‘Cancer Doesn't Care What Party You Belong To’: Poisoned Water Is Turning This Rural State Bluer
Democrats see an opening in rural states for the first time in decades. In Iowa, it’s about water.
By Tom Philpott and Nina B. Elkadi
Chris Jones, the 65-year-old Democratic nominee for Iowa secretary of agriculture, stands at the edge of a pond on a 72-acre farm in eastern Iowa. “What you see here is how fertile Iowa is,” he says, looking intently into the water. Massive bluegills dart about in the clear depths. “When we go up to a corn or soy field, we don’t see this anymore.”
Jones isn’t just talking about the fish. He means the water’s clarity. Iowa’s lakes and ponds are often murky and fetid from algae blooms fed by fertilizer runoff, a byproduct of the state’s vast agricultural industry’s reliance on farming chemicals. Jones spent about a decade as a research engineer, monitoring the state’s rivers and streams. What he learned in that role about Iowa’s water is what spurred his run for office.
Iowa has a long-simmering water problem that has finally begun to boil over — and it’s changing Iowa politics. People are angry and worried about the quality of the state’s water, the health risks it poses and its increasingly undeniable tie to the state’s signature industry: agriculture.
In recent years, Iowa’s cancer rate has climbed significantly above the U.S. average. It now stands as the nation’s second highest, and Iowa is one of only three states where the rate is rising. The situation has put a spotlight on nitrates, which are linked to a growing body of science to kidney, brain and ovarian cancer. Nitrates are a key component in the deluge of chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the state’s farmers, some of which washes off farm fields and into waterways. A second culprit is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most common weedkiller, which the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared “probably carcinogenic” in 2015, an assessment rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Historically, candidates for state-wide office in Iowa, from governor to agriculture secretary, Republican or Democrat, have avoided criticizing the agriculture industry, opting instead for platitudes about how Iowa’s farms “feed the world.” This year is different. Voters are steaming mad, and candidates on both sides of the political aisle are pointing fingers at Big Ag — and winning.
And in a change that has drawn national attention, some of those winning candidates are Democrats. The water crisis and the shifting views of agriculture are scrambling Iowa’s politics, including its traditional partisan divides. In last month’s primary, voters delivered surprises to candidates on both the Republican and Democratic sides of the ballot.
In the Republican primary for governor, a businessman, farmer and political operative named Zach Lahn shocked the political establishment by edging out Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra for the nomination. Lahn won, in part, by openly acknowledging the state’s water crisis and connecting the dots between agriculture and cancer. Lahn was also the first candidate for statewide office endorsed by MAHA Action, the main PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement. MAHA voters supported Kennedy and President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential elections, but have since rebelled against some of their moves, especially the Trump administration’s open support for glyphosate. (Trump has since endorsed Lahn, declaring him an “America First Patriot” and an “effective Voice for Iowa Agriculture.”)
“I could get into tears thinking about the people that I know that have gotten cancer,” Lahn told Tucker Carlson in a February interview.
As for the Democrats, they have their best shot in a decade or more of winning statewide offices in November’s election. Democrat Josh Turek is neck-and-neck in recent polling with Republican Ashley Hinson in the open race for U.S. Senate. And Lahn’s Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, bested him by one percentage point, within the margin of error, in recent polling in the governor’s race.
And then there’s Chris Jones. His bid to become secretary of agriculture — as a Democrat —may be the most unexpected development so far. He’s running an insurgent campaign in a deep red state to reduce the agriculture industry’s dependence on toxic chemicals, crack down on large livestock confinements, and most important: to clean up the water.
The farm he is visiting raises a variety of vegetables in unruly, green gardens: peppers, sweet corn, green beans, potatoes and collards. Though the farmer grows soybeans on some of the property to make ends meet, other fields have been allowed to return to marshy wetland. It’s a sharp contrast to the corn and soybean fields that carpet most of Iowa’s farmland, geometrically arrayed and stretching from fence row to fence row.
Jones admits this farm looks a bit “chaotic,” especially when compared to one of its huge, conventional counterparts. Those farms, Jones says, are an attempt to control nature, and “what has controlling nature here done for us?” He turns back to the pond. “It’s polluted all our water. It’s really destroyed a lot of Iowa.”
