The four groups Brad Sherman needs to beat Kim Reynolds in a GOP primary
A challenger from the right
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Governor Kim Reynolds hasn’t faced an opponent in a Republican primary since 2008, when she ran for state Senate. But if she seeks a third term in 2026, she will likely compete against a challenger from the right: former State Representative Brad Sherman.
The Iowa Standard reported last month that Sherman intends to run for governor. Speaking to Bleeding Heartland at the state capitol on January 23, Sherman declined to discuss specifics but indicated he has a campaign kickoff planned for February.
His campaign Facebook page was recently updated after a stretch of 21 months with no new posts. His refreshed campaign website is recruiting volunteers to “spread the word about the upcoming primary.” His latest campaign financial disclosure shows no fundraising for the first eleven months of 2024—when Sherman wasn’t seeking re-election to the state House—followed by ten donations totaling $4,030 in December. That month, the campaign committee paid $6,000 to a Republican consulting firm.
To put it mildly, Sherman would face long odds against Reynolds. The governor’s campaign raised $1.8 million last year and started 2025 with more than $3 million cash on hand. Reynolds would have massive establishment support—not only in state, but from the Republican Governors Association, where her former chief of staff serves as executive director. In addition, Iowans are famous for re-electing incumbents.
On the other hand, a sizeable number of Iowa Republicans are open to anti-establishment candidates. Then State Senator Jim Carlin ran for U.S. Senate on a shoestring budget but received 26.5 percent of the 2022 primary vote against Senator Chuck Grassley. Last year, Kevin Virgil received nearly 40 percent of the vote against U.S. Representative Randy Feenstra, and David Pautsch managed just under 44 percent against U.S. Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, even though both members of Congress massively outspent their GOP challengers.
Four groups would be particularly important for Sherman if he seeks the nomination for governor next year.
MAGA LOYALISTS
Sherman was an early endorser of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2023 and periodically appeared at Trump rallies in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. A pastor for four decades, he was part of the former president’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition.
Though Sherman opted not to seek a second term in the Iowa House, he stayed active in GOP politics and was a delegate to the 2024 Republican National Convention.
Reynolds endorsed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for president and campaigned extensively with him around Iowa before the caucuses. She’s worked hard since then to demonstrate her loyalty, buying at least two Trump-themed sequin jackets and traveling to Mar-a-Lago on election day in November instead of celebrating with Iowa Republicans.
Sporting “AMAZING merch!!!” at the Republican National Convention
With Doug Burgum at Mar-a-Lago on election night
But some MAGA voters may not be quick to forgive. Morning Consult has tracked the approval ratings of all 50 governors for years, and has repeatedly found low numbers for Reynolds. When releasing the latest batch of poll findings earlier this month, Morning Consult noted, “With the highest disapproval rating of any U.S. governor (47%), Kim Reynolds (R–Iowa), who is up for re-election in 2026, remains the most unpopular governor for the fourth quarter in a row.”
Given Iowa’s continued rightward march and another strong showing for GOP candidates up and down the ballot in November, the governor “should” have better approval numbers. That level of discontent suggests her own party’s base isn’t uniformly thrilled with her leadership.
It probably didn’t help mend fences when Reynolds picked State Senator Chris Cournoyer—who backed Nikki Haley for president—as Iowa’s lieutenant governor in December.
Sherman would need a small army of committed MAGA volunteers to compete with Reynolds, who could spend heavily on advertising and field organizers.
Incidentally, I doubt Trump would endorse against Reynolds in a primary. She’s strongly favored to win, and will look for every opportunity to ingratiate herself with the president. She’s written to state agency leaders and university presidents ordering them to comply with Trump’s policies.
CO2 PIPELINE OPPONENTS
Sherman was among the state House Republicans who sought to stop the Iowa Utilities Commission from approving Summit Carbon Solutions’ proposed CO2 pipeline. He and other GOP legislators joined a lawsuit last September to block the approved pipeline route.
