Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Democratic congressional candidate J.D. Scholten speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, August 2019
By mid-October, much of the corn and soybean is harvested, leaving political signs to dominate the vast acreages of northwest Iowa. They shout out their loyalty on the highways and interstates to the bored eyes of whoever is driving past. Every once in a while, you see a small Biden/Harris sign sticking out of the ground. More often, though, it’s Trump/Pence.
At least that’s what I saw as I drove to Sioux City to attend a campaign rally for J.D. Scholten, the progressive populist running in Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District. Having spoken to him on Zoom a week earlier, I found we had a lot in common. We’re both from Sioux City. We’re both progressives who care about rural issues. And we both share a deep appreciation for a messy loose-meat tavern (Iowa’s name for a sloppy joe sandwich) and a cold beer from a dive bar named Miles Inn.
Still, as I pulled into the park where the event was being held, I wondered if Scholten really had a chance to win in the historically blood-red district. Once he started speaking, though, those fears slowly drifted away.
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Standing on the back of a pickup truck, against the backdrop of his stalwart Winnebago nicknamed Sioux City Sue, Scholten began the campaign rally in his hometown with a typical exhortation—but with a slight twist.
“Could we show some appreciation for the volunteers and staff that made this happen by honking?” he asked the crowd.
Cue 75 car horns blaring in staccato appreciation, and Scholten smiling in response. He had a lot of reasons to smile, too. The former minor league baseball player turned progressive House candidate was hosting one of his largest rallies yet. He was also finally home after finishing up a massive 374-town tour across the district, punctuated by more than a dozen “parking lot rallies”—an idea he borrowed from his church.
“People would come to his church’s parking lot, tune in to a radio station, and get the sermon,” said Scholten’s communications director, Lauren McIlvaine. “We kind of stole their idea.”
It’s admittedly a strange way to hold a campaign rally: attendees nestled in their cars listening to Scholten speak via a radio transmitter. Then again, it’s been a strange year.
Though Scholten’s had to adjust to this new reality of campaigning during a pandemic, he’s done so in classic Iowa style: with plenty of grit and creativity, and little room for complaint.
“It models what our campaign’s all about: old-school retail politics,” Scholten explained to me in our call. “Give me any soapbox, and I’ll give you my message.”
The parking-lot setup is a far cry from how Scholten approached 2018, his first run for Congress. As a novice candidate, he nearly upset white nationalist Steve King, coming up short by just three points in a district Trump won two years earlier by 27. In that race, Scholten crisscrossed the district in Sioux City Sue three times, holding in-person rallies and town halls, shaking hands, engaging in one-on-one conversations with voters (sans mask), earning the respect and support of voters who typically don’t pull the lever for Democrats. He was known to sleep in Walmart parking lots in the Winnebago, and get up early to head to the next leg of the tour.
Now, Scholten has a new opponent: King, the longtime controversial incumbent, was knocked out in the Republican primary by state Sen. Randy Feenstra. And the world of campaigning in which he proved so adept has completely transformed. But in the face of these new challenges and new challengers, he’s adapted, still seizing any and all opportunity he can to make his pitch to voters.
The message hasn’t changed since he first ran in 2018. Scholten is still focused on the issues that matter most to those in Iowa: the farm economy, health care, and corporate monopolies hamstringing the heartland. But those issues have only been exacerbated by the events of the past year.
In August, an unexpectedly powerful derecho blew through the Midwest. The thunderstorm brought 140 mph winds and resulted in the loss of 850,000 acres of crops, hundreds of homes, and power for half a million Iowans for days. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that the derecho caused $7.5 billion in damages, making it the costliest thunderstorm in U.S. history.
The disaster seemed to only add insult to injury in a state that was already struggling to contain the spread of the pandemic. Throughout the summer, Iowa regularly topped the nation in COVID-19 rates, caused in part by massive outbreaks at meatpacking plants. As of October, the state surpassed 112,000 total cases, with more than 1,600 deaths attributed to the disease. Despite this, Gov. Kim Reynolds refuses to mandate the wearing of face masks, while also requiring in-person schooling.
As a novice candidate, Scholten nearly upset white nationalist Steve King, coming up short by just three points in a district Trump won two years earlier by 27.
The twin crises of a public-health emergency and environmental devastation, and the economic stress they have both triggered, dovetail with Scholten’s core message. “What the pandemic has really hit on is the income inequality issue in Iowa,” Scholten said. “That economic pain is probably the biggest thing that I see out there—and that was before the pandemic. Now, it’s just really caused chaos.”
That chaos was underscored for Scholten as he traveled in both his most recent 374-town tour, and also an earlier “Don’t Forget About Us Tour” that focused on communities with under a thousand residents. “In the past two months, we did a deeper dive into some of the hardships in these communities,” Scholten told me. “You go to these towns and so many in those towns have just seen better days. Even last fall, before COVID-19, I really started seeing it over and over.”
What Scholten saw was money leaving rural America by way of parasitic corporate businesses like Dollar General, siphoning money away from local businesses and putting it into the pockets of Wall Street executives. “They come in and offer $8- or $9-an-hour jobs. Then they undercut sales by 25 percent for the local grocers, a lot of whom have been around decades and sponsor local baseball teams,” Scholten describes. “Then these local groceries go under.”
