Democrats have their first candidate in the race to unseat Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, in what will be an uphill battle in an increasingly red state.
Nathan Sage hopes his background as a Marine and Army veteran, mechanic and local sports play-by-play announcer — as he touts in his launch video — will connect with working-class voters.
Sage, who is the executive director of the chamber of commerce in Knoxville, Iowa, highlighted his upbringing in his launch video.
“I never thought someone like me could run for Senate,” he says. “When I was 5, my dad got arrested for a bounced check. $50. He was trying to pay for new school clothes for my sister and I. We grew up poor, but I still believed in this country.”
In the video, Sage also describes places in his state as “being abandoned,” adding, “There’s a war at home, and we’re losing.” He describes a “rigged” economy in which “those in power don’t give a damn.”
“I’m fighting for a Democratic Party that people like me will actually want to be a part of,” he said.
Sage is the first Democrat to enter a primary race that is likely to feature additional contenders to take on Ernst, such as state Rep. J.D. Scholten, who made two failed bids for a U.S. House seat in a deep-red district and said he is considering joining the contest.
“Democrats seem obsessed with saying ‘f---ing ’ and ‘a--’ as the strategy to win back the voters that rejected them in 2024," National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Nick Puglia said, referencing Sage's swearing in his launch video. "It doesn’t matter which radical Democrat gets nominated in their messy primary because Iowans are going to re-elect Senator Joni Ernst to keep fighting for them in 2026."
Ernst's campaign did not return a request for comment.
Defeating Ernst, though, will be tough for Democrats in a state that has trended further right since Barack Obama won it in 2008 and 2012. Last fall, Donald Trump won Iowa by 13 percentage points after he won it by 8 in 2020. Ernst, a two-term incumbent who is also a veteran, won her 2020 race by 6 points and her 2014 contest by 9. The Cook Political Report rates the seat as solidly Republican.
But there was a glimmer of hope for Democrats earlier this year, when Mike Zimmer flipped a state Senate district and defeated his Republican opponent by 4 points. It was a district Trump won last fall by 25 points.
In an interview, Sage said the early days of the Trump administration have “a lot of people” in his state fearing the future, including Veterans Affairs staffers concerned about future job cuts and small-business owners concerned about tariffs’ driving up costs.
“He talked about lowering grocery prices, he talked about making life easier and cheaper for everybody, and we haven’t gotten there,” Sage said, adding of Trump’s tariff plans: “Any extra cost is hard to absorb and hard to deal with. When they say a little bit of pain goes a long way, it’s like, yeah, but when you don’t have much more pain to give, it’s very hard to accept that.”
With Democrats still figuring out their footing in the second Trump administration, Sage said he wonders how many congressional Democrats are “really fighting.”
“When it comes to it, we need more people that are willing to get on the ground with the troops, and you’ve got to fight with them,” he said.
But he said he believes the Trump administration’s actions give Democrats room to grow in his state.
“There’s a lot of people, especially in Iowa, that don’t feel properly represented,” he said. “Now is the time where people are starting to see the writing on the wall and understand, like, listen, life’s not getting easier. Life’s not getting better. We need to change something. And I want to be that Democrat that brings more people in and makes it so they want to actually be a part of the Democratic Party again and fight for what we believe in.”
