Zach Lahn

Running for Governor in Iowa

Downloadable Report Card

Wants to Defund Iowa Public Schools
Attacked Our Access to Health Care — Including Blocking Medicaid Expansion
Dismissed Trump's Tariffs Even as Iowa Farmers Paid the Price
Has Extreme Anti-Abortion Views — Including a Total Ban
Promotes Anti-Vaccine Extremism
Runs as an Iowa Outsider on Out-of-State Money
Is Running as "Iowa First" While Living Part-Time in Kansas
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Wants to Defund Iowa Public Schools

Zach Lahn wants to send more taxpayer dollars to private schools — even though the private school he co-founded answered to none of the standards Iowa's public schools must meet.

Lahn told a Moms for Liberty debate that he wants to "wipe out the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners" — the state board that licenses teachers — and replace it with people who would "suspend their licenses or permanently take their licenses" when teachers "indoctrinate our kids."
Lahn himself co-founded Wonder, a Wichita private school that never sought state accreditation — meaning it was not required to follow Kansas regulations, administer state tests, or hire licensed teachers at all.
Lahn said he would expand Iowa's ESA voucher program, which cost taxpayers more than $314 million in 2025-26 — up from $218 million the year before — while public school leaders describe ballooning class sizes and eliminated programs.

Zach Lahn wants to send more public money to private schools like the one he ran, while Iowa's public schools absorb the cuts. We deserve better.

Attacked Our Access to Health Care — Including Blocking Medicaid Expansion

Every Iowan deserves access to quality, affordable health care. Zach Lahn has spent his career working to take it away.

In 2009, as a college student, Lahn confronted President Obama at a town hall over the Affordable Care Act. Nearly six years later he argued that expanding Medicaid would do nothing but "shackle 77,000 new Montanans to a system that already fails to provide adequate access to healthcare" — dismissing it as "just more of the ObamaCare mess." As of June 2025, 593,000 Iowans relied on Medicaid, including 179,000 in the Iowa Health and Wellness Plan, the state's Medicaid expansion.
Lahn got his political break in 2014, when he became state director of Americans for Prosperity–Montana, the Koch network's flagship advocacy group, and led its campaign to stop Montana from expanding Medicaid — staging "Healthcare Town Hall" events targeting Republican legislators who refused to sign AFP's pledge against expansion.
The campaign failed. Montana's legislature voted to expand Medicaid to 75,000 people, and Lahn's statement in response claimed the vote stood "directly against the voices of millions of Montanans" — in a state whose entire population was about 1.02 million. He later conceded, "Two mistakes were made yesterday."

Zach Lahn led efforts to block Medicaid expansion and opposed the Affordable Care Act. We deserve better.

Dismissed Trump's Tariffs Even as Iowa Farmers Paid the Price

Trump's tariffs have hit Iowa farmers and businesses hard. Zach Lahn brushed them aside and told Iowans the tariffs were not the real problem.

Asked how he would help Iowa farmers navigate the tariffs, Lahn answered, in a video recorded for a January 2026 candidate forum he did not attend, that "the price of soybeans was higher this year when the tariffs were here than it was last year" and pointed instead at seed and fertilizer companies: "This is the real issue if you talk to farmers."
Tariffs cost Iowa importers $90 million in April 2025 alone, a 304% jump from the same month a year earlier, according to research released by Iowa Farmers for Free Trade. A Drake University economist warned that Iowa feels tariff changes more intensely than other states because its economy leans so heavily on agriculture.

Zach Lahn brushed off Trump's tariffs instead of standing up for Iowa farmers facing rising costs. We deserve better.

Has Extreme Anti-Abortion Views — Including a Total Ban

Iowa voters have faced the consequences of extreme abortion restrictions. Zach Lahn wants to go further — all the way to a total ban.

Lahn has called for a total abortion ban, and told an Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition forum he is unapologetically pro-life at conception. In a letter to Iowa conservatives declaring "life is sacred — beginning to end," he pledged to fight for his platform "without hesitation and without apology."
Asked at a Moms for Liberty debate when life begins, Lahn joined the rest of the field in answering "at conception" — a position that, as Iowa Public Radio noted, could threaten certain fertility treatments and contraceptives. Lahn said he and his wife are "banned for life" from a fertility clinic because "we refused to discard the embryos."
Iowa already requires abortion-inducing medication to be prescribed in person, cutting off telehealth and mail-order access under a law signed in May 2026. The total ban Lahn is calling for would go further than any restriction now on Iowa's books.

Zach Lahn threatened the reproductive freedoms of Iowans. We deserve better.

Promotes Anti-Vaccine Extremism

Iowa's public health depends on vaccination. Zach Lahn wants to pull vaccines off the market and end school vaccination requirements.

