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Russian (RU) Before narrowly clinching the GOP nomination for Iowa governor, Zach Lahn took a stance once unthinkable for Republicans in the Corn Belt: Big Agriculture is making Americans sick.
The message, which aligns with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again movement, helped Lahn deliver a rare defeat over a candidate endorsed by President Donald Trump.
"Too many politicians from Washington, D.C., to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money," Lahn said at his victory speech after winning his June 2 primary. "This will not go on when I'm governor."
Lahn - a businessman, sixth-generation Iowan who moved back full-time in 2023, farmer and former Montana state director for the conservative Americans for Prosperity - ran a populist campaign that also appealed to conservative activists. In campaign commercials, he called for cracking down on illegal immigration and reclaiming the school "curriculum from the Marxists who hijacked it." On the trail and social media, Lahn bashed corporate interests and the D.C. establishment.
Lahn has blamed Iowa's unusual surge in cancer in part on pesticides, the subject of extensive litigation as some researchers link long-term exposure to the chemicals to the disease. Lahn's primary opponent, Rep. Randy Feenstra, has defended pesticides as thoroughly evaluated by regulators and urged a MAHA commission chaired by Kennedy to beware of activist groups trying to discredit the products.
Lahn opposed efforts to shield pesticide manufacturers from certain liability suits and Trump's executive order boosting domestic production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in a commonly used weedkiller. The issues are popular with some members of Kennedy's MAHA movement, which has factions pushing for healthier foods, major changes to vaccines and eliminating environmental toxins.
The movement - born out of the 2024 political alliance between Kennedy and Trump - has generally aligned itself with the GOP but has been at odds with the party's historic ties to corporate America. Lahn had discussed his run for governor with Kennedy, who was supportive, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations.
In an interview, Lahn confirmed that he met Kennedy last summer and they talked "a little bit about the race" when he was considering running, but mostly about agriculture. Lahn said he called Kennedy briefly after he won the primary last week and that Kennedy was a big motivation for why he wanted to run in the first place.
"The [MAHA] movement is real," Lahn said. "Whether you're left or right, you don't want our kids getting sick. You want to have real food. You want to make sure your environmental toxins are minimized. And you want low cancer rates."
Kennedy praised the candidate.
"He's a farmer, he cares deeply about the farm economy, he wants to reduce the cost of inputs which are burying American farmers," Kennedy told The Washington Post. "And he wants to give farmers an off-ramp from chemically intensive agriculture."
Some Republican governors have embraced Kennedy's MAHA food agenda, including banning soda and candy in the food stamp program and pushing to rid foods of artificial dyes.
Lahn was also embraced by some vaccine critics, including Stand for Health Freedom, which advocates against vaccine mandates. Although the issue wasn't central to his campaign, Lahn said that he wanted to pull mRNA coronavirus shots off the market and to end vaccine requirements to attend schools, a position that has concerned public health experts who fear a resurgence of preventable diseases. He told The Post that vaccinations shouldn't be a "requirement to participate in society."
Lahn won the state's GOP gubernatorial primary with about 38 percent of the vote compared with the 37 percent picked up by Feenstra, whom Trump endorsed days before the election. That bucks a general trend: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) all lost their primaries after Trump endorsed opponents.
"It cannot be overstated how much of an Ag and chemical industry disruption this win is," Alex Clark, a conservative wellness influencer and podcaster aligned with the MAHA movement said in a text message. "It's unprecedented for a Republican farmer, who is anti-pesticide, to win in a farming state like Iowa."
The governor's race was not purely a referendum on MAHA issues. Some preferred Lahn as an outsider and saw Feenstra as an establishment pick.
Lahn performed best in lower-income farming counties and big cities like Des Moines, according to a Washington Post analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey. Lahn and Feenstra performed about evenly in the Iowa counties with the most farmers. But income mattered: Lahn outperformed Feenstra by about 10 points in poorer farming counties, while Feenstra did best in the higher-income farming counties.
