On June 2, Zach Lahn beat Donald Trump's pick. Lahn, a businessman and farmer who had never held elected office, took Iowa's Republican primary for governor from U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, the congressman carrying the president's endorsement, by 1,652 votes out of 214,529 cast. Four months later the traders on Kalshi price a Republican inauguration at 12¢ on the dollar, in a state Trump carried by 13.2 points in 2024.
What stands between him and the office is Rob Sand, the Democratic state auditor who has already won Iowa twice. Sand leads Lahn in all 16 public polls taken since the nominees were set, by four points in the newest and by nine to 12 in the four before it, and the contract that pays out if a Democrat is sworn in last traded at 88¢ on Kalshi, bid 87¢ (here is how a Kalshi price turns into a probability).
Iowa has not turned blue. One Republican won his primary by running against corporate agriculture in a farm state, and one Democrat has already won statewide there twice, the second time by 2,893 votes. Eight AI models scored this race without seeing a price.
The Primary That Reset The Board
Kim Reynolds is not seeking another term, so Iowa's governorship is an open seat for the first time since 2006, the last year a Democrat won it. Republicans held a five-way primary for it on June 2, and the man who won was not the man the party expected.
| Candidate | Share of the vote | Trump's pick |
|---|---|---|
| Zach Lahn | 37.6% | No (endorsed July 10, after the primary) |
| Randy Feenstra | 36.9% | Yes |
| Adam Steen | 14.5% | — |
| Brad Sherman | 7.0% | — |
| Eddie Andrews | 3.6% | — |
Iowa Republican primary for governor, June 2, 2026, certified results: Lahn 80,765 votes to Feenstra's 79,113, of 214,529 cast. A nominee needed 35% to avoid a party convention.
That total mattered as much as the order. Iowa Code sends a primary to a party convention when no candidate clears 35% of the vote, which would have handed the nomination to a June 13 convention instead of to the voters. Lahn cleared the bar by 2.6 points. The race was settled on primary night and the November field was final.
The way Lahn won is the part national coverage fixed on. He ran against corporate agriculture in the country's leading corn and pork state, opposing liability protections for pesticide manufacturers and aligning himself with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Fortune reported his victory speech, in which he said: "I will take on the big ag cartels. I will break up their monopolies, and I will get Iowa farmers a fair deal." He also told that room, of the industry his state runs on, "Iowa has the fastest growing cancer rate in the world. We all know something is terribly wrong." The Iowa Cancer Registry's 2026 report, as covered by Iowa Public Radio, has the state with the second-highest rate of cancer in the country and one of a few states where the rate is still rising; "in the world" is Lahn's framing, not a measured figure. The Iowa Capital Dispatch recorded Feenstra's concession the same night.
Traders read it as bad news for the Democrat. The Democratic side fell from 64¢ to 56¢ on June 2, the busiest trading day the board had seen to that point, and was back at 64¢ by June 8. It has not closed below 59¢ since.
Rob Sand, meanwhile, had nothing to do on primary night. He was the only Democrat who qualified for the ballot and took 99.6% of his party's 190,193 votes.
Sand Won Twice, Barely
Sand has already won statewide twice, so a Democrat winning Iowa is not news. The margins are. In 2018 he won the auditor's race by four and a half points over Republican Mary Mosiman. In 2022 he kept it by 2,893 votes out of nearly 1.2 million, 600,719 to Todd Halbur's 597,826, a quarter of a point, on the ballot where Reynolds won the governorship by 18.5 points and Grassley held the Senate seat by 12.2. The same electorate that returned Reynolds and Grassley by double digits kept Sand in office by the width of a small county's turnout.
Republicans have spent the years since arguing that the office is the campaign. Governor Reynolds and legislative Republicans have accused Sand of using high-profile audits and fraud allegations to build a political profile. His audit of Iowa's Education Savings Account program found no spending irregularities; Sand said delays in receiving information had prevented a thorough review, while state officials said he was attacking the program for political reasons. Republicans on the Iowa House Government Oversight Committee criticized his handling of the Judicial Branch's misallocation of roughly $25 million in court fees and fines, and the U.S. Treasury rejected key claims in one of his COVID spending audits. In August, Turning Point USA activists followed and booed him at the Iowa State Fair; he responded by calling for civility in the race.
