Josh Turek hand-cycles RAGBRAI while campaigning for Iowa Senate seat

Josh Turek joined the first day of RAGBRAI in western Iowa while campaigning for Iowa’s open U.S. Senate seat, turning one of the state’s biggest summer rituals into a test of whether biography can travel beyond the crowd. The Iowa representative and former Paralympian covered the ride by hand, telling KTIV the challenge was “60 miles” and saying he was excited to take part in “a great Iowa tradition.”

RAGBRAI 2026 began in Onawa on Saturday, July 18, and was scheduled to end in Dubuque on July 25 over a 391-mile route. KTIV said about 40,000 people were expected to participate in the ride, and Turek’s campaign said in a July 20 press release that he “joined thousands of riders and hand-cycled across Western Iowa.” The stop fit the kind of retail politics that can matter in Iowa, where a candidate has to be visible in small towns, on back roads and at public events that draw both regular riders and casual spectators.

Turek’s pitch is rooted in a record that is unlike any other candidate in the race. KTIV quoted him saying he has competed in four Paralympics and won two gold medals. That athletic history, paired with his own mobility experience, gives Democrats a candidate they believe can speak to resilience without sounding abstract. It also gives him a way to meet voters in places where personal familiarity still matters as much as party label, especially in a Senate race for the first open seat in more than a decade.

The Iowa Legislature says Turek is serving his first term in the Iowa House of Representatives. It also identifies him as a Numotion employee who works on mobility for disabled individuals, a volunteer director for the Ryan Martin Foundation and a member of the National Wheelchair Basketball Association’s High Performance Committee. Those details helped frame his RAGBRAI appearance not as a novelty, but as part of a campaign built around endurance, public service and a disability perspective that Democrats hope can resonate with swing voters and rural Iowans who may not have heard a Senate candidate speak in those terms before.