It must be tempting for Iowans to believe they exist in the national imagination only for the duration of the fabled presidential election year caucuses, when the candidates and world media rush to the breadbasket for snowy January vistas and wholesome town halls and kitchen tables, with corn dogs and plaid shirts and John Deere caps and lonesome fields to present themselves as champions of the American pastoral. But 12 years have flashed by since one of their own, Joni Ernst, cut through all the rustic posing with an audacious campaign advert in which she stood in a barn as a well-coiffed if slightly terrifying farmer and former military officer who told voters: “I grew up castrating hogs on an Iowa farm so when I get to Washington I’ll know how to cut pork.” She vowed to cut Obamacare, too, and sent a message to the “big spenders” by saying: “Let’s make ‘em squeal.”Ernst duly won the Republican Party a Senate seat that the Democrat Tom Harkin had held for the previous 20 years. Whether she made the big spenders squeal over her years in Washington is debatable but with Ernst having decided not to seek re-election earlier this year, her seat is up for grabs in a race that has propelled the Hawkeye State back into the spotlight.Tuesday night brought a blizzard of elections across the United States, with voters going to the polls to decide on primary campaigns in California, Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, New Mexico and New Jersey as party strategists scanned the maps and early results for flashing lights that may indicate potential power shifts in the November elections. While the flashy races for governor and Los Angeles mayor’s office in California enjoyed top billing, one of the most fascinating elections to come was clarified after the Republican and Democratic primaries concluded in Iowa.Josh Turek emerged as the Democratic candidate. The 47-year-old has a backstory of dauntless perseverance, having grown up in the early 1980s with spina bifida he contracted through his father’s exposure to agent orange while serving in Vietnam. His family lived through intense poverty in Council Bluffs, turning to charities for clothes and food stamps and Turek found an outlet and passion as a wheelchair basketball sensation, representing the United States as a four-time Paralympian, winning two gold medals and playing professionally in Europe before returning home. He has been a member of the Iowa state house since 2023 and throughout his Senate campaign has taken inspiration from Harkin, whom he describes as his political model. Harkin represented Iowa during the latter half of the 1980s, which were a long nightmare for Iowa’s farmers, caused by the sustained embargo on wheat sales to Russia, with prices tanking during a period when interest rates soared. It led to hundreds of bankruptcies, repossessions and mounting suicides.Turek contends that today’s farmers are on the threshold of being plunged into a similar crisis. The Trump administration tariffs has had a disastrous impact on soybean exports and the Iran war has added punitive fuel and fertiliser costs to farm bills nationally. “It is a really, really scary place to be in rural Iowa and to be a farmer,” Turek told Iowa Now in a recent interview.“It is what I’m calling a Farmageddon. It is a second farm crisis. Because of the chaotic tariffs we now lead the nation in farm foreclosures. You are seeing farmer suicide rates skyrocketing. You go into these rural communities and honestly, they have been hollowed out. They have lost their pharmacies, they have lost their grocery stores, they’ve lost their healthcare clinics.”Turek describes himself as a “common-sense prairie populist” and has echoed Democratic candidates across the country in seeking to pin the blame for the affordability crisis on the current administration. “As I’ve been travelling the state, I’ve heard so many young Americans say they don’t believe the American dream exists any more. They’ll never be able to afford a home.”Ashley Hinson celebrates on stage after winning the right to be the Republican Party's candidate for a a US Senate seat in Iowa. Photograph: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images But Turek will face a Republican candidate the GOP regards as a rising star: the current congresswoman and former television anchor Ashley Hinson, who comfortably won her primary campaign on Tuesday night. She earned the endorsement of Trump early and will now seek to lean on his phenomenal result in the Iowa presidential primary of 2024, when he won 98 out of the 99 counties, losing only Johnson County, to Nikki Haley, by a single vote. Hinson is polished and well established in Iowa and offered this brisk portrayal of her opponent at her victory speech on Tuesday night.“While he has been masquerading as a good old Iowa moderate he is nothing of the sort,” she told supporters.“In fact, he supports and will fight for the same radical and destructive policy agenda that pushed America to her breaking point and left you all to foot the bill. He would mean higher taxes, less jobs, more uncertainty. He puts illegals before Iowans, criminals before victims and he would be a rubber stamp for the same radical policies that tear up the fabric of our country and have hollowed out once great American cities.”Still, the Cook Political Report announced they were moving the Iowa Senate race from “Likely Republican” to the less certain “Lean Republican” after Tuesday’s results and Hinson conceded that the Iowa campaign would not be easy. “The machine will crank up. The attacks will come like never before. And they’ll say anything about me. About my record. About President Trump. And they’ll even say anything about all of you in this room. So I would say: challenge accepted.”It’s not quite “Let ‘em squeal”, but Iowa is back in the conversation.