Then there is the money, which is the least ambiguous number in the race. In the reporting period that ran May 27 to July 14, Sand raised nearly $9.4 million and finished with close to $18 million in the bank. That haul came from more than 33,000 contributions, most of them under $100. Lahn raised about $6.4 million over the same weeks and finished with roughly $1 million, alongside a reported $2.5 million outstanding loan. Almost 78% of Lahn's haul, close to $5 million, came from a political action committee affiliated with the Republican Governors Association; the Democratic Governors Association gave Sand $2.5 million. Iowa's next disclosure is not due until October 19, so nothing after July 14 is public anywhere.
Where Lahn Lives
Lahn's campaign has spent the summer answering two questions, and both are on the documented record.
The first is where he lives. Lahn left Iowa for college, left again in 2018 to start a private school in Kansas, and moved into his family's Belle Plaine homestead in 2023 after finishing renovations. Iowa requires two years' residency before the election to run for governor. Lahn says he moved back in 2023; he did not register to vote in the state until October 17, 2024, a date his opponents treat as barely clearing that window. The Des Moines Register later reported that flight records showed 75 nights in Wichita between October 2025 and the spring of 2026. Sand's advertising now references dozens of flights Lahn piloted to and from Kansas since launching his campaign, and calls him a "part-time Iowan." Lahn's explanation has been consistent: the trips are for a blended family that includes children from his and his wife's previous marriages, who live in Kansas.
Associated Press reporting has found the question still surfacing among farm-country Republicans. At an Arlington farm event, 84-year-old Republican farmer Larry Streicher put it plainly: "Is he going all the time to Kansas? We don't know anything about him."
The second is whether the anti-corporate message survives contact with his own record. The Iowa Democratic Party published a report in August alleging longstanding ties between Lahn and fertilizer interests that control a large share of the national market. That is a partisan source and should be read as one. What is not in dispute is the shape of the coalition problem: a Republican nominee in Iowa who campaigns against pesticide manufacturers is asking farm-country Republicans to vote for him while telling their industry that something is making people sick.
He did get the president back. On July 10 Trump gave Lahn his "Complete and Total Endorsement" on Truth Social, calling him an "America First Patriot," and said afterward that Lahn was "much more Trump" than Feenstra. The Democratic contract closed at 62¢ the day of that endorsement and 63¢ the day after. In a state Trump carried by 13.2 points, the president's backing moved the Democratic side up a cent.
What moved the price came a month later, in August. The board closed the August 10 session at 65¢. Two sessions later it closed at 72¢, it reached 78¢ by August 18, and it closed between 74¢ and 78¢ every session from August 16 through September 8. September added a second leg: the Democratic side has closed between 77¢ and 88¢ every session since September 9, the last print is 88¢ on an 87¢ bid, and the Republican side has not closed above 24¢ in that stretch.
The Same Ballot, Two Different Answers
Two prices on the same Iowa ballot do not agree. The Democratic side of the governor board is bid at 87¢. On the Iowa Senate board the Republican side is bid at 56¢ as of October 11, a cent under where it sat on October 2 and down from 64¢ on September 8. Traders are not pricing a state that flipped. They are pricing one race where the Republican brand is doing its usual work and another where a specific Democrat has been outrunning it for eight years.
The crosstabs say who is crossing over. Emerson College surveyed 750 Iowa likely voters on August 31 and September 1 and asked them about both races: Sand over Lahn 49% to 46% for governor, with 6% undecided, and Republican Ashley Hinson over Democrat Josh Turek 50% to 45% for Senate on the same ballot, with about 6% of the sample voting Hinson and Sand together. Independents broke for Sand by 12 points, 51% to 39%. Fox found the same crossover four weeks later even though it had Turek ahead for Senate: 11% of Hinson's own voters marked Sand for governor, about 5% of the whole sample against Emerson's 6%, and independents went 66% to 16% for Sand. That is the race in one line: a slice of Hinson's voters is voting for Sand, and it is the same pattern his two auditor wins already showed. Trump's job approval in Emerson's Iowa sample was 44% approve and 52% disapprove; Fox's sample had him at 42% approve, 57% disapprove.
The Senate toplines have moved toward Turek and the Senate board has moved with them, but not past them. Since Emerson's September poll, YouGov, Marist, Fox and Suffolk have each had Turek ahead, co/efficient had Hinson up four, the Times/Siena poll had her up by one, CNN had her up by two, Cygnal had a tie and Emerson's October poll has her up two, 47% to 45%, and Hinson's side is still the favorite on Kalshi at 56¢. The split ticket shows up in the price and, again, in the two newest polls.
