With one week until Election Day, Turek is making a closing pitch about males competing in female sports. A separate line about taxpayer-funded sex changes has added to the backlash from Democrats he needs.
Josh Turek’s closing argument to Iowa voters is that girls’ sports should be protected from males competing in female sports. His ad also takes aim at taxpayer-funded sex-change procedures, and that broader appeal to the transgender debate has some Democrats saying they will not vote for him.
The ad opens with Turek describing the bullying he faced as a child in a wheelchair and saying no Iowan should face discrimination. Then he pivots to the issue at the center of the ad: he opposes “males competing in female sports.” He adds, “I’m against taxpayers paying for sex changes too,” calls both issues “the nonsense from both extremes,” and says he wants to focus on lowering costs.
The ad has triggered a backlash from the left. Erin Reed, a national transgender journalist and activist, urged readers to leave his name blank on the Senate line. The criticism was featured by the Des Moines Register’s opinion account, just days after the paper’s editorial board endorsed Turek.
The Register can publish an endorsement and a guest opinion that disagrees with it. Still, the juxtaposition is hard to miss: the paper is backing Turek while its opinion page spotlights an argument that his closing ad could cost him Democratic votes. On X, writer Benjamin Ryan noted that Reed was urging 132,000 subscribers not to vote for four Democratic candidates, including Turek. Iowa Democrat and former congressional candidate Ryan Melton said he wished Turek had stuck with letting sports governing bodies set the rules, rather than “doubling down” on the ad’s language. Iowa political commentator Dexter Merschbrock replied, “And it’s not like he hasn’t gotten this advice.”
The ad presents Turek’s position as a reasonable middle ground, but his record complicates that claim. He was not yet in the Legislature when Iowa passed its 2022 girls’ sports law, so he has no vote on that measure, which passed the House in February 2022, before his first term began in January 2023 (bill history; Turek’s legislative biography). But in 2023, he voted against Senate File 482, which barred students from using school restrooms and changing areas that did not correspond with their biological sex. The official House Journal lists Turek among the 39 nays; the bill history records its passage. The bathroom law did not address sports, but the vote shows Turek opposed a parallel sex-based rule for school facilities.
The hypocrisy is right there in Turek’s own ad. He says, “I’m against taxpayers paying for sex changes too. Anyone tells you any different is lying.” But in 2025, he voted NO on House File 1049, a health and human services appropriations bill that included a provision barring Medicaid reimbursement for sex-reassignment surgery and associated procedures. The official roll-call vote records his no vote. He is now calling people liars for saying his record is different from the position he is selling, even though he voted against the bill that would have stopped Medicaid from paying for these procedures. The record is plain: his vote and his ad do not match.
Matt Corridoni’s comment says the quiet part out loud about what Democrats are willing to do to win. Corridoni, a Democratic strategist whose organization The Bench has backed Turek, says Turek “can be trusted to do what he needs to do in order to win votes in Iowa—including the Republican ones.” The message to Democrats is plain: don’t worry about whether Turek believes it. He’ll say what he needs to say to win your vote. Just vote for him.
With Election Day a week away, Turek is betting that the ad helps him pick up enough Republicans to make the backlash worth it. Some of his fellow Democrats are already saying they will not go along. Did he just turn off part of his base at the moment he needs it most?