At a January 2026 Moms for Liberty debate, Lahn said he would pull all COVID shots off the market in Iowa and end all childhood vaccine requirements for school enrollment, telling the crowd: "We cannot trust the medical establishment in Iowa anymore. They have lost our trust, and they have done nothing to earn it back."
He repeated both positions to the Washington Post, saying vaccination should not be a "requirement to participate in society."
Lahn is a listed signer of Americans for Health Freedom's candidate pledge, which declares COVID shots "not safe and not effective" and asks officials to call for them to be pulled off the market. He also announced the endorsement of Stand for Health Freedom, an anti-vaccine-mandate group.
When federal advisers dropped the recommendation that newborns receive a hepatitis B shot within 24 hours of birth, Lahn called it "A MAHA Win", arguing there is "no logical argument" for vaccinating one-day-old babies whose mothers have already tested negative. Studies published in JAMA Pediatrics found the change will likely cause hundreds of additional childhood infections, more liver cancer, and deaths.

Zach Lahn embraced anti-vaccine policies that put Iowa's public health at risk. We deserve better.

Runs as an Iowa Outsider on Out-of-State Money

Our elected officials should work for us, the people.

Zach Lahn sells himself as a plain-spoken Iowa farmer and political outsider. His campaign account says something else entirely.

In the reporting period ending July 14, 2026, Lahn raised about $6.4 million - and nearly 80% of it came from one source: between June 5 and July 10 the RGA Right Direction PAC, a super PAC run by the Republican Governors Association, donated more than $5 million straight into his campaign account. That is not a super PAC advertising on his behalf at arm's length - it is money his own campaign controls and spends, reported as a contribution on his own filing. On top of that, his campaign carries a $2.5 million loan from Lahn himself. Between Washington and his own checkbook, very little of this campaign is being paid for by Iowans.

Earlier, when the sums were smaller, the pattern was the same. Of the $980,152 he had raised by the spring, $650,000 came from three people - and only one of them lived in Iowa. More than half of that money, 53.6%, came from out of state.

RGA Right Direction PAC - $5,000,000. The Republican Governors Association is funded by corporations and wealthy donors to install Republicans in governor's mansions nationwide. Its super PAC wrote that money directly to Lahn's campaign between June 5 and July 10 - not as outside spending, but as a contribution he banks and controls - and it accounted for nearly four of every five dollars Lahn raised in the period ending July 14. The self-described outsider's campaign is largely paid for from Washington.
Zach Lahn himself - a $2,500,000 loan. Asked by the Wall Street Journal whether he was a millionaire before he married his current wife, he dodged, but conceded he could have funded the campaign "solely from money I have made." See Is Running as "Iowa First" While Living Part-Time in Kansas below.
Jana Scharnberg of West Des Moines - $250,000 in the spring, then $300,000 more in the summer. The largest individual sums given to anyone in the race, from the one big early donor who actually lives in Iowa.
Richard Spanton - $250,000, from Franklin, Tennessee. One of the three donors who between them supplied two thirds of everything Lahn had raised by spring.
Patricia Tippie - $150,000, listed in the filings at a post office box in Austin, Texas. She and her late husband Henry Tippie were major benefactors of the University of Iowa, whose business college carries his name.
James "Mattress Mack" McIngvale - $150,000, the Houston furniture retailer, and $25,000 each from Jeffrey Sandefer, Chris Rufer and Sardar Biglari - none of them Iowans.
And the Koch network that made him. Lahn got his start as state director of Americans for Prosperity in Montana, where he ran the campaign to stop Medicaid expansion, and later ran fundraising operations for the group. The Wichita private school he co-founded was financed by Chase Koch, son of billionaire Charles Koch. The Wall Street Journal called him "the Koch-connected millionaire populist."

Zach Lahn calls himself an outsider. He is right about that - almost none of the money electing him comes from inside Iowa. We deserve better.

Is Running as "Iowa First" While Living Part-Time in Kansas

Zach Lahn built his campaign around the slogan "Iowa First." His own record shows how recently — and how narrowly — he became an Iowan at all.

Lahn voted in three Kansas elections — a provisional ballot in November 2018, in person in Sedgwick County in November 2020, and an advance ballot in the August 2022 primary — and did not register to vote in Iowa until October 17, 2024. Iowa requires candidates for governor to have lived in the state for two years before the election, so he cleared that bar by little more than two weeks.
The same year he registered in Iowa, Lahn's wife bought a home near Wichita and declared on a mortgage document that it was her primary residence — not the couple's property in Belle Plaine, Iowa. A year later they sold the Wichita house to an LLC for $1.
Lahn still keeps the Kansas home and flies there frequently in a plane he owns as part of an LLC. During the primary campaign, that plane spent 75 nights in Wichita against just 51 at his Iowa property. Lahn says the trips are to see children he and his wife have from previous marriages, and that as governor "we'd be in Iowa as much as humanly possible."

Zach Lahn asked Iowans to put Iowa first while keeping a home, a plane, and years of his voting record in Kansas. We deserve better.

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