In a campaign season that looks increasingly full of promise for Democrats, Iowa gubernatorial hopeful Rob Sand is emerging as one of the cycle’s brightest prospects.
The two-term state auditor has led in every head-to-head poll against his opponent, Republican businessman Zach Lahn, since this spring. Professional elections analysts have projected a Sand victory for weeks, making him one of just two Democrats already favored to flip a red seat blue. While the state has drifted rightward over the last decade — Sand would be the first Democrat elected governor in 20 years, and he is currently the only member of his party serving in statewide office — a friendly national environment appears to be helping his chances.
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But when it comes to Iowa’s schools, which serve over 500,000 students and account for over half of all state appropriations, getting the job will be the easy part.
If elected, Sand will be one of the only Democrats in the country presiding over a statewide system of education savings accounts (ESAs) — a form of school choice that directly provides families money to spend on learning costs, including private school tuition. Sand says the initiative desperately needs oversight, calling it an “invitation to fraud.”
Yet he will have few practical tools to make real change. Even if voters abandon them on Election Day, Republicans will undoubtedly continue to dominate the Iowa General Assembly, where they currently command majorities of nearly 2-to-1. What’s more, the state faces a billion-dollar deficit in the current fiscal year, even as local districts are already struggling to keep pace with rising costs. Sand has proposed both new regulations on the use of ESAs and a meaningful increase in K–12 spending, which trails most other states. But prospects for either are cloudy.
State Sen. Jeff Taylor, a Republican serving as vice chair of the chamber’s education committee, said he saw no chance of sweeping revisions to school choice policy.
“He’s not going to be in a position to change existing law,” Taylor said. “He can propose things, but as long as Republicans control the legislature, it’s unlikely that his more dramatic changes will get a serious hearing.”
Depending on how well the midterms turn out for them, a similar dilemma awaits any Democrat chosen to lead largely conservative-dominated states. In places like Alaska, Ohio, Georgia, and even Texas, newly elected Democrats face severe political constraints that could hamper their attempts to implement or even formulate a coherent education agenda. A blue wave alone likely won’t be sufficient to alter that picture.
Margaret Buckton, a school finance expert who lobbies for both urban and rural school districts, said the “sea change” in the school choice environment made it difficult to see any room for bipartisan lawmaking on schools or much else.
“I don’t even know what’s left,” she said. “The bargain is going to have to come in some policy area, and I honestly don’t know what it is.”
Need for compromise
The limitations facing Iowa Democrats are hardly a secret. Sand campaign deputy manager Emma O’Brien acknowledged that some level of cooperation would be necessary to accomplish anything over the next four years.
“Rob is very realistic about the fact that he’ll be working with a Republican legislature if he wins in November — the same Republican legislature that passed the voucher program,” O’Brien said. “He will not have unilateral power to reverse anything, but he will use every avenue to pursue his education policies and will work with the Republican legislature to find common ground “
The auditor has largely couched his criticisms of the policy in terms of accountability and transparency, stumping for annual financial reviews to uncover wasteful spending and limit tuition increases at participating private schools. Sand also favors changing the law to prevent the state’s wealthiest families from receiving accounts.
Lahn, whose campaign did not respond to requests for comment, has said he wants to expand the program. An educational entrepreneur himself — Lahn started a private school in Kansas, which he reportedly sustains through substantial personal loans — the Republican nevertheless does not support extending ESAs to homeschooling families, as has been suggested by some Republicans.
First established in 2023, as part of a wave of similar laws adopted in red states, Iowa’s ESA program was used by about 42,000 students at a cost of approximately $330 million in 2026 . A report issued by the auditor’s office this summer found that nearly 80 percent of ESA recipients already attended private schools prior to the program’s enactment.
As in other states, public reception has been mixed. Demand for the accounts has been greater than expected, with thousands of families using the subsidy to access educational alternatives. But residents of some rural communities, where private academies are often sparse, sometimes chafe at seeing funds allocated to schools located far from them.
Timothy Hagle, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, noted the disparity. In populous Johnson County, where the college town of Iowa City is based, parents have no trouble finding Catholic, charter, or homeschooling options if they are dissatisfied with traditional public schools.
“But if you’re out in a much smaller county, you’re not going to have that opportunity,” he added.
At the same time, some districts have increasingly faced straitened financial circumstances as both K–12 enrollment and state revenues have trended downward. Iowa’s school funding design is somewhat more reliant on dollars from the state government than from localities, and direct aid to districts has lagged behind inflation in recent years. Iowa’s Supplemental State Aid (essentially the year-over-year increase in K–12 spending included in each new budget) often grew by 4 percent or more in the 1990s and 2000s; it has hovered around 2 percent since 2011.
The shortfalls have led school systems around the state to initiate layoffs, including in rural areas where schools are often the largest local employer. One local district recently opted to shutter a 100-year-old orchestra program to balance its books.
Taylor, a conservative who endorsed Lahn in the Republican primary, said he’d voted down a recent 2 percent increase in State Supplemental Aid because it was insufficiently generous. But he added that many of his co-partisans have lost faith in Iowa’s education system, attempting to root out Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offerings and ban the discussion of “divisive concepts” in required teacher training.
“[Funding] hasn’t stayed even in the ballpark of keeping up with increased costs that school districts are incurring,” he said. “But there’s a lot of skepticism or even hostility toward public schools among a lot of Republicans. It’s not my perspective, but it’s the perspective of a lot of them.”
‘Wiggle room’ on ESAs?
If Sand ultimately prevails, and seeks to pursue an ambitious program of K–12 changes, it will entail either collaborating with those Republicans or going around them.
As governor, he could claim authority to interpret the ESA law liberally — perhaps by making administrative demands through the state’s education department requiring stricter eligibility screening for participating schools, stronger audits for the program, and more robust attempts at fraud recovery. Taylor said that a Democratic governor might find some “wiggle room,” but that it would likely be limited.
Thus far, ESA systems have almost exclusively been implemented by the Republican lawmakers who created them. In Arizona, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs spent much of her first term in office attempting to rein in the state’s far-reaching program, proposing to allow access only to students who’d previously spent at least 100 days enrolled in a public school. Like Sand, Hobbs rhetorically tied universal school choice to the state’s growing budget deficit. Yet those efforts were stymied by the GOP-led legislature, and a measure aiming to limit family eligibility based on income failed to make the ballot this year.
Fiscal conditions might be even more difficult to change. Sand has said he would pursue a one-time 5 percent increase in state aid next year, a tall order given the budget deficit that has mounted in the last few years. His proposal for universal, all-day preschool would almost certainly face a huge roadblock as well.
Complicating matters further is Amendment 1, a referendum that could dramatically change the state’s constitution. If passed, future legislatures would need to marshal a two-thirds majority to ever increase the income tax, closing one of the most obvious doors to possible future funding.
While alternatives exist, such as raising sales or property taxes, Buckton observed that they would also be difficult to leverage. As it is, she added, the state has long provided less funding for each K–12 student than the nation as a whole. Within the Midwest region, it lags behind every other state besides deep-red Indiana and Kansas.
“There is no foreseeable way, if that amendment passes, that Iowa will ever be at the national average for per-pupil expenditures again,” she said.