Every public poll of the governor's race agrees on direction. Sixteen head-to-heads have been published since the nominees were set on June 2, and Sand leads all 16, from D+1 to D+12. The published averages landed between Sand +4.0 and Sand +4.5 when this page went up; the two averages readable on October 11 have the race at Sand +7.7 (PoliAgg) and +8.0 (270toWin), and 270toWin had it at +9.4 on October 8, before Emerson's four-point poll entered its five-poll window. The trend is no longer flat: the seven polls through Emerson's September poll averaged 4.6 points and the nine since, YouGov, Cygnal, co/efficient, Marist, Fox News, the Times/Siena poll, Suffolk, CNN and Emerson again, average 8.4. All seven handicappers who rate the race now put it on the Democratic side, from Tilt D through Lean D to one Solid D, and all seven call it a party flip.
What Eight Models Said Without Seeing The Price
We gave the whole race to nine AI models. Each one received a deterministically fetched data card: the certified primary returns, every public head-to-head with its pollster's measured track record, the full ratings board, the campaign finance filings, Iowa's structural voting history back to 2006, the national midterm base rates, and the settlement rules. None of them saw a market price. Then each model read the other models' anonymized reasoning and was allowed to revise.
Eight of the nine returned a number. The ninth declined to score a political race at all, so it was left out rather than guessed at.
| Market | Which party wins the 2026 governorship of Iowa |
| Venue | Kalshi, a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange |
| Ticker | GOVPARTYIA-26, paired contracts on the Democratic and Republican outcomes |
| Democratic side (Rob Sand) | 87¢ bid, 88¢ ask |
| Republican side (Zach Lahn) | 12¢ bid, 13¢ ask |
| Depth | 761,091 contracts of lifetime volume on the Democratic side with about 566,800 still open; 888,818 lifetime on the Republican side with about 630,300 open |
| Settles | On the party of whoever is inaugurated governor, not on either name. The board has contracts only for the two major parties, so any other winner would settle both sides NO |
| Panel read | 73% Democratic, scored September 4; the balance is Republican plus the small chance neither party's nominee is inaugurated |
| Prices as of | October 11, 2026, 8:33 a.m. ET |
The settlement wording is worth one sentence, because it is not the election: the contract resolves on the party of whoever is sworn in, Kalshi's rules let it close early once that happens, and its expected expiration is listed as January 14, 2027. In practice the rules also allow accelerated determination once a consensus of media organizations projects the winner.
Here is every model's final number after the revision round.
| Model | Round 1 | Final | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable | 75% | 75% | Held |
| Claude Opus | 78% | 75% | Down 3 |
| Gemini | 68% | 73% | Up 5 |
| Kimi | 68% | 73% | Up 5 |
| Grok | 69% | 73% | Up 4 |
| Claude Sonnet | 80% | 72% | Down 8 |
| DeepSeek | 68% | 72% | Up 4 |
| GLM | 78% | 72% | Down 6 |
| Panel median | 72% | 73% |
Every seat on this panel is graded against real market settlements. Records to date, as the share of settled calls scored on the correct side: Claude Fable 88% on 5,981, Claude Opus 87% on 6,126, Claude Sonnet 86% on 6,070, Gemini 86% on 12,259, Grok 84% on 9,942, Kimi 86% on 7,272, GLM 84% on 5,553, DeepSeek 84% on 5,346 graded calls. Recomputed daily; the full scoreboard is public.
Every number here gets graded in public once the market settles, on the full graded scoreboard.
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More live boards from the same panel: Iowa's Senate race, where the Republican side is bid at 56¢ · Michigan governor, Democratic side 92¢ · Wisconsin governor, Democratic side 80¢. Prices fetched October 11, 2026.
The panel's middle answer, 73%, now sits 14 and a half points under the market's 87.5¢ bid-ask midpoint. When the panel was scored on September 4 it landed three and a half points under the price, and by September 8 the market had drifted to within half a point of it. Then four September polls landed before the September 27 stamp, every one with Sand ahead, and traders moved 11 cents past the panel, then three more in October. The eight models wrote 73% on a data card that ended at the September Emerson poll; the market has since priced Marist's 12-point lead, Fox News's nine, the Times/Siena 11, Suffolk's 12, CNN's nine and Emerson's four, and the panel has not been re-scored. One trigger below has been touched, co/efficient's 46% share for Sand in mid-September, so a re-score is owed. Until it runs, the 73% stands as scored, and the grade comes at settlement.
