TOLEDO — Throughout his political career, State Auditor and gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand has branded himself as a different kind of Democrat — an avid outdoorsman and outspoken Christian from small-town Iowa who can bridge partisan divides with a message appealing to Republicans and independents. Between inviting the non-Democrats in the audience to stand and be recognized and leading the crowd of about 60 in singing the first verse of “America the Beautiful,” it didn’t take him long to hammer home those bona fides during a town hall meeting at the Reinig Center in Toledo on Wednesday afternoon.

Sand, the only Democrat to currently hold a statewide office, started the event by shouting out Tama’s own nonagenarian Jim Roan for his recent gold medal at the Iowa Senior Games in golf and noting that he worked with his daughter Laura during his tenure at the Iowa Attorney General’s office. As he dove into his stump speech, Sand touted the importance of holding public meetings — he’s embarking on a 100 Town Hall Tour across the state — and accountability by offering the chance for those in attendance to ask him questions on any topic of concern.

The purpose of his campaign, he said, is to highlight a “broken” political system that incentivizes demonizing opponents and perceived enemies over solving problems and working together.

“I don’t think that’s good enough, and I don’t think that the Democratic or the Republican parties solve enough problems to deserve a monopoly on our choices at the ballot box. Now, does anyone disagree with what I have said so far?” he asked, as no hands went up. “Then why is it that we never talk about this? When was the last time you heard a candidate get up and say the two-party system is our main problem? But here we are. We know it. We’re the frogs in the boiling water. It’s time for us to say that it’s getting a little too warm in here and we need change. That’s the heart of this campaign, saying to the Democratic and Republican parties, ‘You should not have special legal privileges. This should be our democracy, the people of the state of Iowa.'”

To do that, Sand said the people of Iowa needed to change the political culture and work together before asking registered Republicans, independents and finally Democrats in the crowd to raise their hands and be applauded. He then asked the audience to sing the opening verse of “America the Beautiful,” which has become a calling card of his recent campaign events.

“Does anybody feel a little better? Great, then my job here is done. Thank you for coming. Have a good day,” he joked.

The Decorah native shared a bit of his and his wife’s personal history — her family hails from Denison in western Iowa — and they are currently raising two sons, ages 11 and nine. Sand said hunting, fishing and church are still important parts of his life to stress that they don’t belong to a single political party, and he told the crowd he first registered as an independent when he turned 18 and doesn’t particularly like the two-party system while joking about the age-old question of “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

“The answer is supposed to be no. I think the answer is, ‘Well how high is the bridge? How deep is the water? Wait actually, is there water under the bridge?’ Right, this is what I’m talking about, just an awareness of what it is you’re about to do. Maybe you like risk and you like adventure, and maybe the sign says ‘Bridge jumping allowed.’ But if you haven’t asked those questions, if you’re just making decisions because everybody else is making the same decision, you might make some bad ones. Sounds like partisanship in 2025,” he said. “Two great parties united only in their hatred of each other, as one of the founding fathers warned us could happen in this country.”

Independent voters in Iowa are disenfranchised, he said, as they aren’t allowed to participate unless they join a “private club” first. In his early 20s, Sand registered as a Democrat because he believed the party stood for the little guy, and former President Bill Clinton had balanced the budget and used the surplus to pay down the debt. Even as an elected Democrat, however, he hasn’t lost his independent mind, and he continues to apply those principles to this day.

“I am what I am, as Popeye said,” Sand said.

He spent seven years at the Attorney General’s office prosecuting various public corruption cases including the largest lottery rigging scheme in American history and a few cases in Tama County as well. After spending too much time focused on “the worst things humans can do to each other” and recalling his efforts to get a skatepark built in Decorah as a teenager, he decided to run for State Auditor as a way to turn his attention to promoting government efficiency and bringing a legal perspective to the office.

He won the 2018 election over Republican incumbent Mary Mosiman and subsequently implemented the PIE (Public Innovations and Efficiencies) contest, a program encouraging public entities to save money that has been copied in two other states. Sand also worked to ensure that employees from his office could live anywhere in Iowa, not just Ames, Des Moines or Iowa City.

