For months, Republicans have criticized Democratic state Representative Josh Turek for skipping a majority of votes this year in the Iowa state legislature. Now, they are criticizing him for the votes he cast when he did show up to work.

Republicans have long litigated Turek’s truancy problem in the Iowa legislature. Now, in the final weeks of his campaign for Senate against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R., Iowa), they are turning to the votes he did cast.  

Turek’s voting record during his time in the legislature is expected to give Hinson and her allies plenty to work with. In one instance, he sided with Democrats in voting to give taxpayer-funded welfare benefits to illegal immigrants, as well as to restrict Iowa law enforcement from working alongside ICE to deport dangerous illegal immigrant criminals; in another, he voted to let children change their gender at school without parental notification; Turek also voted against a change in the Iowa tax code, siding with Democrats to make it easier to raise taxes on Iowans. Turek even voted to let fake meat be labeled as real meat.

Some of Turek’s voting record is already advertising fodder for Republicans; Elon Musk’s America PAC is already running ads against Turek for “vot[ing] to put our daughters and their teammates in danger.”

In the Iowa Senate race, national Democrats put their fingers on the scale for Turek, believing that he was a more electable candidate for them than state Senator Zach Wahls; but Republicans are also highlighting the votes that Turek skipped, many of which would have been less politically problematic than some of the votes he did take.

Turek skipped votes to pass the Iowa Farm Bill, to verify citizenship status of Iowa voters, to fully fund the Iowa Department of Veterans Affairs, and to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars that Hinson secured to expand access to affordable health care in rural Iowa communities.

Democrats, for their part, are trying to muddy the water in Iowa by arguing that it is Hinson who has the truancy problem. The Washington Reporter previously reported that a dark money ad relied on a Democratic Party news organ to argue, misleadingly, that “it’s Ashley Hinson who’s missed nearly 200 votes in Congress.”

“Josh Turek is no moderate,” an Iowa source told the Reporter. “He is just another liberal whose rhetoric does not match his voting record.”