SPENCER – Iowa candidates for Congress fighting for their political lives faced off in Spencer on August 26.
Sitting between Republican Senator Joni Ernst and Republican candidate for U.S. House District 4 Randy Feenstra at the Spencer federal candidate forum, Democrat J.D. Scholten, also a candidate for U.S. House District 4, proclaimed, he “will always show up, even when he’s the only Democrat in the room, and fight for Iowans.”
Scholten emphasized that career politicians have sold out the American farmer, worker, and consumer through massive tax handouts to multinational corporations and the top 1%, a devastating trade war, rampant abuse of the RFS, and market consolidation.
Watch the forum:
In his closing remarks, J.D. Scholten said:
“Our campaign is different. I’m a different kind of candidate. I didn’t get asked by a lobbyist to run. My campaign doesn’t take corporate PAC money. We didn’t hire consultants to tell me what to say. What we did was went around to all 39 counties — we did that at least three times last cycle, we’ve continued to go to every single county. We went to towns of under 1,000 people last fall on the Don’t Forget About Us tour. We meet people and we invite everyone to the table. My proudest thing from last cycle was I earned 25,000 more votes than there are even Democrats in this district. That’s because we welcome people to the table. It’s about showing up. I hear time and time again, people are tired of career politicians.
“When we say ‘the free market always prevails,’ right now, the free market has allowed for monopolies to screw over the American farmer, screw over the American consumer, and screw over the American worker. The packing workers in Sioux City are struggling yet they’re considered essential but they’re paid the same amount that they did in 1984 when my family moved from Nevada, Iowa to Sioux City. If you want a different candidate, a different person that will show up and consider this a service, that’s me.”
Ernst is in a tense struggle against Democrat Theresa Greenfield, with polls showing basically a dead heat.