Returning to his overarching theme of bipartisanship, Sand chose an independent and a Republican who had contributed to his opponent to serve as his two top deputies.

“When we do this, we find that we get better results because nobody has a monopoly on the truth,” he said.

Despite successes in uncovering record amounts of misspent money, implementing PIE and winning re-election in 2022, Sand said Republican legislators and Gov. Kim Reynolds worked together to pass a bill limiting his auditing powers, arguing that it encouraged fraud and abuse and likening it to not allowing law enforcement to patrol county roads.

He then cited statistics showing that Iowa is 49th in economic growth, 48th in personal income growth, number one in the growth rate for cancer and number two in overall incidences of cancer while the public education system has suffered. Sand then referenced the Bible — specifically, one of the few stories in the New Testament when Jesus became angry as he saw people in a position of trust and power abusing that trust and power.

“He got angry. He said ‘You have turned my house from a house of prayer into a house of robbers.’ And he flipped their tables over and sent them packing,” he said. “Folks, there are some tables that need flipping in Des Moines, and I would love your help with that between now and November of 2026. That is why I’m running for governor.”

From there, he opened the floor up to questions on a variety of topics, including an opener about public education and scrutiny of teachers from Berleen Wobeter. He encouraged those who were skeptical to visit classrooms themselves and realize how difficult of a profession it really is, and Sand pledged to stand up for educators and the public education system if elected next year, praising Nebraska’s Republican governor for making the largest investment in public education in the state’s history and criticizing the lack of accountability in the Education Savings Account (ESA) system for private schools Reynolds signed into law in 2023.

“We should make it so that we are not paying this money to the wealthiest families in the state of Iowa who are already going to send their kids there anyway. Folks, if you’re paying money to somebody for something that they would do for free, stop. That is my simple advice to you,” he said. “You’re wasting your money. If you lit it on fire, at least it would keep you warm for a little while.”

He also pledged to veto any proposed cuts to the Iowa Public Employee Retirement System (IPERS), calling it one of the best funded pension programs in the entire country. Sand said the Iowa DOGE committee came up with other ideas that were reasonable and got less media attention but called the IPERS proposal, which would phase out the program for new state hires going forward, “laughable.’ Public employees are generally paid less than their counterparts in the private sector, he said, but get a more generous pension plan as a reward.

Sand lambasted the “Big Beautiful Bill’s” cuts to Medicaid and the risks it poses for rural hospitals in the near future, and he also predicted that it would increase premiums for people with private insurance due to a surge in emergency room visits for the uninsured while increasing the national debt and cutting taxes for wealthy Americans. In response to another question, he quickly took a stand against eminent domain for carbon capture pipelines, citing a lack of public benefit and the federal tax credit they depend on to survive, suggesting other uses such as bricks and aviation fuel for CO2 instead.

When Kennan Seda asked about public and private schools sharing buses, he reiterated calls for more accountability with the ESA program but felt that such an arrangement would make sense and pushed for more local control over those types of decisions. In a county where it has become the most controversial local issue of the last several years, Sand told the crowd he supports wind and solar energy with “reasonable” setback requirements to lower utility costs and improve public health.

“A lot of the information that is out there that is negative on wind and solar, do not forget, comes in the form of lies from the oil companies. These oil companies are desperate to make people hate wind and solar because then they can line their pockets more easily,” he said. “We know what wind and solar are. Why do we know? Because we’ve been outside our whole lives. It’s wind. It’s sun. They’re good. I enjoy them, and it’s wonderful, I think, that we can fuel our future and power our future with them. That said, is anything in the world 100 percent good? No. So the pieces of it that are the downside, we should be mindful of, but I generally think that they are good things.”

During an interview with the T-R before the town hall started, Sand said he didn’t feel that 99 different sets of regulations would be the best way to handle wind energy, but he would be willing to hear out anyone making that case.

Katherine Ollendieck of Toledo Economic Development asked Sand to expound on the governor’s relationship to the Iowa Economic Development Authority, and he felt resources should go toward projects that are “good no matter what” instead of massive projects that only include job requirements for a two-year period. He encouraged investments in small-town amenities like the bike trail loop in Decorah, praising the now-discontinued Vision Iowa program and advocating for the return of something similar.

