Republican senate candidate Ashley Hinson should pray that Allah moves the Iranians to a charitable end to a war with the United States and Israel if it isn’t already too late for the November general election. “I do hope we can get this done by the next couple of weeks. If it drags on beyond that, it’s a political liability for us too, because we’ve lost Iowa soldiers. I’ve been to four funerals since December, it’s awful.” That was Hinson, quoted by Politico, two weeks ago.
President Trump announced on Sunday an understanding that Iran will open up the Strait of Hormuz. There will be no deal to end the war for 60 days, if at all.
The fuel and fertilizer are not flowing, and might not for months.
Voters are anxious. The New York Times reports that Trump’s standing among working-class White men has plummeted since the 2018 midterms. A recent Fox News poll found just a 33% approval rating among this group. It’s even worse among women: All women in an Iowa focus group graded Trump a D or F on the economy.
It’s mainly about fuel prices, inflated by the war on Iran. Secondarily, tariffs have never been tolerated by a state that lives on pork, soy and manufacturing exports. Iowa cultivated the soy market in China, and Trump destroyed it.
Hinson’s ads blame Washington for high costs. Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who is retiring, Hinson and Rep. Marianette Miller-Meeks are responsible. Hinson campaigned as a Trump acolyte and was endorsed by him. Trump says that gas and diesel prices will drop just as soon as this war is over. Farmers know better. Hinson knows that. She is trying to find some distance from it. That will be hard when times are tough around John Deere in Waterloo.
Hinson’s opponent is Josh Turek of Council Bluffs, a Paralympic gold medalist for Team USA in wheelchair basketball. He is handicapped from Agent Orange to which his father was exposed in Vietnam. He will persist. So will high fuel and fertilizer prices.
Endless war is not playing well in Sioux City. Meanwhile, a rural health clinic closes on Medicaid cuts. This is where Hinson’s base lives.
Iran is masterful at dragging things out. Tick tock. November approaches. That guy in the pickup truck who is now $120 lighter after filling up is not happy, and his wife less so. Control of the Senate may come down to Iowa, Ohio and Texas. If working class Whites in Muscatine and Youngstown aren’t moved by Trump to vote, the Senate flips.
Polymarket pegs chances at 60% that Hinson wins, trending down daily. Turek has not begun to attack her. The GOP base in western Iowa does not know her, and is not fired up about other midterm races. Hinson starts from a shaky foundation. Turek benefits from Democratic enthusiasm. Iowa still leans Republican, but there is trouble in the ranks when crop inputs rise and tariffs stifle sales of pork and tractors.
This war cannot end soon enough for Hinson or Trump.
“I’ve been to four funerals since December. It’s awful,” Hinson said to a voter in Fort Dodge on May 28.
It is worth noting that Laura Belin, publisher of the Iowa political news website Bleeding Heartland, was barred from the Iowa Republican Convention in Des Moines last weekend. The same clowns in charge have tried to deny her credentials to report on the state legislature.
Belin covers politics through liberal prism. The GOP has no reason to fear her. She reports the story accurately and honestly. Her father, nationally renowned Republican attorney David Belin, was chair of Lawyers for Nixon. These people are too dim to recognize it. It says something about the party when a free press is locked out. They are embarrassed with themselves: higher property taxes, higher gas prices, poorer schools, fouled waters. They are circling the wagons.
Here is a sampling of what Belin missed, from gubernatorial nominee Zach Lahn: “You all know what the left has been doing across the country — they’ve been putting up candidates who act like moderates and govern like radicals,” Lahn said. “They think that they can fool us. They think that we don’t know what’s going on. I’m telling you, our campaign is going to lift the veil on who Rob Sand really is and show that he is the radical that he is. This is crucially important that we do this. It’s crucially important that you all talk to your moderate Republican friends and let them know the truth.”
The truth is, as we understand it, that both gubernatorial campaigns are financed by agribusiness. The truth is that it is pretty radical of Lahn to indict teachers as Marxists. Gov. Reynolds, the least popular governor in the USA, warned that George Soros is pulling the strings on Rob Sand. The truth had a difficult time at the podium.
You will know the lieutenant governor by his cowboy hat. That much is settled. Republican governor candidate Zach Lahn has picked Rep. Derek Wulf, a farmer from Hudson who sports a big cowboy hat in his Introductory pictures as does Democratic lieutenant governor candidate Dave Muhlbauer of Manilla, on the ticket with Rob Sand. Farm out.
Wulf is a loyal soldier for defunding water quality though Lahn is supposed to be a sustainable sort of farmer. You don’t need water quality monitoring when such good guys are on the land, you could suppose. For his part, Muhlbauer has been written up by IDNR for water quality violations; that is gravel-road cred. Wulf was attractive for his opposition to carbon sequestration pipelines, which is something of a turn-off to the ethanol wing of the party.
Part of the unspoken code is that you wear your hat inside nowadays. It bespeaks your loathing of the elites and their manners. Except that these guys aspire to be the elites. That is the funny part.
We’ve run through the health care ringer over the past couple of years, exposing ourselves to any number of doctors and nurse practitioners (some of whom have doctorates). We just had a checkup this past week with Dr. Sabrina Martinez, and she was shadowed by Abby Jones of Storm Lake (daughter of Amy and Dan) who is finishing up at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. On our last visit, Martinez was accompanied by two female medical students.
It occurred to us that most of our docs are daughters: our generalist, urologist, urology nurse practitioner, vascular surgeon and attending resident vascular surgeon, and vascular clinic nurse practitioner. The male docs include a urology oncologist, a radiation oncologist and a pulmonologist.
Females comprise 39% of physicians in Iowa, which is about the national average. More than 50% of recent med school graduates are women, so the number of female family practitioners is bound to rise. (We are delighted to report that Jones is considering Storm Lake once she finishes her residency.)
This used to be strictly a man’s domain. Not so long ago it was just Dr. Joan Nilles practicing alongside the guys. Men still dominate certain niches such as orthopedic surgery and sports medicine. Women are taking over OB/gyn, predictably, and some of those doctors are not inclined to hang around Iowa to risk jail for providing medical care.
Studies confirm our experience that women, especially in family practice, tend to be more empathetic, listen better, and spend more time with the patient asking and answering questions. It’s been a huge shift in our lifetime, for the better.
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