This is a close endorsement.
CIVPAC endorses Democrat Josh Turek over Republican Ashley Hinson for the United States Senate from Iowa. We do so with substantial reservations about Turek and considerable respect for parts of Hinson’s record.
Indeed, under different national circumstances, we might reach the opposite conclusion.
If Donald Trump and Trumpism were not such dominant forces within the Republican Party—or if Democrats controlled both Congress and the presidency and the greater need were for a check on the left—Hinson’s greater economic conservatism, support for school choice and right-to-work laws, and portions of her earlier bipartisan record might well lead us to endorse her.
But those are not the circumstances in which Iowa voters are choosing a senator in 2026.
The Case for Hinson
Ashley Hinson is not an election-denying MAGA caricature.
After the 2020 election, she voted to accept the certified electoral votes that made Joe Biden president. She was among the Republicans who supported the Respect for Marriage Act. On economic policy, she is generally more market-oriented than Turek. She supports right-to-work protections and school choice, both of which are substantially closer to CIVPAC’s positions than Turek’s.
Those things matter.
They are also why this endorsement is much harder than many of our other choices.
But Hinson’s recent record has moved in a direction we find increasingly difficult to support.
Her campaign now emphasizes that she is fighting alongside President Trump and will help execute his agenda. That matters because CIVPAC does not regard congressional independence as an optional virtue. A senator represents a state and swears an oath to the Constitution, not to a president or a political movement.
Hinson has also supported Trump’s tariffs. CIVPAC’s trade policy reflects our view that broad tariffs operate largely as taxes on American consumers and businesses and are particularly ill-suited to an agricultural state dependent on international markets.
Her fiscal record is hardly the traditional Republican alternative. She supported the large 2025 Republican tax and spending legislation despite its substantial effect on projected federal deficits.
Most troubling for us, Hinson voted against the 2026 Ukraine Support Act. She had previously expressed strong support for resisting Vladimir Putin’s aggression. Her more recent vote therefore represents a movement away from CIVPAC’s support for Ukraine and resistance to Russian aggression, which we regard as important to both European security and the credibility of American alliances.
Turek Has Plenty of Warts
Josh Turek is not our ideal economic candidate.
He supports a wealth tax on billionaires. We do not.
He supports federal price-gouging restrictions on food. We believe price controls and similar restrictions generally treat the symptom rather than the underlying problem and can interfere with the price signals needed to allocate scarce goods.
He supports the PRO Act, including federal labor policies that would weaken the ability of states to maintain right-to-work laws. CIVPAC’s labor policy supports the right of workers to organize but also supports worker choice, secret-ballot representation elections, and the continued authority of states to enact right-to-work laws.
Turek would end school vouchers. Our K–12 education policy supports educational choice, including experimental voucher and charter-school programs, provided participating schools meet appropriate academic, transparency, and accountability standards.
We are also disappointed by his attendance record in the Iowa House while campaigning for the Senate. Running for higher office does not eliminate the responsibilities of the office one already holds.
And his foreign-policy views remain less developed than we would like in a candidate for the United States Senate. His rhetoric suggests a greater instinct toward restraint than our own, and we would prefer clearer commitments regarding Ukraine, NATO, China and Taiwan, and America’s broader alliance system.
These are not trivial disagreements.
Why Turek Nevertheless Gets Our Endorsement
What moves us toward Turek is not ideological agreement. It is a combination of independence, temperament, personal freedom, and demonstrated ability to work with people who disagree with him.
Turek represents an Iowa House district that Donald Trump carried comfortably. Yet Turek himself won the district. That is significant evidence that his appeal to independents and Republicans is more than campaign rhetoric.
His legislative record reinforces that conclusion.
Turek has crossed party lines on consequential votes involving immigration, taxes, firearms and other issues. More importantly, he has demonstrated an ability to operate effectively as a Democrat in a legislature overwhelmingly controlled by Republicans. The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked him among the most effective Democrats in the Iowa House.
We do not agree with all of those bipartisan votes. That is almost beside the point. Bipartisanship means very little if it consists only of agreeing with the other party when the vote is easy. Turek has shown that he is willing to depart from his own party when he believes circumstances warrant it.
On abortion and personal liberty, he is also substantially closer to CIVPAC. Iowa’s restrictive abortion law goes considerably further than the compromise reflected in our abortion policy, which preserves reproductive choice early in pregnancy while permitting greater restrictions later.
On immigration, Turek combines stronger border enforcement and deportation of immigrants who commit serious crimes with an earned pathway to citizenship for long-term residents. That is considerably closer to the practical compromise embodied in CIVPAC’s immigration policy than either open-ended permissiveness or mass-deportation politics.
He also strongly opposes Trump’s broad tariff policy, a position particularly appropriate for an Iowa senator.
A Comparative Judgment
Endorsements are choices between candidates, not examinations in which a candidate must achieve a passing score against an abstract CIVPAC platform.
Turek has economic positions we think are wrong.
Hinson has positions we think are right.
But the reverse is also true.
The difference is that the present national political environment places unusual weight on questions of institutional independence, constitutional restraint, alliances, trade, and whether members of Congress will act as legislators rather than as extensions of a president.
That changes our calculation.
In a government dominated by a left-leaning president and Congress, we might place greater weight on Hinson’s market-oriented economics, labor policy and school choice positions and welcome the counterweight she could provide.
In a Republican Party less defined by personal loyalty to Donald Trump, we might look very differently at a Republican with Hinson’s earlier record.
But we are making an endorsement for the government America actually has, not one we might prefer to imagine.
Josh Turek is an imperfect candidate. So is Ashley Hinson.
After weighing the advantages and shortcomings of both, we believe Turek is more likely to exercise the independence, bipartisan judgment and respect for individual liberty that the United States Senate particularly needs today.
CIVPAC endorses Josh Turek for the United States Senate from Iowa.