On mental health, he told a questioner the state doesn’t have a functional system due to long wait times for service and relating the story of a struggling man from Black Hawk County who committed suicide when he was told he’d have to wait six weeks to see someone. Sand also did not feel the job should fall on law enforcement.

“It’s a mess, and everybody in this state deserves better. The only way we’re gonna get to something better is by electing people who say ‘Yeah, what we’re doing right now isn’t good enough, and we need to do better,'” Sand said.

While acknowledging that he would still likely face Republican majorities in the House and Senate if elected, Sand pledged to veto all “culture war” bills restricting abortion rights, gay rights and access to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and contraception and would instead focus on education and cleaning up the state’s water. In response to a questioner originally from South Dakota who said he felt there was a correlation between being outside and Iowa’s cancer rate, Sand told the crowd he continues to work on a plan addressing the issue but is doing his homework in the meantime, citing a desire to get it right and avoid wasting an opportunity to improve life for the residents of the state.

“We don’t elect a king or a queen. We don’t elect a dictator. We’re electing somebody who’s gonna have to work with different people and try to get them together to reach a plan to address an issue,” he said. “We will have more details on that over the course of the next year. I’ll finish doing my homework. I’ll write my term paper, if you will, and we’ll be back in Tama County next year doing this again and I’ll have a lot more detail for what my plans are.”

The second to last question addressed the topic of school shootings, and Sand, recalling when he first heard about the infamous incident at Columbine High School in 1999, didn’t feel the solution was entirely in either mental health or gun control.

“My answer is (that) the answer is in resolving our divides. We have to bring people together because the kind of country that allows the sort of darkness to fester that leads people down a path where they would do a thing like that is a country that has much bigger problems than making a functioning system around either of those issues,” he said. “We have to start with opening up our hearts and opening up our minds to actually have real conversations with people. I know that that might sound like it isn’t an answer. That is my answer. There is a spiritual piece of what is happening in this country with violence that is much bigger than just policy prescriptions. It’s about how we treat each other. It’s about how we look at our neighbors, and it’s about a political system that teaches us to hate people that we disagree with. We have to start right there because trying to start anywhere else doesn’t bridge the gap.”

The final questioner worried that Sand was being “set up to fail” given the current state of the budget, and Sand noted a $900 million deficit last year with tax cuts and no revenue increases to balance them.

“Iowans are gonna be dealing with the mess, and it is gonna be a mess. We’re talking about this. I don’t know what’s ahead, but you don’t sign up for public service because you think it’s all gonna be sunshine and puppy dogs. It’s going to be hard to resolve the state’s budget issues, but we’re not gonna resolve them with the same kind of thinking that created them,” he said. “We need to have balance in the state of Iowa, and I think we need to be realistic about that.”

Sand suggested increasing the cigarette tax and legalizing cannabis as a few proposed remedies. In conclusion, he asked supporters to help him by volunteering, donating and following him on social media, cited an Op-Ed in the T-R by former Iowa Veterans Home Commandant Matthew Peterson praising his ideas and bipartisan approach to politics. In an unsurprising twist, cracked a joke about his notorious food reviews at various restaurants across the state and made one final call to action.

“I know that we can win this race. I know that we can get Iowa back to the Iowa that we all know, a place that we don’t argue about having to be redder or bluer, but we’re focused instead on better and truer,” Sand said.

When he spoke with the T-R beforehand, Sand also addressed his recent comments on a teacher in Oskaloosa who was fired over a social media post proclaiming “One Nazi Down” about Charlie Kirk’s assassination and has since sued the school district. A teacher at North Tama was also recently placed on administrative leave over a post related to the assassination.

“I think it’s pretty reasonable for parents to have a concern about a teacher that would celebrate a murder. I would have that concern if that was my kid’s teacher’s doing,” he said. “But there is a difference when the employer is the government, and that’s the First Amendment. All these cases, they’re gonna get figured out by our court system. I think the First Amendment is important, but it’s also important for people to recognize that there’s a grieving process. You don’t come up to somebody at their dad’s funeral and tell them what a mean person their dad was to them. If you ever feel you have to say that, you can always save that and share it at a later time when they’re not in pain.”