While serving in the legislature, Sherman voted for bills that would have limited the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines, or made it easier for landowners to challenge whether a project qualifies for eminent domain. Although he hasn’t officially declared his candidacy for governor, he is already signaling this will be a major talking point for him in 2026. The issues page of Sherman’s website contains this passage:
Brad is staunchly opposed to the use of Eminent Domain for private gain. Eminent Domain should only be used for necessary public projects or infrastructure for common carriers – and then only when all other options are exhausted. Private property is a fundamental principle that must be sacred in Iowa.
Eminent Domain is a dangerous creature which must be confined under constant guard behind high walls with iron gates. When it is allowed outside those walls, it must be restrained by heavy chains of specific purpose and then immediately returned to its confinement. Eminent Domain is a cousin of socialistic tyranny and, if allowed to roam free, it will become a devouring beast that consumes our personal rights and liberty.
Opponents of the Iowa CO2 pipeline often claim it does not serve a genuine public purpose, or that Summit Carbon Solutions doesn’t meet the Iowa Code definition of a “common carrier.”
Reynolds has mostly avoided public comment on the pipeline. But key backer Bruce Rastetter has been a major donor to her campaign. The governor tipped her hand years ago when she named a senior Summit Ag executive to her new carbon sequestration task force. She also appointed all three Iowa Utilities Commission members who approved the pipeline permit and the use of eminent domain.
This issue energizes many conservative activists. Virgil hammered on private property rights during last year’s primary campaign in Iowa’s fourth Congressional district. In less than six months, he went from virtually unknown to gaining nearly 40 percent of the vote against a two-term incumbent. It’s likely Feenstra will face a primary challenger again in 2026. Whether that’s Virgil or someone else, a spirited race in the U.S. House district covering northwest Iowa could work in Sherman’s favor.
ANTI-ABORTION ABSOLUTISTS
Pro-choice Iowans view Reynolds as a villain. She adopted a new state marketing slogan (“Freedom to Flourish”) even as she sought to deprive some 600,000 constituents of their bodily autonomy. A near-total abortion ban, which the governor signed in July 2023, has been in effect since July 2024, following an Iowa Supreme Court ruling by four justices whom Reynolds appointed.
Yet for some conservatives, the governor hasn’t done enough to stop Iowans from terminating pregnancies.
During his two years in the legislature, Sherman co-sponsored all of the most extreme anti-abortion bills introduced in the Iowa House. One would have made it illegal to receive abortion medications by mail or through a telemedicine appointment. That legislation would have created new bureaucratic hurdles for physicians prescribing medication to terminate a pregnancy, and would have required electronic records “of who received the pill and the medical personnel involved in the process.”
Another bill would have made it a class C felony “for any person to manufacture, distribute, prescribe, dispense, sell or transfer” abortion medications in Iowa.
Sherman co-sponsored a third bill that declared, among other things,
3. The state of Iowa has a fundamental and compelling interest in protecting the life of every human being from the moment of fertilization.
4. Abortion is a murderous act of violence that purposefully and knowingly terminates a human life in the womb.
5. Unborn human beings are entitled to the full and equal protection of the laws that prohibit violence against other human beings.
That bill would have banned abortion medications, along with websites or apps that help people access abortions, and aiding or abetting someone seeking to terminate a pregnancy. Private individuals could enforce those bans through legal action, as Texas allowed with its “bounty hunter” abortion ban.
None of those bills even received a subcommittee hearing, the first step in the legislative process. Reynolds and top Republican lawmakers are content to let the state’s current abortion ban stand.
Sherman is committed to a nationwide abortion ban. As an RNC delegate and member of the National Republican Platform Committee last summer, he signed on to what would have been a “minority report” demanding a stronger anti-abortion plank. The dissenting delegates wanted platform language endorsing a federal law “to preserve the right to life of every human being from conception to natural death,” and a “human life amendment” to the U.S. Constitution.
