DES MOINES, Iowa—Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson was barely out of college in April 2006 when a tornado tore through a major city 30 miles south of the local TV station where she was a rookie reporter.

With staffing stretched thin, she was told to drive a large live truck—a task normally handled by camera operators—through lingering thunderstorms to the damage zone in Iowa City. It was both exciting and terrifying for a 22-year-old.

Hinson, who won an award for the coverage and was later promoted to anchor before being elected to the state legislature and Congress, now faces storm clouds of a different sort as she competes for an open Senate seat in a red-leaning state where Democrats are showing surprising strength.

“I always run every race like I am 10 points behind,” Hinson said while sipping a cold beer on a hot day at the Iowa State Fair. “I’ve never lost a race. I don’t plan on starting that now.”

Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win the Senate, eyeing pickups in Iowa, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and Alaska, among others, as a possible path. The party’s hopes in the Hawkeye State ride on state Rep. Josh Turek, a two-time basketball Paralympic gold medalist campaigning as a moderate.

The nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Thursday moved her race from lean Republican to tossup, while shifting Iowa’s race for governor in a state President Trump won in 2024 by 13 percentage points from tossup to lean Democrat. Two of its four U.S. House races are tossups.

Those ratings reflect rural America’s economic angst amid high fuel, fertilizer and other costs at a time of stagnant grain prices following Trump’s strong embrace of tariffs.

Hinson, now 43, is trying to balance her traditional Republican roots, growing up in an affluent central Iowa suburb, with a shift in recent years to more fully embrace Trump.

She supported his “one big, beautiful bill” cutting taxes and has praised his presidency. But Hinson also voted to certify the 2020 election—against Trump’s wishes—and was slow to get behind his third White House bid, backing him only after he won the 2024 Iowa caucuses.

Her media experience is an obvious help on the campaign trail, but Hinson said it plays a greater role while working in Congress. “You need a good storyteller in Washington, D.C., because you may only have 30 seconds of one of your colleagues’ time to convince them that a policy is really important for our state or for my district,” she said.

Hinson was widely expected to run for Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s seat in 2028, when he will be 95. But a decision by Republican Sen. Joni Ernst last year not to run for a third term sped up Hinson’s Senate timetable.

Turek led in one poll this summer, but Hinson has been narrowly ahead in the rest. Those leads have mostly been within the margin of error.

While Hinson has faced only one truly close election during her time competing for jobs in Washington—her first race for Congress in 2020—she is showing signs she knows she is in the fight of her political life this fall.

Just one minute into her speech on the Des Moines Register’s political soapbox stage at the fair, Hinson started criticizing her opponent, citing his missed votes in the state legislature and trying to diminish his working-class credentials.

“It’s a pity, but you know where Josh Turek is tonight? He is actually fundraising in Nantucket with the billionaires and the millionaires,” said Hinson.

In an interview, Turek, 47, pushed back against her suggestion that fundraising among the coastal elite is out of sync with his working-class pitch. “It doesn’t change one bit about who I am and where I’ve come from and who I’m fighting for,” he said.

Born with spina bifida, which he attributes to his father’s Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, Turek underwent 21 surgeries before turning 12. As a schoolchild, he said he had “the wrong color lunch tickets,” a nod to his family’s use of government assistance.

Turek, who represents a working-class district east of Omaha that leans Republican, calls himself a “common sense prairie populist” and said Iowa is ready for change. “You can make the argument that the state is hurting more than any other,” he said, pointing to tariffs, commodity prices, farm input costs, rising cancer rates and more.

Independent voters will be critical in the race. As of Aug. 1, Iowa had 712,087 registered Republicans, compared with 528,758 Democrats and 559,741 independents.

Will Rogers, a former GOP chairman in the state’s largest county, said he thinks Hinson’s communication skills will shine when the candidates finally formally debate after Labor Day. “I would rather be Ashley than Josh Turek,” he said.

Three weeks before the race’s rating changed, Turek got a boost when Barack Obama endorsed him. The backing from the former president, who won Iowa in 2008 and 2012, arrived after Turek met in Chicago with David Axelrod, a longtime Obama adviser.

Pointing to his father’s voting for Obama twice and Trump three times, Turek said Iowa is a “state masquerading more red than what we are.”

Hinson, meanwhile, suggested it is Turek who is “masquerading as a moderate.” She suggested his legislative and campaign record sounds “a lot like a socialist.”

Responding to Hinson’s suggestions that he is too liberal for Iowa, Turek’s campaign released an ad Wednesday that claims he voted with Republicans 700 times in the state legislature and would work with Trump—whose image appears in the spot—if elected.

In an interview, former Gov. Tom Vilsack said 2026 reminds him of 1998 when he became Iowa’s first Democratic governor in more than 30 years. He also pointed to Iowa’s sending a Democrat and Republican to the Senate for three decades before the Trump era. “Iowans at the end of the day aren’t comfortable with extremes,” he said.