions of his own.
Mr. Kelly asked Mr. Turek about playing basketball with Mr. Obama.
It was stressful, he said. “He runs out, like, 12 straight shots — bang, bang, bang,” said Mr. Turek, wheeling past the Tornado, the Sizzler and a stall selling strawberry daiquiris.
“And I was, like, ‘I’m playing the president of the United States, one of my political heroes.’ I’m, like, ‘I’m gonna choke under the lights here. I’m never gonna hear the end of this from Paralympians.’”
At Hot Shot, surrounded by the reporters, photographers and passers-by, Mr. Turek held his hand high as his fifth shot flew through the air — the ball bouncing off the front rim, off the back rim, and finally in. He made his sixth try, too. For his prize, he picked a plush steer.
“Once I’m warm,” he said, “I’m good.”
Georgia Gee contributed research. Bayliss Wagner contributed reporting from Des Moines.