While Sherman’s campaign website doesn’t have an abortion section on its issues page, it does state, "We have made progress in the battle to protect the life of the unborn and we must continue that fight." He has been outspoken on this topic in the past. When GOP lawmakers approved the current abortion ban in a one-day special session, most Republicans sat quietly during the House and Senate debates.
Not Sherman. He delivered what was probably his most memorable speech in the legislature. You can watch his full remarks here, starting around 5:27:25. I pulled this excerpt, which generated some media coverage at the time.
Sherman alluded to a message he had received from an Iowan who urged him to oppose the bill: “Don’t force women to have a baby, I demand reproductive freedom, reproductive rights.”
He responded,
All right, then. I think I stand here today in favor and proclaiming that everyone is free not to have sex. If they’re not prepared to have a baby, they shouldn’t have sex, if they’re that concerned about it. I will stand for everyone’s right to practice abstinence.
Abortion has little if anything to do with reproductive rights—it’s after the fact. When a male and a female have sexual relations resulting in a pregnancy, reproduction has already happened. It sounds to me like a lot of people need to review the story of the birds and the bees.
It’s hard to guess how many Republicans would vote against Reynolds in a primary for this reason. After all, she did sign into law one of the country’s strictest abortion bans, in 2018 and again in 2023. Sherman could draw support from those who think terminating a pregnancy should never be legal, though.
THOSE STILL UPSET ABOUT PANDEMIC POLICIES
One of the ironies of U.S. political discourse is that the loudest “pro-life” voices were the angriest about efforts to suppress COVID-19 through masking, social distancing, and vaccines.
As a candidate for the Iowa House in 2022, Sherman received the endorsement of the anti-vaccine group Stand for Health Freedom. His campaign website has an issue page about “medical freedom,” which reads as follows:
When COVID first hit, most of us were blindsided and did not understand what was happening. Under the fog of fear, emergency powers were used to impose unconstitutional shutdowns which resulted in harm to many businesses and families. The long-established concept of developing “best practice” from the experience and evidence gathered by our great doctors and nurses was ignored and we saw a top-down one-size-fits-all protocol forced on medical professionals, not only across the state of Iowa, but around the world! Right here in Iowa, doctors and medical professionals who dared to question these protocols were threatened with the loss of their jobs and even their medical licenses.
Now, the shocking truth of the pandemic is being revealed, and we are seeing how quickly tyranny can come upon us under the guise of doing good. It must not happen again. Brad Sherman will sign legislation to reduce emergency powers and will work to dismantle the bureaucratic swamp that was responsible for the iron hand of tyranny we saw from the medical establishment during COVID.
Note the tactful use of passive voice: “emergency powers were used to impose unconstitutional shutdowns.” Who used them in Iowa? Kim Reynolds.
The governor was hardly zealous in trying to stop this deadly novel virus. She was among the first governors to reopen schools and businesses. She never imposed a mask mandate, even when Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force warned that the state’s inaction was causing “many preventable deaths” in Iowa. She pivoted quickly from promoting new vaccines to being a champion for those who didn’t want to get the shots for school or at work. She urged the legislature to pass a law banning schools and local governments from requiring masks. She turned down $95 million in federal funding, which could have been used for testing or other mitigation in schools, such as better air filters.
Iowa had a higher per-capita death rate from COVID-19 than did many states that adopted more public health recommendations. Nevertheless, many Republicans believe a hands-off approach was vindicated. When campaigning for DeSantis before the caucuses, Reynolds often bragged that she and her Florida counterpart were “out there on an island” with their pandemic response.
She’s still pandering to that segment of the GOP base. Just last week, after President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned the infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, Reynolds posted on her political X feed, “Biden finally admits what we’ve known all along: Fauci caused irreparable harm to our children and communities. Unacceptable.” (Biden admitted no such thing, of course. He was trying to protect likely targets of Trump’s revenge-seeking Justice Department.)
Reynolds may not lose many primary votes on this issue. Still, there are conservatives who believe she went too far in those early months to keep Iowans from gathering in churches or other public places. Some don’t like that she received the COVID-19 vaccine during a televised news conference, and used some pandemic relief funds for ads urging Iowans to “step up and stop the spread.”
