Iowa’s 4th Congressional District is solidly Republican. In 2016, Donald Trump carried it by 27 points, and Steve King won his eighth term in the House of Representatives by 23 points. Yet on November 6, Democratic neophyte J.D. Scholten, a former minor-league pitcher making his living as a paralegal here in Sioux City, came within 10,000 votes of defeating King (he lost by just 3.4 points). The polling had been so close in the last few weeks that King dusted off a 2014 TV ad and bought some airtime. King was having to do something he doesn’t typically have to do: campaign.
Scholten was operating out of an RV he calls “Sioux City Sue” after the old Gene Autry tune. He had crisscrossed the district’s 39 counties three times chasing votes. I met him at a bar called Sneakers in Fort Dodge. It was 10 o’clock at night but Scholten had missed dinner and was hungry. He had hoped his months on the road meeting with voters would resonate with a rural base. But “there aren’t enough rural Democrats,” he admitted. “All of [King’s] controversial stuff is disgusting to me—and it drives me insane—but the fact that he doesn’t fight for this district, that’s the thing that riles me up so much more.”
Steve King has said and done a lot of indecent things. In October, he endorsed Faith Goldy, a white nationalist running for mayor of Toronto. Both King and Goldy have publicly embraced the “great replacement” theory, which posits a coordinated global conspiracy to repopulate countries with immigrants. Usually it’s the Jews who are blamed for this—there were chants of “Jews will not replace us” during the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And in August, while on a foundation-funded trip to visit Holocaust sites in Poland, King took a side trip to Austria to have dinner with members of the far-right Freedom party, which has historical ties to the Nazis. He gave an interview to the party’s website where he decried George Soros’s influence on U.S. elections, attacked immigration, and declared that “Western civilization is in decline.”
He used to display a Confederate flag in his office on the Hill and has said of Hispanic immigrants to the United States, that “for every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King likes to claim that media reports critical of him are “orchestrated by nasty, desperate, and dishonest fake news,” but these are his own words, recorded, on video, and irrefutable. Several times while campaigning on November 5, he told audiences that the Democratic party has closer ties to the KKK than the Austrian Freedom party has to the Nazis.
At an event in Webster City in the back room of a bar and restaurant called the Second Street Emporium, King said the spotlight the media has placed on him is as “bad a propaganda as we have ever seen in this country. It is worse than character assassination.” Talking of his meeting in Austria, he wondered aloud “what those folks who sat at that dinner would have to say about this propaganda, that they were going to compare it to what their fathers and grandfathers had seen on that continent some 70 or 75 years ago.” One audience member asked if King would hold the press accountable for the lies. “We shall see,” he replied.
Little of the global condemnation resonates with King’s constituents, who are far more exercised by local difficulties: some real, some imagined. Unemployment is low in the northwest corner of Iowa. Good meatpacking jobs have drawn immigrants and refugees from around the world over the last generation. At the same time, all too many young Iowans have gone off to college and never come back. At a GOP “Get Out the Vote” event in the back room of a Godfather’s Pizza in Hampton, Alyce Hugeback, a King supporter, told me that she views illegal immigration as one of the biggest problems in the district. But if there’s an immigration problem, it’s that there aren’t nearly enough people coming to northern Iowa—manufacturers pay a lot of overtime so hard is it to find skilled labor. More than anything, the immigration issue stands in for a culturally sensitive topic: These largely white, rural voters see their kids and grandkids moving away and a different Iowa taking shape. Another King supporter at the pizzeria decried the “19 languages being spoken in the Storm Lake school system right now.”
Driving through the small towns of these rural counties, it’s easy to tell how this narrative got traction. Cars are few and the shops mostly boarded up. What were a generation ago active farming and manufacturing communities are decayed. King lives in Kiron, but attends a Catholic church in nearby Odebolt, a town of 953 residents with tall cement grain silos and a train line cutting through it. The church has Saturday, not Sunday mass, indicative of a struggling-to-survive congregation. On the bulletin board at Sparky’s gas station is a flier from the Faith and Freedom Coalition dissecting where King and Scholten stand on the issue of abortion. “On Demand Abortion, Scholten: Yes. King: No.” It’s a resonant message in a culturally conservative area. “If Steve King is re-elected, 950,000 innocent little babies can be saved every year,” the candidate himself tweeted this month. “If his opponent is elected, Nancy Pelosi will ensure all of them and more are aborted.” To the rural Iowan, immigration and abortion are the twin dangers that feed an all-encumbering feeling of being supplanted.
