On a February evening in Iowa, the dining room table at the home of Spencer and Sinikka Waugh is buried under notebooks, campaign maps, yard signs — some with his name and some with hers.
Married since 1998, the two are both running for office in Iowa — Spencer for the state House and Sinikka for state Senate.
Their story didn’t begin as a coordinated political plan. Spencer, an associate dean at Simpson College, had run in the last election and lost by 17 points. When he announced early last year that he planned to run again, Sinikka’s first reaction was blunt. “I looked at him, I said, ‘Why?'” What followed were conversations about “the work and the care that we have for the community and the service that we can do along the way.” As she listened, Sinikka, a small business owner, began thinking about her own role. “How could I use my gifts and my skills and my talents to support him best in the campaign?”
At first, she did so in familiar ways: She stood by his side when he kicked off his campaign. She knocked on doors and showed up at events. Then, at one campaign gathering, someone in the crowd said, “You know, the Senate seat is open.” It happened again at another event.
Photo provided by the Waughs 
The moment Sinikka decided to take up the challenge still makes them laugh. “What if I really ran?” she asked one day in late December. “[Spencer] runs downstairs and he comes back like two seconds later,” she recalls. In his hands was a printed map. “This is the Senate district map. Take a look at this.” When she asked why he already had it, he told her, “I printed it a few weeks ago. Because I could tell.”
Politics, it turns out, fits neatly into the rhythm of the Waughs’ long marriage. The campaigns operate separately, but the boundaries blur. “We share the dining room table,” Sinikka said, “We have to alternate the time when we’re working sometimes.”
Asked why he chose to run for the state House again, Spencer joked, “We already had the yard signs.” After the 2024 race, a volunteer collected the 500 signs, and Spencer wiped them clean, to get them ready to be used again.
He’s not making any predictions about how this race will go, but he says it already feels different. “People care about their community. They care about education. They care about clean water,” he said, contrasting this election with the last one. Sinikka agrees. “The energy is changing,” she said.
Reactions to their joint candidacies have ranged from positive to incredulous. Sinikka laughed, recalling a friend told her, “You people are crazy!” One of their children initially misunderstood what it meant that both would be running, and thought that Mom was running against Dad. But Spencer says people have been “overwhelmingly positive, overall.”
They are realistic about the odds. “There’s four possible outcomes,” Sinikka said. She does not linger on which outcome matters most. “Right now, we’re focused on the journey,” she said. “What kind of good we can do, how we can serve, how we can educate?”
If they both win, someone suggested they could commute together to the Capitol. “Absolutely not!” Spencer replied. “We have a different relationship to time,” Sinikka laughs.
If only one of them were to win, Sinikka says “that’s okay.” Nearly 28 years into their marriage, love looks less like certainty and more like shared work. The dining room table will eventually be cleared. Yard signs will come down. Maps will be folded and put away. However the election turns out, the commitment remains. For now, Spencer says, “We’re focused on the journey.”