His Republican opponent is the incumbent secretary of agriculture, Mike Naig, who can’t really run on water. That’s because, of all things, he actually worked as the manager of state and local government affairs in Iowa for Monsanto, the maker of the widely used herbicide Roundup, which is now owned by Bayer. Naig puts a sunny spin on the water problem, doubling down on the state’s voluntary approach to cajoling farmers to pollute less while insisting that things are getting better — a claim that isn’t backed by data collected from waterways. “We have made tremendous progress working with farmers and landowners and hundreds of public and private partners to incorporate responsible farming practices, but there’s no finish line when it comes to conservation,” he said, in a June press release. (Naig did not respond to a request for comment sent to his campaign.)
Jones is at the vanguard of a crop of Democrats who see a new political opening in rural and red states, trying to make a case that Republican policies have not well served the voters of states like Iowa who are living with the consequences — from tariffs on agriculture to the shuttering of rural hospitals to stagnant wages and rising prices. But none of those issues seem to have galvanized Iowa’s electorate like the state’s polluted water and rising cancer rates.
The possibility that Jones and other Democrats have a chance to win, in a state so dominated by Republicans for two decades, is due in no small part to the motivating power of the water crisis.
“Cancer doesn’t care what party you belong to,” Jones said. “Republicans don’t like drinking poisonous water any more than Democrats do.”
Iowa’s water problem — and the political reckoning it’s triggering — has been building for years.
In 2015, the Des Moines Water Works, which was spending well over $1 million a year to filter pollutants from the city’s water, filed a federal lawsuit accusing the governing boards of three upstream rural counties of allowing high levels of nitrate runoff into the Raccoon River, which, along with the Des Moines River, provides drinking water to the city of Des Moines. Two years later, the case was dismissed, with the judge ruling that the entities named in the suit lacked the authority to control farm pollution.
At the time, Jones had just started managing a state-funded network of more than 70 sensors on rivers and streams across Iowa. The data he collected found Iowa’s water routinely contained heightened levels of two chemicals prevalent in the fertilizer and manure farmers apply to their fields every year: phosphorus, known to trigger toxic algae blooms in freshwater lakes and ponds; and nitrate, suspected of being carcinogenic at low levels in drinking water. Many academics might have been satisfied to quietly publish the findings on a little-viewed website, but Jones spoke up. In academic papers, at community meetings, a hard-hitting blog, a podcast, and in a 2023 book, he methodically tied the state’s water-quality crisis directly to agriculture.
The EPA requires municipal water systems to cap nitrate at 10 parts per million — a level that Iowa water agencies often barely manage to meet. (Importantly for rural areas, the EPA offers no standards to protect people who rely on private wells, which nearly 10 percent of Iowans do.) But a body of evidence from National Cancer Institute researchers suggests regular consumption of water with nitrate levels even significantly lower than 10 parts per million still boosts cancer risk.
A March 2026 Iowa Environment Council report, co-authored by some of the state’s leading oncologists and environmental-health experts, illustrates how Iowa’s “toxic mix” of environmental risk factors contribute to the increased cancer rate, which federal data show started rising beyond the national average in 2008. That mix includes nitrate, which can leech into groundwater from fertilizer and manure; pesticides and herbicides, used to protect crops; and PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals that were often found in sewage sludge spread on farm fields as fertilizer. Iowa farmers spray up to 32 million pounds of glyphosate each year, not to mention heavy doses of other herbicides including atrazine, acetochlor and 2, 4-D. There are also elevated levels of the radioactive gas radon, which is naturally occurring in Iowa soil and the second leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. But exposure to radon can’t explain the rise in cancer cases, because its levels are constant. Iowa’s agriculture output, however, has intensified in recent decades along with its cancer rates.
“This shows us that there’s many aspects of the way in which we are using our land that are known or suspected risk factors for cancer,” says David Cwiertny, who directs the Center for Health Effects of Environmental Contamination at the University of Iowa.
Iowans have taken note. In a February 2026 poll Iowa voters named cancer their top concern —ahead of cost of living, and then, clean water. “People are finally beginning to understand that there’s implications for folks here in Iowa,” Cwiertny says, adding that Jones, his former colleague, deserves at least some of the credit for that.
In 2015, Jones started writing a blog where he documented his research on water quality. It slowly gained a statewide readership in progressive circles, and as it did, Jones began making each post “a little more provocative,” as he puts it — inserting commentary about what agriculture might have to do with it. Over time, the blog developed a sharp critique of the state’s voluntary water-quality rules and a haves-vs.-have-nots narrative of wealthy farmers and their agribusiness allies reaping profits while fouling the environment for everyone else.
