Steve King, the suicidally outspoken Republican representing Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District, is facing the first serious primary challenge of his 17-year congressional career. He has little to show for his time in Congress. He has been stripped of his committee assignments, he’s out of campaign cash and has few friends in Congress. The state and national party have all but abandoned him.
Some may find it odd that in the era of Donald Trump, Republicans are drawing the line at Mr. King. But party leaders sense they must move away from him and what he represents. He seems laboratory-designed to alienate donors and the moderate suburban women the party needs in November. Mr. Trump, in some ways, gets a free pass. No such allowance is made for Mr. King.
Mr. King’s long history of racist, sexist and generally offensive comments are by now well known. He’s referred to immigrants as “dirt,” and said in an interview with Newsmax in 2013 that “for every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
The Republican move to unseat Mr. King picked up after his comments last year to The New York Times in which he questioned why white supremacy should be considered “offensive,” which led conservative outlets to editorialize against him.
Soon after, the House Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney took away Mr. King’s committee seats, tired of having to answer for his musings on rape, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and endorsement of white nationalists. Ms. Cheney said last year that Mr. King ought to “find another line of work.”
With a toxic plume surrounding Mr. King, party regulars are instead supporting a three-term Iowa state senator, Randy Feenstra, one of five primary candidates in the district. Mr. Feenstra is a pro-Trump, anti-abortion small-town businessman. Among his backers are the executives Douglas DeVos and Daniel DeVos (brothers-in-law of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos), the hedge-funder Dan Loeb, the former Iowa governor (now ambassador to China) Terry Branstad and the Republican operative Karl Rove.
Mr. Rove told me that the move to challenge Mr. King was a long time coming, and that he’s distributed to friends a letter supporting Mr. Feenstra. The seat has “become vulnerable because we’ve had too many years of outrageous comments that reflect badly on him and the Republican Party.”
The effort to dump Mr. King is in equal parts high-minded and political.
“He’s taken a safe Republican seat, and made it possible for the Democrats to grab it away,” Mr. Rove observed. That’s part of the political calculation that has party benefactors and leaders exercised.
It’s time to change course, according to a strategist supporting the Feenstra campaign. “Let’s get really talented young conservatives in there like Elise Stefanik, Dan Crenshaw, Mike Waltz and Mike Gallagher,” the strategist said, and “get rid of the bad actors” like Mr. King.
This would explain, in part, why President Trump this month endorsed candidates in two Republican primaries in Iowa, but conspicuously ignored Mr. King.
In 2018, Mr. King won the solidly Republican Fourth by only 3.3 percentage points — a total of about 10,000 votes against his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten. (Mr. King won the seat by more than 22 points in 2016). Mr. Trump took the same district in 2016 by a 27-point margin.
But Mr. King wasn’t always so offensively outspoken. Over his past few congressional terms, Mr. King has become fixated on things far from the interests of his constituents. And his constituents know it.
In 2018, at a town hall event I attended in Webster City, voters wondered why he was traveling to Europe to meet with far-right figures. They also raised questions about his lifestyle in Washington — expensive meals and the like. These Iowa voters, then, wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Mr. King has been paying his son Jeff several thousand dollars a month to manage his campaign, as he has in past years. Mr. King’s daughter-in-law is also on the campaign’s payroll.
But it’s Mr. King’s turn away from the district and toward divisive and racial issues that has really turned off his constituents. Bob Vander Plaats, an evangelical Iowa political broker, has called the congressman “embarrassing” and said the district deserves better. He’s endorsed Mr. Feenstra and appears in ads playing in Iowa’s Fourth. “Whatever you think of Steve King, it’s clear he’s no longer effective,” Mr. Vander Plaats says in the advertisement. “He can’t deliver for President Trump, and he can’t advance our conservative values.”
Mr. King wrote two weeks ago in a newspaper op-ed essay that it’s the “billionaire coastal RINO-NeverTrumper, globalist, neocon elites” who support Mr. Feenstra. Mr. Rove said the opposite is true.
“The people trying to take him down are ordinary people of western Iowa who are sick and tired of a showboater, not a workhorse, and by Republicans around the country who are offended by his remarks and by how badly it reflects on the Republican Party,” he said. “In reality, if he was doing his job representing the people of his district he wouldn’t have any primary opponents, let alone four.”
Despite the opposition, Mr. King appears to be leading Mr. Feenstra by several points. If Mr. King wins the nomination and faces Mr. Scholten again in November, Republicans will have to decide if saving that seat is worth the cost.
Adam Rubenstein (@RubensteinAdam), a member of the Times Opinion staff, is a former assistant opinion editor for The Weekly Standard.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