What Moved Since October 8
The price held and the size did not. The Democratic side closed at 88¢ on October 8, 9 and 10, the same close it has posted in five of the last six sessions, and is bid at 87¢ against an 88¢ offer as of 8:33 a.m. ET on October 11, with the last print at 88¢. The Republican side closed at 13¢ all three days and is bid at 12¢. Read as a quote, three days passed and a cent came off the bid. Read as a tape, Friday was the biggest day the Democratic side of the board has ever had.
At 12:45:45 p.m. ET on October 9 one taker bought 264,999 Democratic contracts in a single second, across 18 fills: 3,804 at 87¢, 1,069 at 88¢ and 260,126 at 89¢, the top of the board's all-time range. The Democratic side's previous record for a whole day was 63,360 contracts on September 3; Friday did 270,525, and more than a third of every contract ever traded on that side changed hands that day. Open interest on the Democratic side went from about 302,000 contracts at Thursday's close to about 566,000 at Friday's, so the buyer was new money and so, almost entirely, was the seller: the sweep opened positions rather than closing them. Nine seconds later 5,358 Republican contracts were sold into bids between 10¢ and 13¢, and about 80 seconds after that 10,960 were bought at 12¢ and 13¢. The Democratic side finished the day where it started, at 88¢, and the Republican side at 13¢. It was also the second quarter-million session on this board in five days: on October 5 the Republican side traded 273,844 contracts and its open interest rose by about 256,000 while its price fell from 16¢ to 13¢, size the October 5 to 8 section below recorded only as two cents on the Democratic bid. What a buyer paying 89¢ gets is 11¢ of upside on a contract Kalshi expects to settle on January 14, 2027, about three months out. That is a statement about certainty, not about edge, and the 250,000 contracts bid at 87¢ are the floor anyone leaning on this board is leaning on.
The pair of standing orders this page has tracked since September is where the sweep shows. On October 8 it sat at about 261,000 contracts bid at 86¢ and 250,000 offered at 90.5¢. On October 11 the bid is about 250,000 contracts at 87¢, a cent higher and about 11,000 contracts smaller, and the 250,000 offer at 90.5¢ is gone from the book. Above the touch the offers are thin, about 3,200 contracts at 88¢, 1,600 at 89¢ and 800 at 90¢, before a 10,000-contract order at 90.1¢. Whether Friday's seller was the 90.5¢ order, lowered to 89¢ and filled at the size it had been showing, or someone else, the book does not say. What it does say is that the Democratic side is walled at 87¢ by a quarter-million contracts and no longer capped at 90.5¢.
The buying came just under seven hours after the only poll published since the October 8 update, and the poll tied for the narrowest anyone has released since mid-September, four points against an 8.4-point average. Emerson College, with Nexstar Media, surveyed 650 Iowa likely voters on October 5 and 6, the second of those days being debate day, and published on the morning of October 9: Sand 49%, Lahn 45%, 6% undecided. That is a point wider than Emerson's own September poll, which had it 49% to 46%, and ties the two four-point races of mid-September as the narrowest margin any pollster has published since Emerson's September poll. It is the 16th public head-to-head since the nominees were set, Sand leads all 16, and the nine since Emerson's September poll now average 8.4 points instead of nine. Sand's 49% share sits above the panel's 47% tripwire, so nothing new has fired. The same sample tightened the Senate race: Hinson 47%, Turek 45%, Libertarian Thomas Laehn 2%, 7% undecided, with Hinson down three points from her 50% in September while Turek held at 45%. Spencer Kimball, Emerson's executive director, put the split ticket in one age line: voters over 50 break for Hinson by 13 for Senate but for Lahn by five for governor, while voters under 50 "break for Turek on the Senate ballot by 14, and Sand by 15." Trump's job approval in the sample was 42% approve, 51% disapprove. On Kalshi the Republican side of the Senate board moved a cent the other way, from 55¢ to 56¢.
Republican-side buyers kept paying 13¢ through Saturday, 11,224 contracts with four of every five on the buyer's side, and could not move the offer; Sunday morning's first 1,106 contracts went the other way, and the last Republican print before the stamp was a 12¢ sale. The three days before all that, the debate and two polls that landed on a board that had already moved, are below.
