Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn appears to have been caught by his own workout tracker, which showed him biking around Kansas long after he claimed to have made Iowa his permanent home.
Lahn, facing a tough battle against Democratic state auditor Rob Sand, has spent months pushing back on accusations that he's only a part-time Iowa resident since launching his campaign, insisting he moved from Kansas back to his home state in 2023 and has voted there since 2024. But according to The Daily Beast, fitness app Strava told a different story: a user account under his name logged four bike rides in Kansas between March and May 2025, months before he officially entered the governor's race that November.
Each ride traced back to the same starting and ending point: the Lahn family's $2 million property in Kechi, a small city just outside Wichita and hundreds of miles from the governor's residence in Des Moines. It was a short list of activity, just four rides total, the longest barely stretching past 12 miles, and none of them logged anywhere within Iowa's borders. Shortly after reporters identified the account, it vanished from the platform entirely.
Flight records for a private plane owned by an LLC tied to Lahn suggest he may have spent weeks at a time in Kansas around the same dates as the Strava activity, at a property that includes an indoor pool, a private lake and a large barn.
An unnamed spokesperson pushed back on the reporting, insisting Lahn maintains multiple Strava accounts and that the full picture would show his actual Iowa residency, though the separate account referenced remains set to private.
Lahn has previously told the Des Moines Register that his Kansas property and frequent flights back there were necessary to see children from his and his wife's previous marriages, though scrutiny over the arrangement hasn't let up.
He's far from the only 2026 candidate facing carpetbagging questions this cycle. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers recently pulled his $2 million Florida mansion off the market, while Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall is now working to sell his own Florida home as he campaigns for reelection.
