Iowa’s Rob Sand Tries a Different Kind of Populism

Instead of chasing outrage, he’s campaigning on audits, electoral reform, and singing “God Bless America.”

(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)

AT EACH OF HIS MANY, MANY campaign stops, Rob Sand—Iowa’s state auditor, now the Democratic nominee for governor—rolls out the same choreographed routine. A cynic might call it a gimmick. He asks for a show of hands: Who in here is a registered Republican? A few hands invariably go up, and Sand leads the room in a round of appreciative applause. Who’s a registered independent? More hands, more applause. There’s one more round of claps for the Democrats (“I’m big on fairness,” Sand says). Finally, the candidate invites the audience—cynics, avert your eyes!—to join him in singing the first verse of “God Bless America.” Someone picks the first note, and off they go.

“Doesn’t that feel better already?” Sand says when it’s over. “Isn’t that what we ought to be doing?”

I’ve been intrigued by Sand’s candidacy this year for a few reasons. He’s running strong in a region—the Farm Belt—that has been more cautionary tale than competitive terrain for Democrats lately: As auditor, Sand is currently the only Democratic statewide officeholder in Iowa. And at a time when so much of the country’s populist energy is concentrating on the political fringes, he’s building momentum as a different kind of populist—a technocratic, centrist, competence-obsessed insurgent.

For at least this one guy, in at least this one state, something about it seems to be working. Although Iowa has voted reliably red lately, several major elections analysts have scored the governor’s contest as a tossup between Sand and Republican nominee Zach Lahn. A New York Times/Siena poll of likely voters conducted in the second half of June found Sand slightly in the lead, 48 percent to 47 percent.

Part of the secret to Sand’s appeal is the harmony between his own biography and his political pitch. The youthful-looking 43-year-old came up in the Iowa government as a public corruption prosecutor, serving for seven years in the attorney general’s office. He leveraged that experience into two successful runs for state auditor on a clean-up-the-books platform, with a laser focus on accountability. That theme still undergirds his campaign speeches today. And Iowa Republicans did him one major political favor: They passed a law gimping the oversight powers of the auditor’s office during his tenure.

In Sand’s telling, what ails Iowa isn’t its decade of Republican governance per se, but a decade of single-party control, period. One-party Democratic control, he insists in his stump speech, wouldn’t be much better: “If you think of that as the solution, please visit California or New York. There you will find problems. Some of the problems are different, because the parties are different, but some are the same. And you know why they’re the same. It’s the same thing we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In his speeches, Sand flogs a host of accountability-focused reforms he’d like to achieve that are credibly populist—starting with term limits, age limits, and cognitive tests for elected officials. He wants to ban state officials from trading stocks, strengthen whistleblower protections, and increase criminal penalties for supposed public servants who embezzle or defraud. And rather than launching frontal attacks on GOP policies, he zeroes in on specific reforms for places where the GOP state government has taken unpopular stances: In the case of Iowa’s major expansion of school choice, Sand argues that wealthier Iowans shouldn’t be eligible for school vouchers, and that private schools that accept them should be eligible for public audit.

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NOTICE WHAT’S ABSENT from Sand’s pitch: The us-vs.-them rage underlying so much of today’s populist politics. His target is not so much a particular class of political or economic villains, but a set of malfunctioning political systems that he argues incentivize bad political behavior. Another recurring bit in his stump speech is a lengthy explanation of a proposed major electoral reform: the abolition of Iowa’s closed political primaries and a move to the “approval voting” system pioneered by cities like Fargo, North Dakota. Sand envisions a system where the top four vote-getters in an open primary advance to a general election in which voters can approve of any combination of the four, and the one with the most approval wins.

“We can make politicians behave like normal people just by giving them a reason to do it,” Sand argues. “Imagine politics being a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious one.”

It all adds up to a compelling message, and one Sand has been pounding the pavement to make for years. He’s been a relentless tourer of the state throughout his political career; when I caught up with him last weekend in Clark and Decatur Counties on the Missouri border, I spoke with plenty of voters who’d been following Sand since he first came to their town years before.

In Decatur County, one of these voters was Amanda Swanson—one of the few to raise her hand as a Republican at the event. (She told me she has bounced around: At various times she has been registered as a Democrat, a Republican, and an independent.) “As the auditor, [Sand] didn’t just target the opposing party,” Swanson said. “He was fair, he was balanced. And also, I really enjoy his food reviews when he travels the state.”¹

Swanson’s mother, Valorie Long, chimed in in agreement: “And if you watch, his viewpoints are not Democrat, or Republican, or independent. It’s what will work, and how can it be accomplished.”

You get the idea. Sand’s got a good thing going—the kind of combination of record, pitch, and reach many politicians would kill for. What he’s got working against him, on the other hand, are two giant factors: a state that dislikes his party, and a party that’s charging in the opposite direction from him. One Republican strategist I spoke to described Sand like this: “Smart. Talented. Desperately trying to avoid his party’s brand.”

Sand may have won two races in a Democrat-hostile environment, Republicans reason. But he has yet to accomplish a much harder task: winning as a Democrat in a campaign cycle where he is the face of the Iowa Democratic Party. At the top of the ticket, Sand is already facing a concerted messaging effort to brand him personally as a lib in moderate’s clothing: “Rob Sand wants you to believe he’s a moderate,” the Republican Governors Association wrote in a typical post this month. “But he’s backed by Illinois’ JB Pritzker and California’s Gavin Newsom. Rob Sand would turn Iowa into Illinois and California.” (Wow, both of those?)

For his part, Sand dismisses the idea that the challenge to define himself is tougher than it’s been in the past. “All I do is go everywhere and I talk to everybody and say the same stuff,” he told me last week. “I think the vast majority of people already know me. The folks who are on the inside in leadership in the Republican party—they’re going to do what they’re paid to do, which is badmouth Democrats and get Republicans elected. It’s their full-time job. I’m going to keep doing what I do.”

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ONE THING SAND isn’t so keen to do is to weigh in on broader questions of Democratic infighting outside his state. Around the country, it’s candidates on the opposite side of Sand’s coalition who seem to have most of the momentum these days: Members of the Democratic Socialists of America notched major wins in New York congressional primaries last week and followed that up with another impressive showing in Colorado this week. Yes, it’s been just a handful of races in just a few places, but that’s been enough for Republicans from President Donald Trump on down to claim the results reveal Democrats’ true colors: “The Communists,” Trump posted last week, “are finally making their move.”

If Sand thinks any of this will make his race harder, he could not be more determined to keep it to himself. “I know there’s a lot of people out there that want to speculate or guess or prognosticate about the direction of either party,” he told me. “They’re free to do that. I just know what I know about Iowa.”

In some ways, watching Sand campaign feels like watching someone try to defy gravity. The campaign cuts against so much of what we take for granted about politics: that rage and partisanship is what drives the electorate, that everything ultimately comes down to jersey color, that it’s impossible to get people excited about an incrementalist agenda that promises to make things better not by implementing grand social change but by tinkering with the rules in the middle.

Then again, that turns out to be the whole substance of Sand’s pitch: If you’re sick of the status quo, why not come along with me and strive for something better? It might not touch a cynic—but I learned at those campaign stops that I’m not a cynic after all. That “God Bless America” shtick got me every time.

1. As I discovered when fact-checking this piece, Sand routinely posts shortform video food reviews from various Iowa eateries on social media. He also has a little riff on social media in his stump speech: “Generally speaking, it’s the scourge of our time. It is shortening our attention spans. It’s filling our heads with lies and it’s making us hate people that we love. But while you’re there, please like and share my posts.”