Lahn will face Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand, who ran unopposed in the Democratic primary, in November's general election. While Iowa has recently become a Republican stronghold that Trump handily won in 2024, this year's governor's race is widely seen as competitive.
Like Lahn, Sand opposes liability shields for pesticide makers and has vowed to combat Iowa's rising cancer rates. The Democrat's campaign accused Lahn of being an "out-of-state political operative" due to his work with Americans for Prosperity, which generally advocates against business regulations.
"Rob Sand has spent his career holding powerful insiders and special interests accountable, and will do the same as Iowa's next governor," Emma O'Brien, Sand's deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.
Lahn defended his record, saying he was born and raised in Iowa and "always wanted to get back home"; he called Sand "a career politician."
The politics of growing cancer rates
On a December video call with MAHA supporters, Lahn recalled growing up riding four-wheelers through Iowa's fields with his dad, who worked as a crop consultant. They would bring nets and catch bugs, and analyze pests and weeds for local farmers.
"After doing that for a few decades, he developed the exact type of lymphoma that's been implicated in the lawsuits that we've seen," Lahn said on the call organized by MAHA Action, a political advocacy group that issued its first state-level endorsement for him. "These have been very informative moments in my life."
On conservative Tucker Carlson's podcast in February titled "Rising Cancer Rates, the Globalist Agenda, and the Big Business Land Grab Making You Poor," Lahn noted his dad was in remission. But he said, "Your chance of getting these specific cancers linked to these products is much higher" when discussing pesticides.
For young adults in the Corn Belt, which stretches across the Midwest, cancer rates have been rising quicker than in the country as a whole, according to a Post analysis last year. The six highest corn-producing states - Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana and Kansas - had the same cancer frequency as the rest of the nation for young adults and the general population in 1999. That began to diverge in the 2000s, and since 2015, the states have had a significantly higher cancer rate for those 15 to 49 years old, the analysis found.
Some researchers have said the growing cancer rates are unlikely to be explained by one factor, and may be attributed to broader changes such as better screening, evolving environmental factors and shifts in lifestyle patterns.
The corporate giant Bayer has sought legal immunity from lawsuits filed by thousands alleging Roundup products cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The industry has stood behind the safety of the products and said they are evaluated by federal regulators through a rigorous process.
Lahn has called for breaking up the "Big Ag cartels" by pursuing antitrust suits against monopolies and to "conduct independent state safety tests on products used in Iowa."
In the interview, he said he would aim to help farmers find affordable ways to reduce the use of chemicals, such as regenerative farming and rotational grazing programs.
A test of the MAHA movement
While MAHA champions view Lahn's win as a boon for their causes, their nascent movement has been tested in recent months with frustration spilling out on social media. Trump officials have increasingly swapped out some of Kennedy's handpicked deputies, leaving some allies to worry that Kennedy's influence is being diminished.
Tony Lyons, a close ally of Kennedy who leads MAHA political advocacy groups, has pledged to raise $100 million to elect MAHA-friendly Republicans in the midterms. But it's difficult to discern how much he raised among the web of groups he runs. Campaign finance documents show the groups spent nearly $650,000 to help Rep. Julia Letlow (R) win the Senate primary over Cassidy in Louisiana; he had aimed to spend $1 million.
Lyons declined to share how much money the MAHA PAC had spent supporting Lahn. The group said in a press release that its spending included four rounds of text messages to roughly 350,000 GOP likely voters in Iowa, as well as tens of thousands of robocalls and get-out-the-vote phone calls.
Kelly Ryerson, a prominent anti-pesticide activist known online as "Glyphosate Girl," said Lahn's win has reinvigorated the MAHA movement by validating what she and others have been telling Republicans - they win votes standing up to pesticides and Big Agriculture.
"Despite what the administration is doing right now, this is where the will of the people is," she said. "And we're going to continue to bring pitchforks to the castle."
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