What Moved From October 5 To October 8
The price moved two cents, and it moved before the news did. The Democratic side was bid at 86¢ when this page was last updated on the morning of October 5 and closed that session at 88¢, the highest close in the board's history. It closed debate night at 87¢, closed October 7 at 88¢ again, and was bid at 88¢ at the October 8 pull, 9:59 a.m. ET. The Republican side was bid at 12¢, down two cents. Everything below, the debate and two more polls, landed on a board that had already made its move.
The debate came first. For an hour on October 6 at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, the two men called each other liars about where they live and who pays for them. Sand told Lahn, "You registered to vote in Iowa less than two years ago," and said Lahn had voted in Kansas in 2018, 2020 and 2022; PolitiFact checked that against Kansas records and found it accurate, with Lahn's last Kansas ballot cast in the August 2022 primary. Lahn called the residency charge "a central lie of Rob Sand's campaign" and said the flights to Wichita are about his blended family: "This issue is about one thing. It's about my children. That's it," as the Iowa Capital Dispatch recorded it. Lahn's answer was the money. He said Sand was funded with a "tremendous amount of money from his family, largest donation in history of Iowa," which PolitiFact rated largely accurate, counting about $13 million from his wife's family across Sand's career and $11.5 million of it this cycle. Lahn also said that family's business sells "high nitrate fertilizer"; Sand answered, "My in-laws' business doesn't sell nitrate fertilizer," and PolitiFact found a Lauridsen Group subsidiary that makes a high-nitrogen organic fertilizer sold for gardens. The one number rated False was Lahn's, that an average family of four saves $7,500 a year from the recent tax cuts; PolitiFact put the combined figure near $3,500. Earlier that day Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, a Democrat, posted a video telling Lahn "it is time to come back to Kansas." No public poll had been published since the debate at that point, and the board's own answer was a cent: 88¢ going in, 87¢ at that night's close, 88¢ the next day.
Then two polls that had been in the field before the debate were published, both from pollsters that had been here before. Suffolk University surveyed 500 Iowa voters from October 1 to 4 and published on October 7: Sand 55%, Lahn 43%, 2% undecided (The Hill's write-up, via Yahoo News). Suffolk's August poll had the race at 48% to 44%. The pollster that had a four-point race six weeks ago now has a 12-point one, which ties Marist for the widest lead of the cycle and is the first survey to put Sand at 55. CNN's poll, taken by SSRS from September 29 to October 5 among 801 likely voters and published the morning of October 8, has Sand 51%, Lahn 42% (the toplines, via Political Wire). That made 15 public head-to-heads since the nominees were set, Sand leading all 15, and the eight since Emerson averaging nine points. Sand outran his Senate running mate in both: Suffolk has Josh Turek up four for Senate on a sample that has Sand up 12, an eight-point gap, and CNN has Ashley Hinson up two on a sample that has Sand up nine, a gap of 11. The Republican side of the Senate board was bid at 55¢ on October 8, a cent lower than on October 5.
The handicappers followed the polls. RealClearPolitics, which had carried this race's only Toss-up rating since the primary, now lists it as Lean D, and Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin moved from Likely D to Solid D. Every one of the seven outlets that rates the race has it on the Democratic side.
Two things this page said it would check. The pair of very large standing orders that boxed the price in through September, and then vanished in early October, was back four cents higher at the October 8 pull: about 261,000 contracts bid at 86¢ and 250,000 offered at 90.5¢ on the Democratic side, so the price lived inside a bracket of 86¢ and 90.5¢ instead of 82¢ and 86¢. What happened to that pair next is the October 9 story above. And co/efficient's 46% is still the only published share for Sand under the panel's 47% tripwire; Suffolk's 55% is the highest share any poll has given him. The second debate is Wednesday, October 14 in Sioux City, the day in-person absentee voting opens in Iowa, and the first general-election money becomes public on October 19.
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Where The Panel Changed Its Mind
The revision round did real work here. Round one ran from 68% to 80%, a spread of 12 points. Round two ran from 72% to 75%, a spread of three. Three of the arcs are worth quoting.