It emerged as a genuine embarrassment for the agricultural powers that be. In 2022, Jones published a piece titled, “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Farmers,” which countered the agriculture industry’s mythology of the Iowa farmer as a heroic, go-it-alone feeder-of-the-world. That myth, he argued, was a self-serving way to uphold the status quo and frame anyone who points to the state’s environmental woes as anti-farmer.
Eventually, he recalls, two state senators began to pressure the university to rein him in. When his bosses told him to stop writing “this stuff,” Jones said he’d rather retire, which is what he did. It was an example of the political power of the state’s agricultural interests.
That power is the reason that the state’s political leaders, Republican and Democratic alike, have treated Iowa’s water woes gingerly, avoiding naming Big Ag as a culprit and promoting only voluntary measures to curb pollution, which have proven to be ineffective. It’s not hard to understand the light touch. Iowa’s farmers earn more than $40 billion from selling their crops and animal products each year, second only to California. And every year, they devote more than 70 percent of the landscape to just two crops: corn and soybeans, which require a massive volume of pesticides and fertilizers. A lot of that corn and soybeans isn’t eaten by people. Instead it is either transformed into biofuels or used as feed for the state’s teeming livestock populations, which are often held in concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, housing nearly 24 million hogs, 44 million egg-laying hens, and 3.5 million cattle — more than any other state, and dwarfing Iowa’s human population of just over 3 million.
All told, Iowa farmers spend around $8.7 billion each year on pesticides, fertilizers, seeds and machinery such as combines, making them a crucial market for global agribusiness firms Bayer and Syngenta, the fertilizer firm CF Industries and farm-equipment maker John Deere. These enormous, powerful firms have a stake in maintaining the current regulation-light status quo.
But, as Jones noted at a recent fundraiser, despite the state’s status as an agricultural powerhouse, its farmers aren’t actually a potent voting force. The state is home to only about 160,000 full-time farmers, according to the 2022 Agricultural Census. And a far smaller fraction run operations large enough to have a stake in the status quo Jones wants to shake up. The census also found that only 11 percent of Iowa’s 87,000 farms had annual sales of at least $1 million — and that top 11 percent accounts for nearly three-quarters of the state’s total sales of agriculture products. By contrast, nearly half of the state’s farms had sales of less than $50,000, accounting for less than 1 percent of sales. In short, the big farms are doing the most business and the most damage — and at least in theory, there aren’t enough of them to truly swing the vote in a state with 1.8 million active registered voters.
The other knock against Jones, in addition to being a Democrat, is his lack of family ties to farming — a rarity among ag-secretary candidates. Naig’s bio on the Iowa Department of Agriculture website notes that he grew up on a farm and is still involved in its operation today. The implication is that, unlike Jones, Naig has deep ties to Iowa’s heroic farmers. However, Jones doesn’t come off as an out-of-touch professorial type. He’s an Iowa native who speaks bluntly and who grew up fishing, and who to this day spends his spare time in and around Iowa’s waterways, pole in hand. So he may cut a more appealing figure in rural Iowa than Republicans bargain for.
And Jones has a handy prop for turning Naig’s own backstory into a liability. At campaign events, he likes to show off a memento he picked up years before: Naig’s business card from his days as a Monsanto lobbyist, which he gave Jones when Jones was working for the Iowa Soybean Association. In April, Jones posted a meme on his social media accounts that depicted the race as a battle between “Monsanto Mike” and “Clean Water Chris.”
It’s a strong frame that seems like it should appeal to voters across the state. But the real vulnerability for Jones is not that he doesn’t farm — it’s that he’s associated with cities. And the big divide in Iowa, as in lots of places around the country, is between urban and rural.
Still, this disadvantage has an upside. Iowa is heavily rural, but maybe not as rural as the perception: 63 percent of its population lives in urban areas. Jones’ path to victory involves rallying urbanites without a direct interest in agriculture to vote for clean water. But he also needs to peel off some of the rural vote, which Trump won overwhelmingly in 2024, to push him over the top.
Jones understands this, and he thinks the water issue allows him to do that. “Only 14 percent of rural Iowa is comprised of farmers and their wives,” he says. “Most of rural Iowa is nurses and truck drivers and teachers and hairdressers and people who work at convenience stores.”
All Iowans feel the burden of toxic water, he argues, even as only a select few reap benefits from the operations that cause the pollution. “These environmental issues are common-good issues that affect everyone in rural Iowa, and especially those that are not farming,” Jones says. “Avoidance of water quality, avoidance of the environmental consequences of agriculture has been a real tragic mistake here for the Democratic Party.”