Yet the economic challenges here are real. Trump’s trade war is hurting the manufacturers, and the tariffs are beginning to bite farmers too. At an election-eve rally in Sioux Center (in Sioux County), Dolf Ivener, a 44-year-old farmer, had to be escorted out as he shouted at King: “$7.50 for soybeans, I’m going to go broke because of you, Steve King! I’m going to go broke because of you.” It wasn’t racist remarks or his associations with neo-Nazis that drew King protests; it was the most local concern possible. China has reduced its purchase of U.S. soybeans by 94 percent in 2018, and farmers here are being pummeled. King is a vocal supporter of Donald Trump’s “trade war,” and his share of the blame for the price of soybeans is real. Even so, King still carried Sioux County the next day.
I asked King supporters what they thought of his “somebody else’s babies” comment or his support for far-right politicians in places like Canada and Austria. Most didn’t know he’d said these things, and if they did, they didn’t care about them. They chalked it up to “the media being the media.” “If they don’t have anything else to say they call racist or sexist,” Alyce Hugeback said. In Hampton, King joked that he hoped Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would “elope to Cuba” and make room for a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The remark made the rounds on Twitter and was condemned as racist, homophobic, and misogynistic. The Hampton gathering giggled at the gibe. It was just business as usual for King. In Webster City, he had obliquely referred to Mexicans and any immigrants coming over from California as “dirt.” None of it worried the Republican voters of the 4th district.
Nor did Steve Stivers’s condemnation of King. The Ohio congressman is chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee and sharply disavowed King’s race-based remarks in October. “Congressman Steve King’s recent comments, actions, and retweets are completely inappropriate. We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all forms, and I strongly condemn this behavior,” tweeted Stivers. Some in the Iowa GOP similarly sought to distance themselves from King during this election. A local GOP insider told me just how much discord there is in the party when it comes to King. “We’re trying to put out a positive message, and he steps on it every day. He used to do a lot [for Iowa]. He’s MIA in D.C.,” he told me. “He’s on his crusade overseas, and he’s leaving Iowa voters behind. No one is comfortable with him anymore.”
Iowa GOP co-chairman Cody Hoefert was abnormally silent on social media in regard to King. He tweeted out support of GOP candidates David Young, Rod Blum, and Kim Reynolds in the week preceding the election but, conspicuously, not King. Yet there was Hoefert introducing the newly reelected King at his victory party at the Stoney Creek Inn in Sioux City. Hoefert said, “What the left and the liberal media tried to do to our congressman was an absolute travesty. We refused to let the left Kavanaugh our congressman.” King picked up this theme in his victory speech: There was, he said, “an attempt to Kavanaugh-ize me like this state has never seen, and maybe America has never seen.” He claimed to be “bloodied but unbowed” and “if they could have knocked me off tonight, the ‘life issue’ would have been set back, who knows, decades.”
King views himself as an essential member of Congress despite a very meager legislative record. He did his best in his appearances throughout the district to associate himself with Iowa’s “Heartbeat Bill,” a piece of pro-life legislation put together by Governor Kim Reynolds. King likes to say Hoefert called him the “father of the Heartbeat bill.” He mentioned this at several events on November 5 and at his victory party.
At J.D. Scholten’s election night party, attendees were optimistic as the first precincts closed and poll numbers appeared. The returns showed Ted Cruz besting Beto O’Rourke and Ron DeSantis defeating Andrew Gillum, but Scholten told me that he’s “just worried about the 4th district. I don’t worry about a lot of national stuff. . . . I don’t believe in a blue wave, I believe in earning votes in this district.” But as the night progressed, and the rural votes were tabulated, Scholten fell behind. In his concession speech, he invoked the names of Tom Harkin and Berkley Bedell—Iowans who lost their first race, ran again, and won.
Cale Dobson, 23, of Sioux City, voted for Trump in the last election, but supported Scholten in this race. He told me that he’s disappointed in Scholten’s defeat but knows he’s “not the type of person to give up, and I’m confident he’ll run again and win.” As they were everywhere on Election Day 2016, eyes were already on 2020 in Iowa’s 4th district.