The biggest move came from the model that started highest, and it moved eight points down:
The revision down from my prior 80% reflects underweighting the split-ticket evidence and Sand's history of near-single-digit-margin wins even in favorable years, both of which suggest treating the polling lead as more contestable. — Claude Sonnet
Three models started at 68%, and the two that moved up five points did it on the same technical argument about how far a midterm poll can be trusted:
I revised from 68% to 73% on Forecaster B's and G's emphasis that Trump-era midterm polling bias was near zero, unlike presidential years; a 4.5-point lead against that error distribution converts mechanically to the mid-70s, not the high-60s. I stay below the 78-80 cluster because Iowa polling specifically has understated Republicans in recent cycles, Sand's own 2022 statewide margin was 0.25 points, and 5-7% remains unallocated two months out. — Kimi
And one model read all seven of the others and did not move:
Holding at 75%. The lower estimates lean on Iowa's R+13 baseline reasserting. I already weight that via Sand's 0.25-point 2022 margin and two months of Republican Governors Association advertising against Lahn's $1 million cash on hand, and no forecaster surfaced evidence I had missed. — Claude Fable
What they converged on is narrower than "Democrats are favored." Several arrived independently at the split-ticket reading and named it as the reason the national environment cannot carry the estimate by itself. The same Emerson sample that put Sand ahead put a Republican ahead for Senate, which makes this a fact about one candidate rather than a fact about Iowa. Three of the four upward revisions cited the money. Two of the three downward revisions cited Sand's 2022 margin of a quarter of a point.
What Would Change The Panel's Mind
Four things are checkable between now and November 3, and each pushes the number in a stated direction.
A poll showing Lahn ahead. Not one of the 16 public surveys since the nominees were set has had him in front. The undecided share runs 2% to 12% in the polls since Emerson, and in the four widest of them it is not enough on its own: erasing an 11- or 12-point lead takes the undecideds plus movement off Sand's number, which is why the trigger is a poll with Lahn in front, not a poll with more undecideds. Pushes the Democratic number down.
The October campaign finance filing. Everything known about the money stops on July 14. If Lahn's next report shows the Republican Governors Association converting Sand's roughly 18-to-1 July 14 cash-on-hand advantage into parity for the advertising window, the structural argument holding the panel above 70% weakens. If it shows the gap intact with a month to spend, the opposite. That report covers July 15 through October 14 and is due October 19.
The three debates left. The first, on October 6 in Davenport, showed what the format does to this race: the residency attack landed, with PolitiFact backing Sand's line on Lahn's Kansas votes, Lahn answered with the Lauridsen money, and the board moved a cent, 88¢ to 87¢ and back. Three remain, October 14 in Sioux City, October 21 at Iowa PBS in Johnston and October 27 in Cedar Rapids. That is still a lot of live television for a first-time candidate whom, per Associated Press reporting, farm-country Republicans said they barely knew, and the cheapest name-recognition Lahn can buy with the $1 million he reported in July. The price will move on the first clean post-debate poll, not on the debate itself; the first poll out since the debate, Emerson's, was in the field through debate day and moved the size on the board, not the price: Sand's share under 47 in one pushes the Democratic number down, a second poll at 55 pushes it up.
Republican consolidation showing up in a crosstab. The panel's ceiling is held down by one number on its data card: Emerson's 6% undecided, with Iowa's baseline saying most of them lean Republican. The newest polls have the undecided share between 2% and 7%. Several models named the same tripwire without coordinating, which is a poll putting Sand's own share below 47%. The published tables have him between 48 and 55 in every other poll; co/efficient's mid-September survey is the only one under 47, at 46, with 12% undecided. Pushes the Republican number up.
The Dates That Matter
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| October 6, 2026 | First debate, Davenport (KWQC), held |
| October 14, 2026 | Second debate, Sioux City (KTIV); in-person absentee voting opens the same day |
| October 19, 2026 | Next Iowa campaign finance disclosure, covering July 15 to October 14, the first general-election money to become public |
| October 21, 2026 | Third debate, Iowa PBS in Johnston, 90 minutes, no live audience |
| October 27, 2026 | Fourth debate, Cedar Rapids (KCRG-TV9 and The Gazette) |
| November 3, 2026 | Election day; the contract becomes eligible for accelerated determination once media organizations project a winner |
| January 2027 | The new governor is sworn in, which closes the contract early; Kalshi lists its expected expiration as January 14, 2027 |
Both men know what a close Iowa race feels like, and the board does not expect this to be one. The first debate is behind them and the second is three days out, and the Democratic side goes into it bid at 87¢ with a last print of 88¢, within a cent of where it went into the first.
Every price on this page is as of 8:33 a.m. ET on October 11, 2026, and refreshes when the story moves. The panel's numbers are estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. One trigger has fired, co/efficient's 46% share for Sand; that re-score is pending, and the 73% stands as scored until it runs.
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