For those analyzing Steve King's defeat tonight, I hope they will give due credit to @JDScholten, who arrived in summer of 2017 as a political nobody and campaigned King into the ground in what should have been a solid red district. (Disclosure: I have fundraised for Scholten)
J.D. campaigned relentlessly in a district no one considered winnable. He did three full circuits of this huge district, holding town halls in every county, lived out of an R.V., and in the end came within 11,000 votes of unseating an incumbent who won by 80,000 votes in 2016
He did it when he had no money, and he did it when he was briefly a national media darling in the runup to the 2018 election. Instead of talking about King's many provocations, he stuck to how monopoly, misgovernment, and Trump's capricious trade wars were hurting Iowa farmers.
What I particularly respect in J.D. is that he had an off ramp into punditry after 2018 and chose not to take it. He's a handsome, telegenic guy, and after his high-profile race he could have made a fortune as a Resistance talking head, complete with podcast on rural organizing.
Instead, he went back to work, visiting small towns in his district who had never seen a Federal candidate, talking about issues (like the fact that Iowa, breadbasket to the world, is a food desert) that no other Democrat touches. And he put a target on King's back.
There are other heroes in this story, including groups like @slpng_giants who worked hard to get corporations like Land O'Lakes to stop donating to King, and a *single* Intel engineer who got them to stop giving. In the end, King couldn't raise any money to contest his primary.
But my point is that it took three years of unrelenting toil to make King vulnerable, and most of it fell to one of the most talented and resolute rural Democrats we have, J.D. Scholten, who I am sure will have some beers tonight and then get to work defeating Feenstra.
I talked briefly with J.D. back in April, as his district was bracing for the arrival of the pandemic. But our interview ended up being more wide ranging. If you'd like to get a sense of the guy, and of rural issues in general, I invite you to read it. idlewords.com/2020/04/j.d._s…
I am sure this is not the way J.D. wanted to unseat King, but the openly white nationalist, proudly xenophobic, and thoroughly vile congressman will not be returning to D.C. in 2021 because he put in the work. I hope you will continue to support him now. secure.actblue.com/donate/jdslaun…
Back in January, I also did a Twitter thread from a Steve King town hall in Storm Lake. I invite you to read it to see just how big a victory we won by having this guy out of government.
Ultimately, this is a normative victory in Republican politics. You can be a white nationalist, but you can't be an overt white nationalist. I know this sounds cynical, but it is not! The line of what was acceptable before tonight included Steve King; now he is over the line
