The Democratic Party’s 2024 standard-bearer spent $1.4 billion, lost every swing state, and spent the following year posting coconut tree memes on social media. Now Democratic candidates in Iowa are being asked whether they want her help — and they can barely get the word “no” out before the laughter starts.
Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand is running for governor. State Rep. Josh
Turek — a Paralympian in wheelchair basketball — is running for the Senate seat. Both appeared at the Iowa State Fair earlier this month. Both were asked the same question by Politico’s Jonathan Martin. Both gave the same answer.
Sand’s exchange deserves to be quoted at full length because it was a masterclass in political honesty:
Martin: Would you want to have Joe Biden campaign for you?
Sand: Uh, no. Can he even do that right now?
Martin: How about Kamala Harris?
Sand: No thanks. Let’s move on. We need some new leadership.
Martin: You don’t think Harris should run in 2028?
Sand: Nope.
Rob Sand on a Kamala Harris 2028 run: "Nope."
— POLITICO (@politico) August 26, 2026
Sand could become Iowa's first Dem governor in two decades, but he's not interested in help on the campaign trail from prominent party names like Harris or Biden.
Watch his full interview with our @jmart: https://t.co/08NH2EzXGB pic.twitter.com/nTPRSmIWiG
__PRESVEND__
Turek couldn’t even get to “no” without laughing when asked the same question about Harris. The chuckles came first. The answer followed.
This is what the Democratic Party’s bench looks like when the cameras
Q: Should Kamala Harris campaign for you?
— BulwarkClips (@BulwarkClips) August 26, 2026
Josh Turek: "No." pic.twitter.com/voMTkMhm1k
are off and candidates are being honest. Not the carefully crafted MSNBC soundbites about coalitions and enthusiasm and the party being energized. The reality is Iowa Democrats running competitive races who can’t answer the question “would you like the 2024 presidential nominee to campaign for you?” without either laughing out loud or delivering a string of increasingly sharp rejections.
The Biden rejection carries its own layer of brutality. “Can he even do that right now?” is a reference to the stage IV metastatic bone cancer diagnosis that Hunter Biden disclosed recently — the illness that, by Hunter’s own account, had been silently advancing for three years while the administration told America Joe Biden was sharp, healthy, and ready to serve. Sand couldn’t even treat the question as serious. His immediate assumption was that the former president might be physically incapable of appearing at a campaign event.
Sand, to his credit, admitted in his full Politico interview that he had even voted Republican in the past and was uncomfortable with the direction of internal Democratic Party politics. Which raises the question he hasn’t fully answered: what exactly is he still doing in a party whose most energized wing wants to abolish the Senate, defund the Pentagon, and nominate candidates who campaign alongside Mao-praising Twitch streamers?
The answer is probably that winning a governor’s race in Iowa as an independent is harder than winning it as a Democrat. But the coalition he’s actually running in — the one that’s abandoning Kamala Harris in real time, on camera, at a state fair — may not be a coalition that his party’s national leadership has any interest in maintaining.
Sixty-eight days to November. Sand and Turek are distancing from Kamala. She’s eyeing 2028 anyway.
