Rep. Ashley Hinson has been a loyal soldier for President Trump in Congress and a tireless partisan in the Second District. This week she voted in support of the war on Iran while her Republican peers Rep. Zach Nunn and Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks voted to assert Congressional prerogative over the war. Hinson is running for the US Senate having supported Trump’s bungled war every step of the way.
Hinson avoided a rally headlined by Vice President JD Vance in Council Bluffs the same week. She said she had a previous engagement. So did most others, as only a couple dozen showed up to hear Vance beg for a second chance.
Hinson voted for the war but steers clear of the vice president. Hinson portrays herself as the minivan-driving mom who works across the aisle. The truth is she carries Trump’s water bucket like most Republicans. She was all for the Medicaid cuts and eliminating health subsidies.
You could understand why she would avoid Vance when he tries to tell Iowans that Trump has been good for farmers. Fuel and fertilizer are sky high. Trump is shipping in beef from Argentina and Brazil because hamburger is so high. Vance thinks Iowans don’t get it.
Hinson can’t just run away from her record. She sustains the war on Iran with Trump. She stood by while he started a trade war with the world. Hinson is full-on MAGA, no doubt about it. Iowa voters may have had a belly full of that sort of chaos.
Josh Turek is the Democratic alternative. He is not the ogre Hinson portrays. He won a gold medal in the Paralympics in basketball. He was a victim of Agent Orange. He advocates for better health care. He is a decent person who will do good for Iowa. He will provide a check on Trump. We need it.
At long last, a Latina Republican called out the GOP establishment for its impractical and counter-productive immigration policy. Speaking to President Trump in a campaign ad, Rep. Maria Salazar of Florida says, “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.”
She says many Hispanics thought Trump only wanted to deport criminal aliens. We heard a different message: mass deportation of the undocumented, which is how it played out.
Salazar is a Cuban American locked in a tight House race with another Cuban American in Miami. Each is a former local TV newscaster with broad appeal. Trump won the district by 14 points but the congressional race is a toss-up in large part because of Trump’s immigration sweeps and attacks on refugee communities. Trump went “too far,” Salazar says in the ad. The administration threatens to send Cubans back to Cuba, and Haitians back to Haiti, failed states in despair. It’s cruel. People in Miami were shocked with what they saw in Minneapolis.
Nationally, support for Trump among Latinos has tanked. In Texas, Democrats hope that helps them pick up seats in Congress from the Rio Grande Valley. Same in Arizona, which used to be a conservative stronghold. Now it is represented in the Senate by two Democrats because of cruelty toward Latinos.
Republicans continue to demonize immigrants in their Iowa TV campaigns. It’s all they have to sell — fear of the stranger. Iowans watched as the masked goons shot US citizens dead in Minnesota. The fear is not of the immigrants but of the goons aiming for you because they don’t like the way you look. Americans are not keen on concentration camps.
Trump is losing the Cubans. That took some effort.
Iowa’s leading academic scientists in their 16th annual Climate Statement urged the development of more renewable energy to meet growing demand. Some 180 scientists signed onto the 2026 statement last week citing continued growth in demand as the reason to press forward with renewable energy over fossil fuels.
“We have a choice to make, and we need to make it now,” the statement said. “Rapidly rising electricity demand calls for every stakeholder — from ordinary Iowans, to tech industry leaders, to local elected officials and utility company executives — to advocate for and adopt cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient ways of generating electricity and to push back against roadblocks designed to selectively hinder renewable energy.”
Demand is expected to grow by 40% within 20 years. More natural gas capacity will fire up. Nuclear plants are in the process of restarting. Coal consumption rose in Iowa in 2025 for the first time in years.
Iowa has been a leader in renewable energy since the 1980s. We have tremendous wind and solar potential that is undeveloped because of transmission bottlenecks and increasing local opposition based on planned disinformation. Iowa must maintain its position as an innovator in a new energy economy. Now is the time to build on our advantage. The economic opportunities are huge. It begins by knocking down those roadblocks, that come not only from turf grass misinformation but also organized efforts to stifle energy sales into the grid for shipment.
Those lying political attack ads are poison. They corrupt us. We hate nearly all of them. Rob Sand has a couple we like because they focus on positive change. In one, he talks about education: “Folks, we’re losing to Nebraska!” That’s a good one. It has the right spirit.
The best ad we have seen this cycle is Sand’s ad about his hometown, Decorah, where he learned how to hunt and fish; and where he learned that it’s about right versus wrong, not left versus right.
Sand says: “Decorah is small enough to know most people, and to know that our differences are small too. Politicians down in Des Moines should learn that. Stop the division, work together, put Iowans first. To actually solve problems like high costs, corruption, and our cancer crisis. Folks here deserve that and in your hometown, too.”
That’s the sort of conversation Iowa needs. We hope it is effective.
The free press in the USA is under relentless attack. President Trump ordered CNN, Politico and MS Now banished from the White House last week. He describes reporters as pigs. He sues. He harasses. If necessary, the administration arrests reporters and charges them with crimes for reporting.
The attacks are cast in an environment described by New York Times Publisher AG Sulzberger, on the 175th anniversary of his family’s newspaper:
“Today, the future of America’s free press is uncertain. As the advertising-based business model that long supported original reporting has collapsed, the country has lost nearly 3,500 newspapers and a vast majority of local journalism jobs in just two decades. This erosion appears poised to continue as the journalism produced at great cost by news organizations is stolen and repurposed at unprecedented scale by the tech giants behind artificial intelligence. And in this financially weakened state, the press is simultaneously confronting, and sometimes buckling in the face of, the most direct political attacks on its rights and legitimacy in more than a century. All this has left fewer reporters backed by the institutional resources and institutional courage needed to do this difficult work — to witness events that might otherwise go unseen, to uncover abuses of power that have never been easier to obscure.”
In Iowa, we have been called an “enemy of the people” by locals who aspire to be Boss Hogg. Legislators threaten annually to snuff out paid public notices in newspapers. It would wipe out at least a third of the state’s news outlets. Their contempt for the press reflects an arrogance toward the public.
For the press to remain free, your support is vital. We are grateful for your subscription. We appreciate your tax-deductible donations to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation — we could not publish without it. The vigorous flow of vetted information is oxygen for democracy. We take our task seriously, and sincerely ask your continued support through uncertain times. Thank you.
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