Republican Zach Lahn of Belle Plaine, a candidate for governor, has submitted petition signatures from over 6100 Iowans to qualify for the June 2 Primary ballot.
“We were the last people to get into the race and so spinning up a field team like that that can handle crossing the whole state was a feat,” Lahn said. “I’m just really thankful for the people on the team.”
Lahn, a businessman and farmer who worked for Americans for Prosperity in other states, has run campaigns, too, but this is the first time he’s put his own name on the ballot. “What I see is that Iowans are maybe getting tired of the typical politics and, as a matter of fact, I’m tired of the typical politics,” Lahn said. “I think that throughout this capaign we’ve been doing things a little bit differently.”
Campaign finance reports from 2025 indicate Congressman Randy Feenstra is the fundraising leader in the GOP race for governor and Feenstra is now spending at least a million dollars on campaign ads. Lahn told reporters this morning that he has an outsider message that he’ll soon deliver in ads on radio, TV and other media.
“We fully intend to compete on both the grassroots level and on the media level,” Lahn said. “To me this is about the different vision for the state of Iowa moving forward that keeps our kids here, that saves our family farms, that makes education — including public education — number one in the nation and helps stop the cancer crisis in our state.”
Lahn has been endorsed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) PAC and he said the Republican Party’s nominee for governor has to be willing to address the systemic issues in agriculture. “We have to be willing to confront the elephant in the room and that is that we’ve been lied to for a long time by large agricultural companies about the safety of their products,” Lahn said. “I think this is a bipartisan issue, I truly do, but also I am a conservative. I’m not ashamed to be a conservative. I’m proud to be a conservative, but I also think these issues are so important that we can’t ignore them anymore.”
Lahn is the fourth of the five GOP candidates who’e been campaigning for governor to submit his nominating paperwork for the June Primary. Today is the deadline for federal and state candidates to file for the Republican and Democratic Party Primary Elections coming up on June 2.