Joni Ernst’s Latest Challenger Once Boasted of Sharing Playboys With His Moms: 'Only Rule? They Got First Dibs'

Joni Ernst's latest Democratic challenger, Iowa state senator Zach Wahls, once boasted of sharing Playboy magazines with his moms, something he now says is "normal guy" behavior that will help him connect with male voters.

Wahls launched his campaign on Wednesday, saying it would focus on "issues that Iowans care most about." He first emerged on the Iowa political scene as a college student nearly 15 years ago, when a speech he delivered to the state legislature on his two moms went viral. Wahls sat for a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" session shortly thereafter, discussing his porn preferences, an affinity he once had for "the Asians," and the Playboys he shared with his moms.

"My moms bought me a subscription to Playboy when I was 16 at my request," Wahls, now 33, wrote in the November 2011 Reddit thread. "Only rule? They got first dibs."

Wahls also shared that he used to watch lesbian porn, but "not so much anymore." Instead, Wahls said he developed a love for "tall brunettes" by following "Amateur Allure," a site that features "nice amateur beauties" engaging in graphic sex acts.

"Was all about the Asians when I was younger, but seem to have moved on," he added. Wahls married Australian brunette Chloe Angyal, a former Vice News editor turned romance novelist, in 2021.

Democratic activists in Iowa circulated Wahls’s Reddit comments over the weekend as he signaled he would launch his bid on Wednesday, the New York Times reported. But Wahls said his comments were nothing out of the ordinary in a statement to the outlet on Tuesday—and argued they could help him "connect with American men."

"I think it’s a little funny that some folks are worried about Democrats’ ability to connect with American men, while others think that old Reddit posts by me as a college kid, talking about Playboy and porn like a normal guy would do, would scare me off from running," Wahls said.

Wahls is the latest Iowa Democrat to jump into an increasingly crowded race against Ernst, who is expected to seek a third term in office next year. Wahls faces an uphill primary battle against his fellow Democrat, Iowa state representative J.D. Scholten, whose entry into the race last week led Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball to shift Ernst’s race away from her favor from safe to likely Republican. At least three Republicans have also launched primary bids against Ernst.

Wahls’s record as an outspoken advocate of transgender issues as a state senator could be a tough sell in deep-red Iowa, which President Donald Trump won by more than 13 points in 2024.

In 2023, Wahls delivered an impassioned speech against a bill to ban medicalized gender transitions—such as the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or sex-change surgeries—on Iowa minors. Wahls asserted that "kids are going to kill themselves because of this law." The bill passed with comfortable margins in the Iowa state house and senate, and Iowa governor Kim Reynolds signed it into law in March 2023.

Wahls was also an outspoken opponent of a measure that prohibited biological males who identify as transgender girls from participating in female athletics at the high school and college levels, calling it an attack on the "most marginalized kids in our society." Reynolds signed that bill into law in March 2022 after it passed both houses of the state legislature with comfortable margins.

Before he joined the Iowa state legislature in 2019, Wahls cofounded Scouts for Equality, a now-defunct nonprofit group that played a critical role in pushing Scouting America, the organization formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, to allow gay and transgender people to participate in its programming.

"They clearly did the right thing," Wahls said in 2017 after the group announced it would let biological girls who identify as transgender boys to join the organization. "My team and I knew that they were considering a policy change, but we are both heartened and surprised by how quickly they moved to change the situation."

Wahls’s Boy Scouts activism will likely play a central role in his Senate campaign. He touted in his campaign launch video Wednesday that he was an Eagle Scout as a child and gave his "scout's honor" that he would serve bravely in the Senate.

The Wahls campaign did not return a request for comment.

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