He continued: “That’s a recurring theme of what’s happening in rural America. There’s no investment. There’s no money coming in. But there’s a lot of money getting sucked out.”
Scholten will have to rustle up all of that homespun populism to have a chance against Feenstra, a “defensive substitution” (to borrow parlance from Scholten’s professional-baseball days). Supported by the Republican establishment, Feenstra is just as pro-Trump, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant as Steve King. The only difference is he won’t say the quiet parts that King gladly shouted out loud.
While the pandemic has impacted the way political campaigns reach out (or don’t reach out) to potential voters, the differences between Feenstra’s and Scholten’s campaigns couldn’t be more stark.
“They feel pressure from us, so they’re starting to do a few events,” Scholten told me in our call. “But the events they’re doing are either Republican fundraisers or they’re meeting with the owners of businesses—not workers. They don’t hold one event where somebody can ask them a question.”
It’s a recurring theme for Feenstra’s establishment- and corporate-funded campaign. During the Republican primaries, he was seen as the anointed successor to the seat, attending events hosted by establishment lobbyists and corporate donors who were turned off by King’s outspoken white nationalism.
The twin crises of a public-health emergency and environmental devastation, and the economic stress they have both triggered, dovetail with Scholten’s core message.
Scholten’s campaign, by contrast, is entirely grassroots. He’s quick (and a little proud) to tell me that he rejected money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, freeing him from their D.C.-based consultants and one-size-fits-all messaging. Though that might seem like a handicap, he has consistently outraised Feenstra by relying on small-dollar donations. According to the FEC, Scholten raised $815,637 in the third quarter of 2020 alone. That’s nearly 79 percent more than Feenstra’s $456,869 raised in the same time period.
“We personify what grassroots is,” Scholten explained. “I get frustrated because every campaign says they’re a grassroots campaign, but we literally hop in my RV and go from town to town to town.”
All the while, Feenstra is running a campaign of avoidance—avoiding talking to voters and avoiding tough questions. According to Scholten, Feenstra has rejected calls from his campaign and the press to attend public forums and debates on 11 separate occasions. During the only debate that he did participate in, the state senator deflected when Scholten asked about his corporate donors.
“You see rural hospitals that are struggling due to the privatization of Medicaid, which you were for, and you’ve taken money from MCOs,” Scholten pressed at the debate. “We see people have to ration their drugs and you take money from pharmaceutical companies. You’ve taken money from two different monopolies that are owned by China [Smithfield and Syngenta] that are squeezing our farmers.”
He continued, “So how can you represent the district and [its needs] when you haven’t even been around the district and you take from all these entities that are taking away from our livelihoods?” Feenstra replied by claiming that Scholten’s funding comes from “coastal elites.” In the last quarter, Scholten received over 50 percent more donations from Iowans than Feenstra.
Scholten’s campaign is all about accessibility. He wants to be able to answer any and all questions voters might have for him as often as possible. “We are the complete opposite [of Feenstra’s campaign],” he said. “I stick around. I answer all the questions, even if I have to stay after.”
Scholten’s style hearkens back to his political hero and mentor Berkley Bedell, a former Iowa Democratic congressman and progressive populist who died in 2019. Bedell was able to win over a traditionally conservative voting bloc throughout the 1970s and 1980s with a populist campaign slogan that seems prescient now: “The 1% controls our government. Does the 99% have a chance?”
This populist spirit was embedded into the backbone of Scholten’s rally in Sioux City. He told stories of struggling Iowa dairy farmers who are being priced out due to corporate mergers (the giant in the field, Dairy Farmers of America, has recently been accused of anti-competitive collusion and price-fixing). He spoke about working-class Iowans struggling to pay their hospital bills. He outlined how corporate ag monopolies have held Iowa farmers back from being able to grow the types of crops they want to grow.
“We see more and more people who get elected and they go to D.C. to fundraise more than they do to legislate,” Scholten sermonized. “And ultimately, that hurts the American people. We’ve got to get back to a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
“We personify what grassroots is,” Scholten explained.
As he finished speaking (cue cars honking in “applause”), he remained behind to answer questions and talk to those who attended. The sun was setting when he began greeting and speaking to attendees. By the time he was finished, though, night had fallen over the rally site.
In total, 127 people in 75 cars, along with an additional 1,800 viewing the live stream, watched the event—which personally floored me. Anyone who grew up in Sioux City can tell you how hostile the district can be to Democrats and progressives. One notable example is Kim Weaver, the last Democratic candidate other than Scholten to run for the seat. She was ultimately forced to quit after she was inundated with “alarming acts of intimidation, including death threats.”
But if Scholten stood little chance, nobody told him—or the hundreds of people who attended his rallies.
“It is a grind,” he told me after he spoke with the last attendee. “But I made a promise. Every time I get exhausted, every time I’m worn out, I think if I don’t do this, there’s going to be exactly the type of person I don’t want there instead.
“And ultimately,” he continued. “That’s what lights my fire.”
