Democrats need to be on the ground in states like Iowa, supporting local Democrats who can start building the case now against Sen. Joni Ernst (R) and other pro-Trump politicians, whoever ends up winning the right to challenge her as the Democratic nominee. I’m not saying Ernst will lose. It will be a very difficult race. Iowa has rapidly gone from a textbook swing state to a reliably red one in presidential elections. But people forget how rapidly things can change in a political climate in which visible, core political decisions by elected officials have tangible and deep impacts on ordinary people’s lives. People forget what happened between 2004 and 2006. They forget what happened between 2008 and 2010, though I think the first is the more relevant analog. There’s 2018 too. But I think we’ll find 2018 isn’t that true an analog.
In any case, Ernst won election with 52.1% of the vote in 2014 and 51.74% in 2020. Those are far from overwhelming numbers. And they show little consolidation of support. And just today we learned that Ernst carried on romantic relationships with an Air Force general tasked with lobbying Congress and a Navy official who was a lobbyist for the Navy. The Navy official was reassigned; Air Force Major General Christopher Finerty lost one of his two stars after the investigation into the affair with Ernst among others. She’s not going to lose her reelection over these relationships. She’ll lose if Trump is unpopular and his presidency has been damaging to the agricultural sector. But that’s a distinct possibility. “Have fun” as a comment on handling devastating declines in agricultural export opportunities not aging well isn’t hard to imagine.
When time finally ran out on John Tester in Montana in 2024 I’m sure a lot of younger people were thinking: How’d he ever get elected in Montana in the first place? Things must have been different back then. Well, not exactly. Some things are certainly different. That was the very end of the period. But it seemed like a real stretch back then too. He beat a guy named Conrad Burns, himself a three term senator when he lost to Tester. Burns seemed unbeatable until he wasn’t. His deep involvement in the comically sleazy Abramoff scandal helped soften the ground for Tester.
These things happen more often than you think. It’s the hardest thing we do as humans to imagine that the future isn’t simply a continuation of the present. But you also have to lay the groundwork for certain eventualities. And in Iowa that time is now.