Seventeen years ago, a college student drove eight hours round-trip to stump then-President Barack Obama on Obamacare.
This week, that same man defeated President Donald Trump’s handpicked candidate for Iowa governor.
Zach Lahn, a 40-year-old farmer and Make America Healthy Again advocate from Belle Plaine, Iowa, pulled off the most stunning upset of the 2026 midterm primary season on Tuesday night, edging out Trump-endorsed Rep. Randy Feenstra in Iowa’s Republican gubernatorial primary by less than one percentage point — 37.8% to 37%.
It was the first time a Trump-backed candidate for governor, House, or Senate had lost a primary in the entire 2026 cycle.
When Lahn’s primary victory was called Tuesday night, an old clip immediately started circulating on social media.
Take a look —
On August 15, 2009, Lahn — then a student at the University of Colorado Boulder — drove four hours each way with his roommate to reach a town hall in Grand Junction, Colorado, where President Obama was promoting the Affordable Care Act. He and his roommate made the drive twice: once to pick up tickets, and again days later to actually attend. When Obama called on him, Lahn was ready.
“We all know the best way to reduce prices in this economy is to increase competition,” Lahn told Obama. “How in the world can a private corporation providing insurance compete with an entity that does not have to worry about making a profit, does not have to pay local property taxes, they’re not subject to local regulations?”
“How can a company compete with that? I don’t want generalities — I’m not looking for philosophical arguments. I’m just asking a question,” he asked.
Obama, stumped, admitted to the crowd he might not support including a public option in the final bill.
“Certainly they can’t compete if the taxpayer is standing behind the public option just shoveling more and more money in,” Obama replied. “That’s certainly not fair, and so I’ve already said I would not be in favor of a public option of that sort.”
Conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh spotlighted the exchange at the time, calling Lahn “amazing” and saying that with “one simple question that Obama can’t answer, [he] nukes the entire foundation of Obamacare.”
Fox News and other networks immediately sought Lahn out after the powerful exchange.
“Ultimately, what came out of it was, maybe in an inadvertent way, he mentioned for the first time that they might not have the public option in Obamacare,” Lahn told Fox News this week. “Then right afterwards, Fox and CNN and these people wanted to talk to me because Obama had just said that this key part of his plan may not be included.”
Lahn left the public spotlight over the next 17 years for a simple life in Iowa, building a business and saving his family farm.
In his election night speech Tuesday, he sounded like the same young man from the Grand Junction town hall.
“Iowa has the fastest-growing cancer rate in the world. We all know something is terribly wrong. But too many politicians from Washington, D.C., to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma have printed money. This will not go on when I’m governor.”
Lahn’s campaign was built around the MAHA movement backed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. MAHA Action endorsed him in December 2025, calling him “a steadfast champion of personal health freedom.”
He now faces Democratic Iowa Auditor Rob Sand in what will be one of the most closely watched gubernatorial races of 2026. Feenstra, in his concession call, gave Lahn one instruction: “Hey, you got to carry this torch. We got to keep this state red.”