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Independent Advocate: Sand touts ‘public service’ over partisan politics during packed campaign stop in Indianola

For Immediate Release

Contact: press@robsand.com

Rob Sand for Iowa

9/10/2025

Rob Sand: “I find hope in hard work. When you feel like things aren’t going well, you roll up your sleeves and get to work.”

DES MOINES, IA – On Monday, candidate for governor Rob Sand continued his 100 Town Hall Tour across Iowa, making stops in Appanoose and Monroe counties before ending the night with a “packed” crowd in Warren County. As the Indianola Independent Advocate reports, “two hundred people packed West Hill Brewing Company on Monday, spilling onto its lawn, to hear a decidedly unpolitical message from Rob Sand.”

Rob is “more interested in public service than party politics,” the Independent Advocate went on, as part of his mission to make an Iowa that isn’t redder or bluer, but better and truer. Rob fielded several questions from the attendees in Indianola on Monday night on topics ranging from public education to affordability to how to get Iowans to stay in Iowa, and marked his 51st public town hall of the year.

Read more from Rob’s stop in Indianola on Monday night here, or key quotes below:

  • Two hundred people packed West Hill Brewing Company on Monday, spilling onto its lawn, to hear a decidedly unpolitical message from Rob Sand.

  • The current state auditor and gubernatorial candidate may be running on the Democratic ticket, but he said he’s more interested in public service than party politics. “Broken” was his word to describe today’s climate of extreme partisanship.

  • “There’s the idea of public service: statesmen and stateswomen who are just trying to make good decisions to lead the state in the right direction,” Sand explained. “And the way to do that is having people who think differently working together.”

  • Sand said it “makes me burn” to think of how current politicians have worked to make the state’s spending less transparent instead of fixing the deficit.

  • They are serious issues, Sand admitted, but “I find hope in hard work. When you feel like things aren’t going well, you roll up your sleeves and get to work.”

  • Without change, some of Iowa’s politics remind Sand of the biblical story of Jesus flipping over the tables of moneychangers in the temple. “I know why that story stuck out to me: because a lot of what Jesus said didn’t sound like somebody who would ever flip tables. ‘Turn the cheek. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Clothe the naked. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick,’” Sand said, listing some of the key tenets of Jesus’s teachings.

  • “I would like your help in November of ’26 with flipping some tables in Des Moines,” Sand concluded, as the room erupted into cheers and applause.

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