When Zach Lahn went on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in February, the Republican candidate for Iowa governor shared the story of a reluctant politician.
“I’m not the typical person that would run for office,” Lahn told the former Fox News host. “I really worked hard to be on our farm, to farm it.”
Lahn charmed Carlson with his romantic talk of his German lineage and board-by-board restored family farmhouse in Belle Plaine. He did the same on the shows and podcasts of other MAGA dissidents, with a slate of popular appeals that echoed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed 2024 presidential run. Lahn embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, with promises to “take on” Big Ag and Big Pharma, and embrace environmental conservation, support farmers, clean the water and fix the food. He’s called for a moratorium on data centers, lower property taxes and higher taxes for outsiders buying up Iowa farmland.
He has acknowledged that MAHA supporters are his “natural base” and has pledged to ban mRNA vaccines in the state and drop vaccine requirements for public schools — red meat for a movement built on anti-vaccine activism. After his projected win in the state’s Republican primary on Tuesday (beating Trump’s pick, Rep. Randy Feenstra), the first officially endorsed MAHA candidate has handed the movement a consequential electoral victory. But Lahn’s career as a Republican operative threatens the above-politics outsider narrative his campaign and MAHA activists are hoping will win against a Democrat in November.
“We are going to make Iowa a model state for the MAHA movement,” Lahn said on a video call Wednesday with Tony Lyons, who helms several MAHA-aligned efforts, including advocacy groups and a political PAC that poured millions of dollars into Kennedy’s presidential campaign and is putting millions more into races backing Republicans who further Kennedy’s agenda.
While Lahn, the son of a preacher, leans into the story of a simple farmer pulled into politics by his duty to his “heritage” and his love of the land, he talks much less about his years as a Koch-network operative and Republican campaign strategist.
Neither Lahn nor his campaign manager responded to requests for comment from MS NOW.
Lahn thrust himself into national politics as a 23-year-old University of Colorado student who, after heckling Barack Obama to “debate him” at a 2009 town hall, challenged the then-president on the Affordable Care Act. He described himself on Twitter at the time as “Determined Christian Conservative in CO, home state of IA. Not stopping until everyone agrees w/me. Pro-Life, Pro-Guns, Pro-Reagan, Anti-Big Gov.” Lahn was an immediate conservative sensation: He was interviewed on cable news professing his appreciation for Sarah Palin and profiled in national newspapers, where he spoke of his future goals. One wrote, “Lahn isn’t certain what he’ll do after graduating in December, but it likely will involve politics. He’s not sure if he’ll run for office; he may steer toward working for a conservative public policy group.”
Lahn did just that. He worked as a staff assistant to Colorado Republican Congressman Cory Gardner in 2011. Then he managed the 2012 winning congressional campaign for Montana Republican Steve Daines and joined that staff. In 2014, Lahn was managing another less successful congressional campaign for Matt Schultz out of Iowa.
And by that summer he had landed a job as the Montana state director of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group bankrolled by the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers. (Koch Industries — the business arm of the Koch empire — is consistently ranked among the country’s worst corporate environmental polluters.)