Whether Republican voters are mad enough about the state’s toxic water to vote for a Democrat remains the question that will drive Iowa politics until November.
There are signs that Jones is making inroads, even with some farmers. Three of Iowa’s best-known social media activists are a trio of corn-and-soybean farmers known as the “Lobe Rangers.” The name refers to their home region, a large soil-rich swath of north-central Iowa known to geologists as the Des Moines Lobe. They have gained a reputation in contemporary Iowa politics for speaking candidly about their outrage at the state’s poor water quality, and the refusal by policymakers and their fellow farmers to address it.
They’ve been impressed by Jones’ run. Until he came along, Matthew Bormann, one of the Rangers says, “We’ve never seen a candidate in Iowa — I don’t think we’ve ever seen a candidate, period — who’s led on water quality.”
Lahn, the MAHA-backed GOP candidate for governor, talks about water, too, but he is a newcomer to the issue. Until relatively recently, Lahn was part of the libertarian wing of Republican politics, which isn’t focused on environmental issues. Jones has been at it for much longer and — unlike Lahn — he isn’t likely to fear breaking the political taboo against calling for major regulation of farming practices.
“The success of Lahn and Jones in the primary goes to the importance of the issues,” said fellow Ranger Zack Smith. Both sides of the aisle see water as key to winning, and it has scrambled traditional partisan divides. “It’s probably the No.1 or No.2 issue on the ballot this year.”
There is, of course, one big difference between the two men, the Rangers say. Lahn is a Republican in a red state, and Jones is not. (The candidates also hold diametrically opposed views on practically every political, social and economic issue that doesn’t involve water.) Because of that, the Rangers said, they are a little skeptical of Jones’ chances of winning office.
“He’s gonna get spun as that ‘liberal environmentalist wacko’ that’s trying to put farmers out of business,” Bormann says. Smith gives Jones more of a shot. He expects Naig to dominate the farmer vote, but believes that Jones may have enough support in populous urban counties to make things interesting. “I think it’s going to be a closer race than a lot of people think.”
Art Cullen, who has edited the Storm Lake Times Pilot in south-central Iowa since 1990, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for a series of scathing editorials on agriculture’s role in the water crisis. He says Jones’ clean-water message is genuinely popular among Iowans. “But for whatever reason, whether it’s abortion or whatever the case, they vote for Republican majorities that refuse to give them clean water,” Cullen says. And he doesn’t see Jones changing that: “It’s going to be very difficult for Chris to beat Mike Naig. He’s running against an amicable, or amiable, Republican Farm Bureau guy, and Iowa loves incumbents.”
But at a moment that voters across the country are in an anti-incumbent mood, the question is whether Iowans’ anger over water and cancer, combined with a more general national predisposition to overthrow status quo candidates, will change the equation for long-time Republican voters.
Bill Billings, 62, a healthcare administrator and the former mayor of Red Oak, a town of about 5,600 in western Iowa, may be an example of that voter. He was diagnosed in 2024 with a rare cancer called high-grade B-cell lymphoma. “I was the healthiest cancer patient that my cancer team says they’ve ever had,” he says. He only occasionally drinks alcohol, “eats clean,” exercises daily, and in a previous career worked as a conditioning coach for college athletes.
Today, he carefully filters his water to remove nitrates, but his lifestyle still includes one risk factor that he ties to his cancer: Red Oak is surrounded on all sides by large corn and soybean operations, the closest less than a mile away. He says his proximity subjects him to pesticide vapor from the crop-dusting aircraft that often traverse the sky nearby, as well as “any herbicides or pesticides that I used around my home” in landscaping. (His cancer is in remission after chemotherapy.)
Glyphosate stands out for him in particular. It’s suspected of boosting risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a category that includes B-cell lymphoma. And Billings says he sees the malady all around him. When he was first diagnosed, “My oncology team said that they were treating upwards of 20 patients for basically the same form of cancer that I have.” These days, he knows two people who live nearby with the same cancer type. “I would say you can’t find anybody in the state of Iowa who doesn’t have a family member or a close acquaintance” with a cancer story.
A lifelong Republican, Billings says Jones’ hyperfocus on Big Ag polluters and cleaning up the water resonates with him. It’s not lost on him that the herbicide he associates with his cancer, glyphosate, was the brainchild and blockbuster product of Monsanto, Naig’s former employer.
“I think [Jones] has a great chance,” he says. “Iowa has been a fairly red state for 10 to 15 years now. But I guess Chris doesn’t seem like a regular Democrat.”
