Josh Turek

When Democrat Josh Turek decided to run for the U.S. Senate in Iowa, a state that hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008 and had given Donald Trump a 13-point margin of victory in the 2024 presidential election, it wasn’t the hardest or most audacious thing he had done in his life. Not by a long shot.

Turek, born with spina bifida, had undergone 21 operations by the time he was 12. Doctors told his parents he’d never live a complete life.

A wheelchair athlete, he was cut from the U.S. national wheelchair basketball team in six straight years.

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Turek went on to win two gold medals in the Paralympic Games and was elected to the U.S. Senate in the 2026 midterm elections by a margin of almost four points.

His approach on the basketball court and on the campaign trail, as he told The New York Times in 2026, was steely and similar:

You’re not going to tell me what’s possible and what’s impossible. I’m going to go out there and I’m going to do the work and the results will come when I do the work.

Early life

Quick Facts

Josh Turek

• Full name: Joshua Peter Turek
• Born: April 12, 1979, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S.
• Education: Southwest Minnesota State University (bachelor’s degree in history, 2002); DeVry University (M.B.A.)
• Current role: Senator-elect from Iowa
• Party affiliation: Democratic
• Family: Married to Jarolin Reyes, whom he met while playing basketball in Europe
• Quotation: On running for the U.S. Senate: “This is harder than winning a gold medal.”

The moment Turek was born in 1979, his parents knew something was horribly wrong. A sack of nerves was visible on his back. Doctors diagnosed him with spina bifida, a congenital defect caused when the spinal column doesn’t form properly in the womb. Turek’s father, John, had served in the Navy for 22 months during the Vietnam War and was exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant tied to the birth defect. It was not the first hardship that Luellen and John Turek had endured. Their oldest child, Tasha, died when she was a toddler in a swimming pool accident. Luellen worked as a social worker while John worked at a technical college. Aside from Tasha and Josh, the couple had four other children, and they had a hard time making ends meet.

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Turek had multiple surgeries, including for clubbed feet, and struggled to get around as a child before beginning to use a wheelchair when he was 10. Bullied and friendless, he spent his middle school years in Missouri with a great-aunt, attending the Christian school where she taught. He was introduced to wheelchair basketball when he was 12, and by the time he returned to Iowa for high school, he was serious about the game. His younger siblings played basketball on their garage hoop, and Josh Turek did too—from his wheelchair. He later said it changed his life, telling The Times:

It’s tough enough to grow up poor, but it’s really difficult to grow up poor and disabled. Didn’t have a lot of friends, was really struggling with self-esteem, and basketball, adaptive sports, wheelchair basketball, really provided me that outlet.

Playing basketball

Senators and Olympians

Josh Turek will become the fourth U.S. senator to have competed at the Olympics or Paralympics. Here are the others:

• Wendell R. Anderson: Won a silver medal as part of the U.S. hockey team in the 1956 Games. He went on to represent Minnesota as a Democrat.
• Bill Bradley: Won gold as a member of the U.S. men’s basketball team at the 1964 Games. He would represent New Jersey as a Democrat.
• Ben Campbell: Competed in judo at the 1964 Games. He later represented Colorado as a Democrat and a Republican.

Turek attended Southwest Minnesota State University on a basketball scholarship and became a four-time All-American. He went on to play in Europe, and in 2004 he was selected for the U.S. Paralympic team in the Athens Games. The team finished seventh, which he described as an “abject failure.” Always a good shooter, Turek’s lack of size and defensive skills were seen as drawbacks. He tried out for Team USA in 2005 and got cut. The same story played out for the next five years. But when the Americans claimed the bronze medal at the 2012 Games in London, Josh Turek was on the team, as he was in Brazil in 2016 when the medal was gold. He was 42 years old when Team USA won gold again in 2021 at the Games in Japan.

Josh Turek was finished playing competitive basketball, but he wasn’t satisfied with three Paralympic medals as his legacy. He told his hometown newspaper: “I don’t want basketball to be the be-all, end-all of my story.”

Political life

The next chapter turned out to be politics. Turek, who had worked at a company that provides wheelchairs and assistive technologies to those with disabilities, had discovered something while playing basketball in Europe that both disheartened and motivated him. “I think it’s embarrassing that 40 million Americans don’t have health coverage,” he said in 2008.

Turek cast his first vote in a presidential election as a Republican for George W. Bush. In 2008 he changed his registration so he could back Barack Obama in the Iowa caucuses. In 2022, frustrated by the inadequate state of health care in Iowa, he decided to run for the Iowa House of Representatives. Turek’s campaign style was pretty typical for local races; he went door-to-door to ask voters for their support. Except that for Turek, sometimes that meant dragging himself up stairs so he could knock on a door. When voters asked him how he had managed to get to their door, he told them, adding, “That’s how important your vote is.” He won by six votes.

Up for reelection in 2024, he won handily, despite Trump winning the state by double digits. When Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst announced in September 2025 that she would not seek reelection, Turek announced his candidacy. He had considerable support from Washington politicians, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, although Turek denied reports that Schumer recruited him to run for the seat. In the Democratic primary he faced off against Iowa state Sen. Zach Wahls, a progressive; Turek characterized himself as a “common-sense prairie populist” who, as a former Republican himself, was willing to work with members of the GOP. Turek won in a landslide with almost 63 percent of the vote.

The general election, in which he faced Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, was much closer. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report declared the race a toss-up in August, and polls showed it close right up until Election Day. Hinson, who had declared herself a Trump acolyte, found herself having to defend unpopular presidential policies such as tariffs, plans to import foreign beef, and the war in Iran, which increased prices for Iowa farmers. Turek campaigned on reducing the high cost of food and increasing access to medical care; he navigated the fine line of Iowa politics, drawing attention to Hinson’s support for Trump on the Iran war and on the One Big Beautiful Bill, while proudly pointing out that he had voted with Republicans “700 times” in the state legislature. In July he secured the endorsement of Obama, who made an ad with Turek in which the two men played a game of basketball.

There was another element to a victory that was not lost on Turek. The last Democrat to hold a Senate seat from Iowa was Tom Harkin, who had been critical in securing the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. When Turek defeated Hinson on election night, he called Harkin to join him on the stage, noting that it was “beautifully poetic” that the man who would reclaim Harkin’s seat had so benefited from the signature legislation.

I believe to my core that the United States Senate is the single greatest vehicle to make societal change, and I believe [in the] ability for a good senator to change lives.…because one senator changed mine.