Sherman’s on the same wavelength as those harboring suspicions related to the pandemic. I pulled this next clip from a March 2023 debate on the Iowa House floor. As the chamber considered what was expected to be an uncontroversial bill cleaning up the state’s pharmacy code, Sherman rose to deliver extraordinary remarks.
While acknowledging the matter was “not directly related to this bill,” Sherman brought up the controversy surrounding the use of off-label drugs during the pandemic. He asserted that medical professionals “were intimidated from offering certain drugs,” and “were fearful of being investigated” or losing their licenses if they prescribed ivermectin. That medication is designed to treat parasites and has not been shown to be effective against COVID-19.
Sherman claimed the intimidation “came from a federal level.” But he argued the Iowa Board of Pharmacy “needs to be more accountable to the people of Iowa than to the federal government.” Though voting against the bill wouldn’t fix the problem, Sherman “felt compelled to speak on behalf of those who were intimidated.” In closing, he said, “I think there needs to be a message sent to the pharmacy board on this issue.” The Iowa House approved the bill by 86 votes to 10, with Sherman among ten Republicans voting no. He voted against the bill again in 2024, when a slightly amended version came back from the Senate (which had passed it unanimously).
I’m not saying pandemic policies will be a major voting issue in next year’s primary. But the contingent who still resent the limited lockdown Reynolds imposed in 2020 could cast a protest vote for Sherman.
A COMPETITIVE PRIMARY COULD HURT REYNOLDS
Assuming Reynolds seeks a third term, I am skeptical that anyone could beat her in a primary. But Sherman wouldn’t need to win the nomination to inflict serious damage on the governor’s re-election prospects.
Reynolds didn’t have any Republican competition in her last two campaigns. (Former Cedar Rapids Mayor Ron Corbett failed to qualify for the primary ballot in 2018, and no one else sought the GOP nomination in 2022.) She was able to stockpile cash and avoided problems on her right flank.
In contrast, Sherman could spend the next year and a half highlighting issues that don’t play to Reynolds’ strengths with her party’s base. Although the governor has plenty of money to run a statewide campaign, a strong result for Sherman (say, a third or more of the primary vote) would be embarrassing for her.
Every dollar the Reynolds campaign spends before June 2026 could put the incumbent at a financial disadvantage for the general election. The likely Democratic nominee for governor, State Auditor Rob Sand, already has more than $7.5 million cash on hand in his campaign bank account.
It’s impossible to predict which way the political winds will be blowing in the fall of 2026. But let’s assume Reynolds goes into the general election as the favorite in this red state. A midterm election can be challenging for the party in power, and Reynolds will be running against a backdrop of GOP trifectas in Des Moines and Washington, DC. Independent voters could gravitate toward the Democratic nominee.
Meanwhile, depending on how the primary plays out, there could be hard feelings in Republican ranks. While most voters who prefer Sherman to Reynolds would come back to support the GOP nominee in November, some may look for other options.
Libertarian Charles Aldrich, who has sought other offices in past elections, confirmed to Bleeding Heartland on January 25 that he plans to run for governor in 2026. If Aldrich qualifies for the ballot, his beliefs could appeal to many conservative voters.
Libertarian nominee Rick Stewart received just under 2.4 percent of the vote in Iowa’s 2022 gubernatorial election. That didn’t affect the outcome of a race Reynolds won by more than 18 points. But if she and Sand are locked in a close race, a third-party candidate drawing 2 percent or more could be impactful.
Whatever the outcome, Sherman’s campaign—along with the MAGA-fueled effort to defeat Senator Joni Ernst—could reveal much about the strength of different Iowa Republican factions. For that reason alone, it will be worth watching.
Thanks for this good bit of investigative work. My comment about Sherman and his adherents is the same as what the American general told the Nazis when told by the same to surrender during the Battle Of The Bulge: “Nuts.”